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It also can be argued that the ongoing expansion of just what queerness can mean could have made a segment of gay bars, which thrived in a sort of self-identified exclusivity, obsolete.
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The closing of many east-side gay bars can be blamed, in part, on gentrification’s effect on rents. The Eagle is my regular bar, and I’m thrilled to have it.” But I don’t want to completely dog what we have left. You have three bars on the east side that people go to: the Eagle, Akbar, and the Faultline. It’s lost some of the freakishness and the weirdos, which I miss. Now things are much more concentrated and assimilated. You would make the rounds rather than just go to one place. in the early ’90s, there were more than a dozen on the east side. “As Silver Lake - and the whole landscape of gay Hollywood and the east side - changed so much I always had this idea in my head of turning the place back into Cuffs for one night,” he says. Jonesy, along with a group of artistic collaborators, threw a party last summer that re-created Cuffs in the same space it once inhabited, now home to the Hyperion Tavern. Working there was a real challenge,” he says with a laugh, “especially when you were trying to clean up using a tiny penlight.” “Bar service stopped at 2 but they kept it open until 3 and the lights went out for that final hour. Jonesy, a mononymous L.A.-based queer artist who was a regular at a number of these spots worked briefly as a barback at Cuffs, a major gay hangout of the recent past.Ĭuffs “was incredibly dark and super cruisey,” Jonesy recalls. These are souvenirs from experiences which could have been life-changing moments.”
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“ have a very strong emotional connection. “People go through and look for places they remember,” says Lerew. The matchbooks have made the library a draw for former patrons of the bars. Many of them are gone now and are the only record they ever existed.”
#The original eagle gay bar archive#
“It’s like an archive of safe spaces,” Lerew says of the collection. Todd Lerew, program manager at the Library Foundation, the private nonprofit that oversaw “21 Collections,” curated the exhibition. Elegantly arranged in concentric circles, the matchbooks hail from such evocatively named establishments as the Sewers of Paris, Basic Plumbing, the Meat Rack, the Big Banana, the Fallen Angel and Dude City. gay bars and sex clubs, most of them now closed. In the midst of the exhibition “21 Collections,” which fills the Getty Gallery with doll hats, bird eggs and Tom Hanks’ stockpile of vintage typewriters, sits a round, glass-topped case containing 200 alphabetized matchbooks from L.A. A time capsule of L.A.’s bar history is now on display at downtown’s Central Library.