June 6, 2018
San Diego's Gay Bar History (FilmOut)
Roger Walker-Dack READ TIME: 2 MIN.
Filmmaker Paul Detwiler's documentary "San Diego's Gay Bar History" is a story that is very similar to that from many other urban areas in the U.S. who have seen the rise and fall of their number of�establishments in the past few decades.
He starts his film in the aftermath�of WWII, when San Diego was a major naval and military base. Whilst heterosexual serviceman couldn't�wait to rush back home to their families, gay men and women were basking in the freedom they had started�to experience�away from the constrictions of their traditional family lives, and didn't want to leave.�
Homosexuality may have still been illegal then, and being found out for being gay could literally�ruin your lives, but between 1950s and the 1960s there were 25 gay bars in the City. Detwiler mixes some great archival footage with�interviews of bar patrons and owners from that time who attest to the fact that�they all had a great deal of fun despite the restrictions they lived under. For many people, the gay bars then were a springboard into the community that was mainly hidden from sight.
In the 1970s gay bars proliferated�in the city, but none of them were owned by gay men or women because,�as they were legally considered to be 'degenerates,' they were unable to obtain liquor�licenses.�
In the next decade as the LGBT community was devastated by the onslaught of�the AIDS pandemic, gay bars were the only places where it was possible�to raise much-needed funds for all the victims and their treatments.�In a highly emotional section in the documentary,�several survivors talk about how the huge loss of life deeply affected the bar community and beyond.
There was no going back into the closet after that, but the role of the bars was evolving and part of the liberation was the eventual arrival of the internet, which would affect the LGBT community in how they now chose to intermingle. It's sad to see the closing night of Numbers, one of the city's gay clubs,�packed and mourned by the same people whose failure to support it up till then led to�its demise after�a 20-year run.
What the documentary lacks in production values it makes up for in its energy, as it does a valuable job recording a part of our community's history that may very well soon be forgotten.
