1980s

Hot '90s++ Pics: The Box, Club Q, Sticks, & More

In my Our Dyke Histories interview with Lucas Hilderbrand, we talked giddily about a wide range of incredible spaces -- and you need to see them to believe them.

Some of the incredible images in Lucas Hilderbrand's The Bars Are Ours, all discussed on Our Dyke Histories, and Lucas himself in technicolor.

I love a queer rant but sometimes the brain just needs visual candy.

If you need more visual candy, buy Lucas Hilderbrand's The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America,1960 and After. It's delicious.

In my interview with Lucas Hilderbrand, we talked giddily about a wide range of incredible spaces and you need to see them to believe them. Below you can enjoy photos from the 1960s-1970s Kansas City Jewel Box Lounge, and 1990s Skirts, The Box, Club Q, and Club Uranus parties in San Francisco.

Drag in Missouri: the Jewel Box Lounge

When it comes to dyke bars* both on Our Dyke Histories and both in the gay and mainstream media, we talk too much about the coastal cities. Thank the goddesses, Missouri is much gayer than you may imagine.

Ads and memorabilia from the drag queen standout bar, Jewel Box Lounge. From L to R, top then bottom: 1) Per Lucas, The Jewel Box Lounge marketed, alongside the adjoining Cat Balleu burlesque club and Yum-Yum strip club, as “Mid-America’s Greatest Fun Complex” for straight slummers. Kansas City Times, December 31, 1965; 2) matches from the same; 3) flyer for JBR; 4) front of JBR and its neon; 5) drag performers glamour shot c.1972-4; and 6), per Luca, matchbook for the Jewel Box Lounge featuring headshots of its femme mimic cast... The marketing euphemistically bills it “K.C.’s most unusual.” Numbers 1, 5, and 6 courtesy of the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America, a.k.a. GLAMA, University of Missouri–Kansas City.

Skirts

From Lucas, who alludes to the long-held lezbiqueertrans practices of fucking in party and bar bathrooms. ❤✊🏼💜

Skirts was marketed with a seductive image of a dandy butch in a fitted suit touching cigarettes with her bandeau- clad femme (see below). Its opening-night party—at which Hodel spun records— drew a thousand people, confirming the demand for such events. Savvily, a later version of the ad also reassured its target audience that the venue has “16 bathroom stalls” to serve the massive crowd.

From Lucas: "This seductive flyer for the Skirts opening party in early 1989 signaled a new lesbian chic spin on butch/femme aesthetics and drew a crowd of a thousand. A later version of this advertisement reflected the turn toward co-gender clubbing by specify- ing that guys 'with gusto' are 'welcome.' It also reassured women that the venue featured “16 bathroom stalls.” LGBT Business Ephemera collection. C/o GLBT Historical Society.

This Club Was Made for You & Me: The Box & Club Q

From L to R: (top row) adorable photos of Page Hodel as adorable bb DJ in SF; (middle & bottom row) per Lucas: Mixtress Page Hodel (at center with microphone) announcing the winner of a weekly boom- box giveaway at the Box, circa 1990 c/o Melissa Hawkins; per Lucas: ads for The Box showing multiethnic, multigender queer crowd c/o GLBT Historical Society; present day ad for Page Hodel's woodworking business -- take classes with this visionary already, San Franciscans and Oaklanders! THE MIXTRESS ALSO STILL DJS!

Clockwise from top L: still from *Club Q* documenary; 1990 and 1989 ads for Club Q; and photo shoot for Club Q with Page Hodel and organizers. Notice the multiethnic, multigender representation in any photo image.

Plus(!), would you believe you get a documentary and(!) a reflection on how great Club Q was by the people who created it? Amazeballs. Thank you, SF dykes.

Documentary "CLUB Q - The Legendary Dance Party For Women" (2003).

Club Uranus

As Lucas writes in The Bars Are Ours, "Club Uranus embraced bdsm and espoused a confrontational sensibility." Now as antiracist and pro-trans The Box and Club Q were, Club Uranus assumed it's white ads would appeal to all those who loved BDSM, wearing clown makeup, and the furthering of straight edge punkdom in the club scene. It was quite a scene too.

Care of The Bay Area Reporter 2015, Jerome Caja, CU emcee, reminisces:

I would dance on the bar. Usually though, I didn't dance; I was wrestling with someone...I always loved wrestling and I think I did more wrestling than dancing. When I'm in drag I want to interact...when I was a gogo dancer...it was always traditional that I would be the last one because I had a tendency to destroy things. They made, like, cages and things and I'd always destroy them.

Doorman Thomas Maffei confirmed Caja's claim: