The killings in Orlando seemed to expose the feeling of fragility that surrounds many LGBT bars and clubs — and point to our need to remember the pivotal role these "sanctuaries" have played.
Last weekend, as the popular weekly Latin night was winding down, and shortly after bartenders announced the last call for alcohol, Orlando's Pulse nightclub became a scene of carnage and violence that would soon shock all Americans.
For LGBTQ people, it went deeper: a sanctuary was violated.
Pulse offered safety in a hostile world -- and understanding the history of LGBTQ bars and clubs is more urgent than ever in the aftermath of Orlando.
That sense of sanctuary was shattered last week. But here in Newark, queer clubs have always been vulnerable -- as well as pivotal to our local queer history.
When we began investigating the history of LGBTQ discos, bars, nightclubs, and ballroom houses in Newark, one theme emerged from our community meetings: these spaces provided sanctuary, when few other institutions did, particularly for people of color.
Of course, anti-LGBTQ violence has not usually taken the form of a mass killing in a bar or club. In what was previously described as the largest anti-gay mass murder in U.S. history, a 1973 arson fire, at the Up Stairs Lounge in New Orleans, killed 32 people. Journalists and police officers showed little sympathy for the victims, casting them as deviants and outcasts even in death.
Today's media responded to the Pulse massacre more sympathetically.
Yet, far more often, anti-LGBTQ violence has occurred outside the doors of the club -- in the home, or on the street, as when Richard McCullough murdered 15-year-old Sakia Gunn at the corner of Broad and Market in 2003.
As Mayor Ras Baraka said at the June 13 vigil for Orlando at Newark's city hall, "People in the LGBTQ community were being attacked before ISIS was even thought of."
Historically, the most sustained patterns of anti-LGBTQ violence have come from police officers and other agents of the state. In 1960, there were no gay rights groups in Newark, but there was Murphy's Tavern downtown, at the corner of Edison and Mulberry. It was repeatedly harassed by state regulators who considered gay flirting "filthy and obscene conduct," and took note of the "feminine actions and mannerisms" of the male patrons in revoking the bar's liquor license.
Only after a protracted legal struggle did Murphy's prevail before the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1967 -- winning a landmark gay legal victory for the rights of gays and lesbians to congregate.
Many of the people we interviewed for the Queer Newark Oral History Project mentioned Murphy's, which survived for decades before being demolished to make way for the Prudential Center. "You could hold hands in Murphy's," Yvonne Hernandez recalled. "You could kiss in Murphy's, you could sit on each other's lap, and it was great, 'cause there were no straight people involved."
LGBTQ spaces in Newark were still subject to unexpected violence. In the early 1970s, the Other World disco, in north Newark, provided basement space for Newark's earliest meetings of gay liberation activist groups. Yet when James Credle, who is African American, went to the Other World with his white lover, someone in the neighborhood shot at their car with a BB gun.
As other LGBTQ-friendly clubs emerged in Newark, at Le Joc, Club Zanzibar, SRO, and elsewhere near downtown, the threat of violence was never far removed.
In the 1980s, Newark was among the cities hit hardest by the AIDS crisis, and the city's black and queer communities faced another form of violence, that of official neglect. Newark's ballroom scene, in which "houses" offered runway performances that defied gender norms and celebrated queer expression, provided a de facto care community when blood families, hospitals, and politicians failed. The FireBall ballroom shows at the Robert Treat, which began as AIDS fundraisers in 1992, have recently been revived for a new generation, recreating a long tradition of community-based HIV prevention in the face of government indifference.
In all of this, Newark parallels other communities in New Jersey and beyond, especially places with large populations of people of color, who have often been marginalized in white-dominated activist groups and found community in these social spaces. When Murphy's went to court, it was joined by bars in Atlantic City and New Brunswick. Ballrooms have played a major role in black and Latino communities in places like Detroit, whose history mirrors Newark's in many ways. And the Pulse reflected the recent growth of the Puerto Rican LGBTQ community in Orlando, as Julio Capo Jr. observes.
The killings in Orlando require us to ask: where have we fallen short? As recently as 2010, when an undercover Essex County sheriff's officer shot and killed DeFarra Gaymon in an area of Branch Brook Park traditionally used for male cruising, we saw again the susceptibility of LGBTQ lives to state violence.
In recent decades, LGBTQ communities in cities across the nation have benefited from the birth of community centers, which offer programming and services those who cannot get into bars and clubs, because they are too young or lack money.
Yet in the almost fifteen years since Gunn's death, LGBTQ Newarkers have been promised more from the city's political leaders than they have received.
Newark's LGBTQ Community Center ( whose motto is "safe spaces save lives," is on the brink of financial collapse today - and no one has come forward to save it (full disclosure: Strub sits on its board).
The killings in Orlando sent a shiver down the spine of so many LGBTQ people, visiting devastation on a place of refuge and solace. They seemed to expose the feeling of fragility that surrounds many queer bars and clubs -- and point to our need to remember the pivotal role they've played in our history.
Timothy Stewart-Winter and Whitney Strub are co-directors of the Queer Newark Oral History Project in the Rutgers-Newark History Department, which regularly offers free community workshops and training in preserving LGBTQ history.
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