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“Young gays and lesbians now feel comfortable going to straight bars,” Coyle says. Such events threatened gay bars but more fundamentally justified them, reinforcing the need for the refuge they offered. “Nowadays, gay men and women do not have to ‘hide’ in gay bars like they used to,” Coyle points out. In 1960s Philadelphia, where he grew up, he remembers, “It was illegal to serve alcohol to a known homosexual.” Two hours north in Manhattan, in 1966 the New York Liquor Authority prohibited bars from serving gay patrons, labeling gays “disorderly.” Even after the NYC Commission on Human Rights, a government body tasked with protecting citizens from discrimination, came out in opposition to this rule, police frequently raided gay bars as places where “sexual deviants” assembled.
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While widespread acceptance of homosexuals isn’t leading to the downfall of society, as many rights opponents have predicted in their more frothing moments, it may, ironically, be leading to the downfall of the gay bar as an institution. Public opinion polls throughout the 1990s showed 60-70% opposition to gay rights recent polls show a clear and growing majority of the country supporting them. Then, gays couldn’t serve legally in the military now, they can. In ’93, same-sex marriage was legal in zero states today, it’s legal in 17, including Connecticut. Nonetheless, he and Goodwin are popular fixtures at 168, which has been a gift to the city’s LGBT community since it opened on Christmas Day, 1993.īetween then and now, things have changed considerably for LGBTers. Coyle, co-owner of gay bar/kitchen 168 York Street Cafe with his partner in business and in life, Joseph Goodwin, typically arrives each morning to take inventory and place orders, then leaves operations mostly to staff. W hen George Coyle began tending bar in 1971, he imagined it would be temporary-a job to work while finishing school.Ĥ0 years later, he’s behind his own bar, though he doesn’t spend much time serving drinks.