Sociologists and historians alike have noted the increasing gentrification of what were once known as "gay ghettos" or "gayborhoods" and it's potentially damaging effect on LGBTQ identity, community and culture.
Beginning in 2000, Guerrilla Queer Bar ( GQB ) essentially lived up to the concept of guerrilla warfare as irregular groups of LGBTQ people fought against the conventional forces of gentrification through benign hit-and-run invasions of traditionally straight bars or the more quirky venues and sights of San Francisco.
It made an atypical name for itself as one of San Francisco's last frontiers of non-commercialized LGBTQ revelry while the once-vibrant and outrageous bars of the '60s and '70s disappeared as the city's queer neighborhoods were gradually eliminated.
On Oct. 3, an organization called The Welcoming Committee ( TWC ) held the first of their own brand of GQB events at the Lions Heard Pub/The Apartment in Lincoln Park in Chicago. TWC claims that similar events will continue in Chicago on the first Friday of every month. These events are part of a national push by a new group of party hosts.
However, the co-founders of Guerrilla Queer Bar in San Francisco assert that the Boston-based company has not only hijacked the idiosyncratic brand of GQB but has set out to destroy its unique revolution against conformity by turning it into a mainstream opportunity for profit.
In an extensive 2011 study published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, authors Petra L. Doan and Harrison Higgins discussed "The Demise of Queer Space? Resurgent Gentrification and the Assimilation of LGBT Neighborhoods." Using the LGBTQ community of Atlanta as the backdrop for the article, Doan and Higgins analyzed the consequences of gentrification and the impact on locations of LGBTQ expression and organization. "One of the fears of community activists about resurgent, highly capitalized gentrification is that the arrival of new residents and the dispersal of existing LGBT communities will profoundly change the character of the neighborhood," they wrote.
Among the queer spaces that have been profoundly changed by the onslaught of gentrification are arguably the most prolific and celebrated in LGBTQ history. Beginning in the 1960s, San Francisco's Polk Street and Castro neighborhoods became epicenters of LGBTQ activity and activism. In the Castro, gay men began to buy up real-estate in what was once the working-class Eureka Valley for bargain prices, opening businesses and bars which were not only distinctive in character but, through organizations such as The Tavern Guild, settings in which the genesis of community was founded.
According to many LGBTQ historians, those communities began to evaporate under the dot.com boom of the mid 1990s that propelled real estate and the cost of rent in those neighborhoods into an ascent that has never abated. According to Randy Shilts book The Mayor of Castro Street, when Harvey Milk and his partner Scott Smith opened Castro Camera in a Victorian storefront in 1973 "the pair took their last $1,000, spent $500 buying up supplies and the rest on a first payment on a five-year lease."
Today, the average median sales price for real estate in the Castro Upper Market is a little short of $1,300,000. The neighborhood that was once home to an iconic battle against homophobia through a defiant bacchanal of sexual expression is now a tourist attraction of keen interest to families. Gay bars have been replaced by straight bars, karaoke lounges and high-end clothing outlets. According to their website, The Castro Village Wine Company proclaims themselves to be the "last gay-owned retail business from the 'lavender wave' of the 1970s that is still operating."
"For queer spaces to survive," Doan and Higgins concluded in their study, "organized community action will be required."
In 2000, San Francisco residents Brian McConnell, Dr. Don Romesburg, Selma Soul and a few other artistically inclined rabble rousers took action but in a deliberately disorganized fashion when they co-founded GQB. "A lot of community space was being commercialized," McConnell told Windy City Times. "Everybody just felt like they were under siege."
Romesburg got involved with GQB in 2000 when he was a reporter for The Advocate tasked with an assignment to write about it. "Nightlife was flailing and it was very hard for people to open new venues because the rents were all so high," he remembered. "We were concerned with where queer life was heading in the city."
"We thought it would be really nice to have something for the queer community that wasn't owned by anybody and operated wherever," McConnell said. "So we made a point of finding off-the-beaten-track places to take people."
"When GQB emerged, it was this dynamic, inclusive and raucous approach that took the best of San Francisco's 'crazy for street theatre' attitude and infused it with a queer sensibility," Romesburg added. "It was diverse racially; there were gays, lesbians, trans* people, just all sorts of folks."
Once Romesburg had submitted his report to his editors, he too became an avid participant in GQB.
With no smartphones or tablets available and a comparatively small number of adults using the Internet ( mostly through dial-up modems that transported them to chat rooms ) hardly anything was pre-planned as it is today via announcements on social media or through meeting-maker websites.
An outing for GQB often began with the spark of creative genius lit by a lot of alcohol. "A group of us would be drinking and then somebody would have an idea and then other people would start amplifying that idea and we'd end up with a sketch of what the evening would look like," McConnell recalled. "Generally we'd just wing it. We'd never tell the locations we were thinking of that we were coming and, basically, we'd just show up."
