To get a sense of the type of archeology that Harrison Apple is involved in, think Indiana Jones in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now, replace the booby-trapped cave with the remnants of a dark, abandoned after-hours club in East Liberty ... and replace the coveted golden idol resting on a pedestal with a DJ booth full of old records, cigarette packs and condoms.
Apple is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon, artist-in-residence at CMU's Center for the Arts in Society and a public historian. For the past two years, he's been engaged in "queer archeology," studying gay social life in Pittsburgh between the 1960s and early 1990s. Along with his adviser, CMU's Tim Haggerty, he developed the Pittsburgh Queer History Project, an oral-history and archival project focused on the local LGBT community.
Apple's work took a groundbreaking turn in 2012, when he was given the chance by new building owners to "excavate" a former gay after-hours club at 6119 Penn Ave.
"I went to the back of the building and walked up two flights of stairs and there was a big black door with a sliding eye peephole," Apple recalls.
"They opened the door and it was like a time capsule of an after-hours joint. There were drinks on the bar and there was oil in the kitchen and rotten juice and soda everywhere. There were tinfoil stars and a DJ booth filled with empty CD cases and records and Newports and condoms and whatever."
Judging from membership cards he found on the site, the venue was known as "Upscale Private Night Club." But if the name itself was a blank slate, Apple saw the club as a trove of information.
"I brought in my plastic gloves and respirator and I bagged and tagged everything," he says. "I basically knew how many cigarettes and condoms were in the space. But we also found membership lists and cards and police reports and all these things that talked about what this space really was, both legally and socially."
And that was just the beginning. In a space between a stage and a concrete wall, Apple's boyfriend found an old wallet that had been there for probably more than two decades. Inside it was a membership card for a place called the Travelers Club.
"I did research and found that the Travelers was a gay after-hours club that was run by a guy named Lucky," Apple says. "Lucky not only ran that club, but two clubs before that and a bar. It showed that gay bars in Pittsburgh didn't just appear out of vice and ether."
That discovery led Apple to delve into the history of the city's gay after-hours clubs, the people who orbited around them, and their significance in shaping the city's present-day LGBT community. Some of the research and material he recovered will be part of a month-long exhibit entitled Lucky After Dark at Future Tenant. The show, the gallery promises in a statement, "challenges existing interpretations and assumptions about the development of an LGBT culture in Pittsburgh."
The exhibit will focus mainly on material from the three clubs operated by Robert "Lucky" Johns between the 1960s and early 1990s: the Transportation Club, the House of Tilden and the Travelers.
By focusing on those three clubs, Apple says he was able to document that Pittsburgh's LGBT community evolved much differently than those in larger cities.
"This is not a story of New York, where people come there from their hometown and use sexual identity to meet people in a new city," Apple says. "This is a place where your sexuality is operating amongst family relationships, ethnic relationships and neighborhood relationships. All of these things are very closely intertwined, and if you're going to do anything in this city, it's going to involve your family at some point.
"What we're trying to do is to take a history that's not just a gay history, but it's a Pittsburgh history. It's a Pittsburgh history of gayness; you just can't separate the two."
Haggerty, who came to the city in the late 1980s, agrees. Haggerty says that during the period Apple is studying, Pittsburgh was a city facing economic decline and out-migration. Many in the LGBT community were leaving Pittsburgh for larger cities, where they found gay enclaves in places like Dupont Circle, in Washington D.C., and The Castro, in San Francisco.
