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Contents:
- THE PAST AND FUTURE OF ONE OF HOTON’S MOST HISTORIC GAY BARS
- MAPPG MONTROSE'S GAY HISTORY
- HOTON’S GAY BARS TO VIS TO GRAB DRKS AT THIS WEEKEND
THE PAST AND FUTURE OF ONE OF HOTON’S MOST HISTORIC GAY BARS
* old gay bars in houston *
I llect gay.
Historilly known among lols as the Gayborhood, Montrose ed to be where the weirdos were.
The Gulf Coast Archive and Mm of Gay, Lbian, Bisexual and Transgenr History timat that was the se of more than three hundred funeral servic and remas the fal rtg place of an unknown number of people’s 1970 to 2009, this space was part of the legendary Hoton gay bar Mary’s…Naturally!, which fostered such a close muny that some regulars chose to have their funerals there. Mary’s, as wrer Ed Martez put a sprg 1983 issue of Out Texas, was “the mother hoe of all the gay bars Hoton. ” When origal owner Joe Anthony opened Mary’s, was primarily a leather bar where gay bikers would ngregate.
MAPPG MONTROSE'S GAY HISTORY
But quickly beme known as a place where anyone was wele: gays, lbians, punk micians, wrers, hippi, and bohemians all termgled. “The Gayborhood is marked as much, if not more, by absenc as by the visible markers of s past, ” says curator Junr Fernanz, who anized the event along wh S Rodriguez. “We are terted how the disappearance or ‘revelopment’ of the spac to bnch spots and ffee ho might mirror the overall trajectory of gay liberatn, om s earlier ialism to late-palist intarian pfalls like rabow-packaged Oreos.
But one uld argue that Mary’s, too, was a gentrifier—one former patron remds me that gay men the seventi phed Montrose’s heavily Hispanic populatn out of the area to claim a space for themselv.
In one vio piece, for example, Penagos manvers his body to rg a bell agast a brick, which symboliz the mythologized “first brick of the gay rights movement” thrown by gay activists at the 1969 Stonewall uprisg.
HOTON’S GAY BARS TO VIS TO GRAB DRKS AT THIS WEEKEND
”The exhib celebrat the full breadth of Mary’s, which— the way that only a historic gay gatherg place n—served as a hookup spot, a muny anizg hub, and the se of many, many funerals. After Stonewall and the ceptn of the the AIDS crisis, the bar beme a place for gays to meet, anize, and prott. Acrdg to one archive of Hoton LGBT history, the group that beme the Hoton GLBT Polil Cc, which bills self as the olst gay-rights anizatn the South, began at Mary’s.
Don Gill, a “fundraiser supreme” at Mary’s, rells s shift om grty gay hookup spot to the go-to venue where LGBT social anizatns uld munite wh the muny. In a 2002 Hoton Prs article, bartenr and part-owner Gaye Yancey said “wasn’t unmon for three Mary’s ctomers to die each month.