Using a megaphone hooked up to an MP3 player, they played the theme that symbolized audacity "The Bridge Over the River Kwai" in order to announce their arrival. "It was pretty chaotic," McConnell said. "But we never had a hostile reaction. Basically anyone already there was confused as to why 200 people had just come pouring through the door. It was kind of like 'shock and awe' for a few minutes, but then the bartenders would figure out that they were going to make a lot of money. So, while they were pocketing several hundred dollars in an hour, they became our friends even if the owner or manager was having a fit."
After they felt they had been there for long enough, GQB would remobilize for a raid on sometimes two or three other unsuspecting destinations in the course of an evening.
While he admitted that memories of the glory days of GQB tend to be a bit hazy, Romesburg did recall one night in March of 2000 during which two gay lads visiting from Ireland asked GQB to throw a party for them. "We created this thing called 'Saint Patricia's Day' for the patron saint of drunken sex mistakes," he said. "We went through several Irish Pubs in Union Square and then suddenly veered off to Chinatown and ended up at strip clubs in North Beach."
The parade of 300 drunken people confused San Francisco's tourists.
But it wasn't just straight bars that were suddenly discovering what it was like to have character. Sometimes GQB would charter a small fleet of "Green Tortoise" hippie buses whose lounge-around interiors may have been a little ramshackle but were perfect for a mobile party headed for the suburbs. McConnell said that such occasions were the only time people were asked to chip in some money up front, in order to cover the cost of the rentals. Other than that, everyone looked after themselves or each other. McConnell and his co-founders never once had profit in mind.
"GQB suddenly opened up all these spaces in San Francisco to queer nightlife that ostensibly didn't belong to us," Romesburg said.
Nevertheless, it was losing steam by 2005. However something that decried procedure could never formerly shut down and outings would still spontaneously occur here and there as the years went on. Regardless, it was never forgotten because of the rent-free place it earned in the hearts of San Francisco's queer community.
While the name of Guerrilla Queer Bar may have been identified with the beautifully subversive, it was never legally trade-marked and so queer communities in other cities across the U.S. took up its mantel and began their own quests to go against the plain. Chicago's version called itself Guerrilla Gay Bar and ran from 2009 to 2011.
"Usually a group of people, kind of like us, would pick up and start doing it," McConnell said. "They'd get in touch with us and we'd give them tips on how to do things and how not to get thrown in jail. We even had a little field manual that we distributed with the understanding that what they were doing was ad-hoc and non-commercial."
Chicago's Guerrilla Gay Bar was conceived by a pair of medical students Andy Czysz and Scott Feldman. Czysz told Windy City Times that they were living in Printers Row at the time and so began his events because of the dearth of gay bars in his neighborhood. "Gay people tend to go where there's other gay people," Czysz said. "So, we decided if a bunch of gay people could go to a bar at the same time, it would be a gay bar."
They researched GQB and its sister events across the country before launching in January 2009. "It just started out with just inviting our friends," Czysz said, "But then, as things do online, a bunch of other people found out. The first one had maybe 20 people. By the second month we had 150 and it went on like that for a couple of years."
After Feldman left Chicago, Czysc found that organizing the events on his own was taking up a lot of time. "I felt [in 2011] that we'd had a good run and that if other people wanted to do something similar that they were more than welcome to."
The founder of The Welcoming Committee Daniel Heller envisioned his own version of GQB shortly after he moved to Boston in 2007 for much the same reason as Czysz and Feldman. "I was single and everybody had all these straight friends," he told Windy City Times. "They would all go wherever they wanted and I would end up just trying to find someone to join me at one of two [gay] bars in the city. The model didn't make sense to me, so a friend of mine and I started an event called Guerrilla Queer Bar—which had existed before, you know it's a cool concept that kind of pops up all over the place."
Much as Czysc and Feldman discovered, once word got out the level of enthusiasm grew with each event. "By the fifth event, we had 1,000 people showing up," Heller said. "We really didn't understand the energy that we were tapping into."
However, with an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a background in market research and strategy, Heller did understand GQB's potential. In 2012, he sat down with regular attendees to Boston's event— traditionally held on the first Friday of every month—in order to identify a list of places other than straight bars where they could make the same impact.
"We launched The Welcoming Committee to help LGBTQ people experience the entire world, not just gay bars," Heller said. "The community grew significantly when we got out of just bars and started hosting takeovers of cultural establishments, sports games and travel destinations; anywhere that our crowd found iconic, they wanted to experience in a TWC way."
The organization expanded to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in 2013. Along with the recently launched Chicago version, TWC has also opened in Atlanta. Some of the organization's prior volunteers became staff members in departments such as business development, marketing and communications, new city expansion and community management.
