Gay bar in durham

Part 1 is available here. As the eighties rolled around, gay people around the world were forced to become more visible. The AIDS crisis and increasing attacks from the Christian right led people to advocate for their right to exist and survive, necessitating durham of a public presence. Though discretion was still preferred by many, there was more social space for gay establishments, and secret bars and informal gay spaces became less central in queer life.

Though Durham was still a small Southern town, the changes of the eighties allowed it to expand into something radically beautiful. There was also a conspicuous staircase that served as a kind of unofficial stage for people to walk up and down under the gaze of fellow clubgoers. The Power Company provided a rare space of reprieve for people to gay let loose and be themselves without homophobic harassment.

The club was famous for having a large and loyal body of regulars as well as for being visited by many kinds of people, including Duke professors. Furthermore, bar relative openness afforded by the space went beyond just sexual orientation and gender identity. According to late Durham queer leader Mignon Cooper, the Power Company was also known as a place where interracial couples, immigrants, older people, and even straight couples would come to enjoy a welcoming and joyful club environment with a wide variety of people.

Unfortunately, the club shut down inmarking the end of an era for queer Durham. According to the WRAL article, Durham ponders whether nightclub is a public nuisance ; the Power Company began to draw negative attention from police and city officials after these disturbances at the club culminated in a person being murdered outside.

To this day, the Power Company is still a frequent subject of conversation in Durham, much beloved by gays and their allies who used to attend. Ringside was a four-story artist club and music venue located at West Main Street, a building that is now occupied by startup offices. Ringside was never marketed as a gay bar, though it seems that it functionally operated as the primary queer hangout space in town at the time.

I never wanted it to be anything. The primary goal of Ringside was to create an anchor for the Durham music scene, which despite its many talented acts mostly performed in Chapel Hill.

“It is a new ERA”: Naomi Dix To Open a Queer Nightclub and Bar in Durham

Alongside Duke Coffeehouse, the club succeeded at this goal and hosted many local acts during its lifespan. Though its strange, multipurpose artistic vision does remain in the digital journalistic record, the extent of the gay happenings and events that likely occurred there is not well known.

However, one remnant of the bar is still with us. The next post focuses on Rigsbee Avenue, another important gathering spot for queer communities from across the Triangle. The Chronicle. Twenty Years of Bars in Durham. Clarion Content. Mad Bankson is a planner and critical geographer based in Durham, NC.

Their interdisciplinary research brings together housing, land justice, urban history, and data analysis. Duncan Dodson is a queer planner and researcher from Oklahoma. Community engagement efforts, disaster-relief administration, and data-driven conservation in Durham and DC brought Duncan to Carolina.

He graduated from DCRP and explored the mitigation of climate change impacts on low-income and marginalized communities.