Soon after 5801 opens at 4 p.m., light still streaming through the bar’s plate glass windows even on the briefest of December days, it’s already hard to get a seat. Men from the neighborhood, all white and ranging in age from 50 to perhaps 70, are drinking Iron Cities and catching up, shouting to the bartender, who shouts right back. One of them says something racist in a nonchalant way, which goes unacknowledged. It’s an incredibly ordinary Pittsburgh scene, except for the fact that these men are gay.
5801, named for the building it occupies on Ellsworth Avenue, and which was once a piano bar called New York, New York, is the only gay bar left in Shadyside, but the crowd it draws indicates something about the social fabric of the neighborhood.
For decades, Shadyside has been where Pittsburgh gay life rests a little more comfortably within the white middle class. In his essay “Aroused from Hibernation” in The Bear Book: Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subculture (1997), Scott Hill, who grew up in Beaver County and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1980, wrote about moving “to an apartment in Shady Side [sic] with three male classmates” during his sophomore year of college. “I remember,” Hill continued, “how funny my mom’s voice sounded when I called to tell her, excitedly, where I was moving. It took a while for me to realize that many of us lived in the neighborhood, a fact that obviously went through her head long before I figured what kind of neighborhood I had moved into.”
In addition to New York, New York, Hill’s apartment would have been an easy walk to the Tender Trap and its basement disco, the Trapease — mainstays of Pittsburgh’s gay nightlife scene between 1967 and 1986 — as well as the Metropolitan Community Church, a nondenominational Christian church that explicitly welcomed gays and lesbians. It also, at the time, hosted the Gay and Lesbian Cultural Center (GLCC), founded in 1979, in the basement.
Today, if you google “Pittsburgh gayborhood,” Shadyside is what comes up; there are still gay businesses along Ellsworth (special appreciation for the much-beloved, queer-owned Eons vintage clothing store), and in 2019, the city tried to solidify this assignation by painting a rainbow crosswalk on Ellsworth in front of 5801 — an act that was bemoaned as a facade of allyship.
But while middle-class, middle-aged, and older cis gay men, most of whom are white, might own more houses in Shadyside than elsewhere in the city, Shadyside is not, and never has been, the only place where Pittsburgh gay life happens. It’s just where gay life is made most visible and palatable in the daytime — those plate glass windows! — for liberal passersby.
At night in the late 1970s, when Hill was in school, Downtown would have been the place to be. The blocks of Penn and Liberty, now owned by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, where Heinz Hall, SPACE Gallery, and the August Wilson Center currently sit, were once a constellation of gay bars, strip clubs, massage parlors, and porn theaters. Then, the city undertook a project of urban redevelopment with the purpose of making Downtown palatable to visitors.
David’s, a gay bar that operated at 632 Penn Ave. beginning circa the 1960s, was just down the block from the Cinema Follies Club, a porn theater that showed primarily gay films and, according to a 1979 article in the Pittsburgh Press about gay life in Pittsburgh, boasted 13,000 members. (The Metropolitan Community Church, by comparison, had only 60.)
In the late ‘70s, the bar Mother Russia, rumored to have the priciest drinks in town, operated at 814 Liberty Ave., and during the same period, The Loose Balloon at 942 Penn Ave. was “popular with transvestites,” according to the same Press article. Nearby were Schume’s Liberty Baths, the Venture Inn, and many other gay venues, some of which lasted only briefly. Others, like Pegasus at 818 Liberty Ave. (replacing the Copa Club, 1948-1979), became an anchor of the scene soon after opening in 1980, and remained one through its move to the North Side in 2009, and until its closure in 2012. The building that housed the club, which was also sold to the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, was once owned by real estate developer Leon F. Thorpe, raised in Shadyside and a graduate of Shadyside Academy. The last vestiges of the downtown gay club scene are Tilden, now a straight after-hours bar, and the gay bar Lucky’s, beside the 16th Street Bridge.
So, one reason Pittsburgh doesn’t have a gayborhood is because, like many other American cities, its gritty downtown was gentrified and redeveloped in the late 20th century in the name of “family values and safety,” to quote gay writer and cruising documentarian Samuel Delany, creating a Cultural District where once there had been culture. Without that initiative, Downtown could have been it.
But even at its gay peak, Pittsburgh was a city of neighborhoods; queers don’t like to cross a river or a color line more than any other yinzer, and most queers in this town are yinzers.
The first recorded hubs of queer Pittsburgh nightlife were clubs in the Hill District in the 1940s; the Black jazz and performance scene was not specifically queer, but was more welcoming to queer life than white bars of the period. In the 1980s, several lesbian bars and restaurants were operating on the South Side, while camp and leather reigned on the North Side at the Crossover Lounge, the Pittsburgh Trucking Company, and the Home Circle Club.
In 2019, City Paper reported that “Pittsburgh’s urbanized areas are the oldest, whitest, and most native-born in the nation.” This means that, unlike other larger cities, which are hubs for gay migration from smaller towns, Pittsburgh’s gay population is from around here, too — and likely have closer ties with their families, childhood friends, and neighborhoods which are not specifically queer, and which dissuade them from cordoning off their social worlds.
Even the Tavern Guild, a business association that, in the mid-1980s, took out advertisements in queer newspapers across the Northeast and Midwest proclaiming Pittsburgh to be “Gay America’s Best Kept Secret,” relied more on place-based relational ties than geography. A network of police and mafia protections, cultivated by Pittsburgh nightlife anchor Robert “Lucky” Johns and then shared among the bartenders and nightlife workers he trained and supported in their careers, was what allowed gay bars across the city to operate relatively undisturbed by the raids and harassment that plagued other cities in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.
But most of all, the locations of gay bars have been determined by liquor licenses because the state of Pennsylvania does not issue new ones. Pennsylvania only allows those already extant to be bought, transferred, and sold, so anyone in Pittsburgh hoping to open a new nightlife venue needs to find someone with a liquor license who is willing to sell. Harder yet, operators of after-hours clubs, like Donald Thinnes of the Norreh, known later as Donny’s Place, bought out club charters from previous members, and as a result, inherited whatever location and facilities already belonged to the the social clubs, which in the first half of the 20th century were mostly organized by neighborhood.
Which brings me to Wilkinsburg, where I live. It’s a dry borough, and despite being the home of the GLCC from 1985-1990, it’s not much known as a gayborhood; the nearest gay bar used to be the Traveler’s Club, “Lucky” John’s after-hours anchor in Larimer, the site of the only recorded location of a police raid on a gay nightlife venue (February 14, 1988) in Pittsburgh; but it closed in 2006, much to the relief of some neighbors.
And yet, without a bar to its name, Wilkinsburg, anecdotally, has one of the densest trans populations in the city. (This is likely in part because the housing is cheap, and being trans often prevents a person from making money.) From my house, I can walk to the homes of three different exes, and dozens of friends, acquaintances, and frenemies. Nearly everyone is sober, or nearly.
If I want to go to a bar, if I want to be among people who are queer and gay and trans in an atmosphere that facilitates making friends for a night and forgetting them in the morning, I head to the late-night nightlife desert that is Butler Street, where even on a Wednesday at midnight, the Blue Moon is roaring. It’s open stage, which means drag performers — the supportive old guard along with nervous first-timers. In terms of age, gender, class, and race, it’s by far the most flexible and diverse of any of the gay bars (and very cheap if you convince a cute stranger to buy). Which, to its credit, is the ideal microcosm and, perhaps, a guiding light for how to dream of a neighborhood where queer life can thrive.