Coordination in Chicago varies depending on the venue type. "If it's a night life take over, you get an email the Monday before that says 'plan your pre-parties, we're going on Friday night to Lincoln Park and tomorrow we'll announce the name of the venue'," Heller said. "There are a lot of volunteers on the ground in Chicago who will pick one just in time."
In the case of something like a trip to a baseball game, Heller said that the events are much more organized. "We'll get a block of seats together, because that's how we can provide the sense of day-to-day experiential quality. We can provide a comfortable environment by just enough people showing up."
Ironically, one of the other cities Heller launched his GQB in this year was San Francisco.
McConnell said he was contacted by Heller in late August. "He said he had heard of Guerrilla Queer Bar and was interested in learning about its history, how we operated and what we were currently up to," McConnell said. "He was up front about the fact that they were going to start doing The Welcoming Committee here. We're genuinely supportive of people organizing these events, but he completely misled us about the fact that he was going to copy the name [GQB] that has existed here for 14 years and is considered a part of [this city's] queer history."
McConnell added that it is Heller's attempt to turn GQB into a franchise that has repulsed and incensed its original co-founders. They were first alerted to Heller's use of the name by TWC's aggressive social media campaign. In a blog post McConnell wrote shortly afterward, he displayed a screen shot of the Facebook page Heller and his team have been using to promote GQB in San Francisco. It contains four generic, archetypal images that include the San Francisco Giants and Alcatraz Island. "It's an amazing way to go out anywhere in the city," the page says. "We'll announce the neighborhood on Monday, September 29 and the venue on Thursday, October 2. Yep, we like surprises."
McConnell and the rest of GQB's co-founders certainly didn't. "We found out within about five minutes of them pushing the button on Facebook that this was going on," McConnell said. "People were confused and emailing us saying 'is this your thing?' But we want to make it absolutely clear to the queer arts community that we had nothing to do with this."
As an LGBTQ historian, Romesburg sees Heller's expansion to San Francisco as ironic in terms of the very gentrification that GQB was launched to combat in the first place. "As someone who thinks about what it means to produce these so-called 'sharing economies' that are more economy than sharing, I think what The Welcoming Committee is doing is absolutely typical of the moment we live in," Romesburg said. "It's troubling because it presumes that, in order to create queer possibilities for bacchanalia, somebody needs to make a buck off it."
For both he and McConnell, the main source of their acrimony isn't merely the possibility of Heller one day making enough money to turn GQB into a stock option, but that they believe TWC took the name, stripped it of its impulsive essence in a desire to seamlessly curate every moment and venture capitalized it in a way that robs it of its nonconformist significance.
"They've turned it into this generic for-profit experience that they are calling 'Guerrilla'and 'Queer'and, while it might be fun, it's neither guerrilla, in the strictest sense of the word, nor is it queer in the sense of anti-normative and poking your finger at things," Romesburg said. "I think The Welcoming Committee is a perfectly legitimate business model for prepackaged gay nightlife experiences. It's just a shame that they felt like they had to appropriate this long tradition of disruptive and absurd possibility that was Guerrilla Queer Bar."
Through his own experiences, Czysc said he understands where Heller is coming from. "When we were doing Guerilla Gay Bar, we had to strike a balance between how much we wanted it to be a spontaneous takeover versus how much we wanted to organize it," he recalled. "When we were becoming popular, there was no way these bars could serve us all. It was too crowded and people were waiting 20 minutes for a drink out of a plastic cup because they ran out of glasses. It came to the point where we needed some level of planning otherwise it would be kind of a disaster. As far as [TWC] taking over, it depends what the purpose of the event is. I guess I see the advantages of creating an experience you can only do with a larger organization dedicated to event planning, which we certainly were not."
Heller acknowledged that GQB is not something that The Welcoming Committee created. "It's more of a concept," he said. "It's one thing that we do and it's an activity from our perspective. The truth is that we don't disagree with most of the stuff in [McConnell's] articles. It's not as radical as he wanted it to be and I can't disagree with his opinion. He hasn't reached out to me so I have really little to say beyond that."
"When somebody does something of such low integrity, there's really no point in having a discussion," McConnell said.
Instead, he and a few other GQB alumni have begun again in San Francisco with an event called "Pop Up Gay Bar."
"It's in a different form this time," McConnell said. "We've been experimenting with different ways to make it easier to create neighborhood gay bars out of happy hours in their immediate area. It's a totally organic, community-driven approach."
In a follow up email to Windy City Times, McConnell said that GQB's co-founders teamed up with a queer Burning Man art car, the Big Ass Amazingly Awesome Homosexual Sheep ( BAAAHS ) on Oct. 4 to organize a short-notice party at the top of San Francisco's Twin Peaks. "Word got around," he wrote. "We ended up with hundreds of people, many of whom hiked in. That party ran for a couple of hours before the cops shut it down. The general consensus is that it was one of the best nights here in a very long time."
