Party On! The Slide Bar
June is Pride Month, one of the happiest events in the LGBTQ+ calendar, when we celebrate our struggles, triumphs, our culture, and our glorious lives. Within that happy month is one of our saddest days, June 12, the Pulse Night of Remembrance, when the LGBTQ+ community commemorates the horror at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, where 50 of our sisters, brothers, gender queers, and others in our LGBTQ+ family were shot to death and 53 were wounded by a terrorist.
So it seems fitting, in honor of our Pride and in memory of our lost loved ones to nightlife violence, that we tip a hat to historic nightspots and their courageous, outrageous patrons who defied their era’s smothering moral codes and oppressive laws.
For me, one nightspot in particular stands out as an example of LGBTQ+ courage in a time of brutal suppression of LGBTQ+ life and culture: The Slide, a true dive bar opened in 1890 in a basement on Bleecker Street in New York’s Greenwich Village where it operated until it was shut down by the police in 1892.
Despite laws criminalizing same-sex relationships and socializing, there were a number of late nineteenth century nightspots across the country. In New York, a mecca of gay life, they were chiefly in the Tenderloin district and Greenwich Village, which catered to an LGBTQ+ clientele. Most of these establishments operated clandestinely, or tried to, though their locations were more or less open secrets. Police raids or raids by the era’s moralizers were commonplace, resulting in arrests and beatings. And yet these nightspots continued to provide social and entertainment venues where LGBTQ+ patrons could meet, drink, dance, laugh, hook-up, and generally be themselves.
Among these nightspots, The Slide was considered to be the most daring. Indeed, it was often referred to by the scandal-hungry press as “notorious.” It earned this distinction because of the working class, rough-and-tumble clientele which frequented the place, and because of the rouged and lipstick’d waiters who sang sexually explicit songs while serving The Slide’s beer and cheap whiskey.
Moreover, The Slide, like other downtown dive-joints, didn’t discriminate among the races. Blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos, and others of immigrant stock mixed freely. This, as much as the saloon’s sexual outlaws, enraged the general public and the moralizing crusaders who editorialized their outrage in the newspapers.
Among The Slide’s chief attractions was a lively “fairy” contingent, fairy being the general nomenclature at the time for cross-dressing men. Though the clientele was mostly men looking for other men, The Slide also attracted its share of women, as well as male and female prostitutes. In other words, The Slide attracted a cornucopia of genders, everyone enjoying the booze, the free-flowing sex, and the bawdy music played on The Slide’s piano.
The proprietor of this wild nightspot was himself a rather wild and colorful personality: gambler, boxing referee and promoter, and friend of Tammany Hall big shot Frank Stephenson (spelled Stevenson in some accounts, notably in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York Evening World newspaper). Though evidently not gay himself, Stephenson’s life in the sporting world introduced him to men of various races, not to mention closeted gay men and women. As far as he was concerned, these people were all potential customers for his various drinking establishments. The aforementioned Mr. Pulitzer demonized Stephenson and The Slide in a short but acidic article in the Evening World newspaper, calling the bar “morally the lowest in New York, London, Paris or Berlin” and “a sink of vice and depravity.” The article labeled the patrons’ socializing “evil doings.”
Such is how our LGBTQ+ community was thought of for decades, if not centuries: depraved, immoral, evil. During this month of Pride, it behooves us to remember that such attitudes have not gone away despite our gains in civil rights. The massacre at the Pulse nightclub is testament to that ongoing hatred of our community and our lives. Though there was an outpouring of public support for our grief and our struggle for civil rights after the Pulse shootings, the current political climate has once again turned threatening to our rights and our very safety.
Thus, gathering in our nightspots is not only a night of socializing, dancing, laughing, singing, or a night filled with tempting romantic possibilities. Gathering in our nightspots is also an act of remembrance and defiance in honor of all those who dared to live their lives, even flaunt their lives, centuries before us in nightspots like The Slide and others across the United States, where the booze was cheap, the music was sexy, and despite the threats to life and liberty, inhibitions were left at the door.
Happy Pride, everybody! Party on. ▼
Ann Aptaker’s Cantor Gold crime/mystery series has won Lambda Literary and Goldie Awards. Her short stories appear in numerous publications and anthologies.