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Their identities, night life, relationship with the other communities, and performances in gay bars reveal the role gay bars have played in homosexual people’s social participation in public and private spheres. The main argument of this paper is that the private and public binary experience of LGBTQ communities can be seen in the way that gay bars acted both as safe spaces and spaces of contestation in New York City. Instead of reinforcing the suffering and oppression of gays in the 1960s, which for years were seen as the direct trigger of the riot, the goal of this paper is to stretch the landscape of the history of homosexual communities into the nineteenth century and to articulate the gradual transition of this community’s identity relative to the larger public. At the same time, this study uses micro-historical characters, such as the influence of the Mafia on bars and saloons during the 1920s in New York, to help reconstruct the context of the history of gay bars. This paper translates these anthropological ethnographies into narratives of original experience, and uses theories of embodiment, structuralism, and performance to weave fragmented historical remnants into a broader macro-narrative.
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These ethnographies detail and recorde the activities of gays in gay bars in New York City and other big cities, such as San Francisco and Chicago. Fortunately, some anthropologists have studied and done field works on gay bars that covered periods before the 1980s. However, it is difficult to study the perspective of homosexual communities and understand how individuals from the LGBTQ community have self-identified in the past, because these experiences were kept secret and suppressed for so long that they are virtually invisible in archives. Normally, historians seek out primary sources and first-hand evidence.
#Greenhaus first gay bar phoenix archive
Philosopher Michael Foucault profoundly viewed the archive as the experiences (the events) which are recorded through different discourses, thereby determine historical narratives. The main methodologies of this paper come from anthropology and microhistory. In a word, through stories from the history of gay bars in New York City, one can map the transition of homosexual communities from underground and marginalization to openness and normalization. So, why has this event become the symbolic monument of gay resistant history? Why have homosexual people tended to gather in bars? The answers to these questions can be found by viewing multiple historical events since 1900s in New York City: the construction of homosexual economic institutions, the performance of homosexual people (especially gay men in this discussion), the night life in New York City, the distribution of police and Mafia, and the demarcation between public and private spaces. But there were protests before the riot elsewhere in the United States. Historical narratives articulate that the Stonewall Inn Riot was a spontaneous event without thinking historically about why the event happened at a specific place in a specific city. By viewing the Stonewall Inn Riot as the transitional event after which homosexual people spontaneously walked out of the “closet” and collectively protested for their human rights, people today celebrate the riot every year, and it is marked as an important annual event for queer communities (Humphreys, 1972, p.6).įor years the public have passively accepted that this riot brought the LGBTQ community into public view. This eruption also signaled how activism at gay bars would be at the forefront of the movement from the perspective of both the homosexual population and police community. This riot revealed intense tensions between the police and the homosexual community, which represented a traditional conflict between the homosexual minority and the heterosexual public. The renowned riot at the gay bar Stonewall Innin 1969 has been recognized as the start of the modern homosexual political movement (Duberman, 1993, p.