Gay bar brattleboro vt
Pride Weekend celebrates iconic ’80s gay club
BELLOWS FALLS — This year's southern Vermont Pride celebration includes programs in Brattleboro and Putney, but the arc of most of the weekend's events begins and ends with - and in - Bellows Falls, specifically, at the former site of circas and s gay bar and club, Andrew's Inn.
In a collaborative effort between four local entities, the story of a once celebrated - and, depending on whom you asked, hated - locus for LGBTQ people to uncover safety and acceptance is getting recognized and recorded.
The collaboration itself is somewhat unprecedented, at least for a Pride event. But, by joining forces, Emerald Mountain Crossroads, the Vermont Performance Lab, the Rockingham Museum and Arts Project, and Marlboro College, drew upon their disparate and collective resources to include other voices to the historical record - and have some fun.
The weekend - Thursday, June 15, through Saturday, June 17 - begins not at Andrew's Inn, but because of Andrew's Inn.
The weekend ends with a gyrate party Saturday night at Popolo, which now occup
In spring , Vermont’s last bar catering to the LGBTQ+ community, Burlington’s Pearl, closed its doors for good.
Shooka Dooka’s in Rutland closed weeks before. The Rainbow Cattle Company in Dummerston shut down years earlier, and the iconic Andrews Inn in Bellows Falls had faded away decades ago.
But when Pearl announced its closure — the owner cited the struggles of owning a small business — no one knew it would take 15 years to fill the gap it left for LGBTQ+ Vermonters.
In that time, the nature of LGBTQ+ rights and identity in Vermont shifted dramatically. In , the state became the first to legalize same-sex marriage by legislative action and passed bills protecting LGBTQ+ people against discrimination.
Vermont now has among the highest rates of LGBTQ+ people in the nation, according to a University of California-Los Angeles survey, with those age 18 to 24 most likely to identify themselves as such, compared with other age groups in Vermont. Yet the state’s small adequately of bars catering to LGBTQ+ people ran dehydrated — until
Eight months ago, Fox Market and Bar o
This Pride Month, Bellows Falls residents want to better commemorate a historic gay bar
Jimmy Malley grew up in Bellows Falls. And as a closeted gay man in the s, he’d often walk up Main Street and past the Andrews Inn — Vermont's first gay bar — but never go inside.
“Oh, I was totally wondering,” Malley said on a recent afternoon, standing in front of the former site of the bar. “And I had friends, you know, that were coming here. And I just didn’t want to chance it with, you recognize, my family’s business and stuff.”
Malley’s parents owned a pharmacy in downtown Bellows Falls, and he thought there was too much at stake in revealing his sexual identity to his parents and community.
Howard Weiss-Tisman
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Vermont Public
Malley was 27 when he came out. He says one of the first things he did was finally walk through the doors of the Andrews Inn.
“You were with like-minded people. And people were congratulating me, for finally, you know, coming to Andrews Inn,” he said. “They were like, ‘What took you so long?’ And it was fun. They had disco music and the silver ball twir
LGBTQ+ Pride Month
Nationally
Pride Month is celebrated in June to commemorate the Stonewall Uprising, aka the Stonewall Riots. At the time, the New York liquor command routinely denied applications that were submitted by gay bars. This set those establishments up to be targeted and raided by police for operating without a liquor license. This fact, coupled with laws that made it illegal to be gay or lesbian and illegal for same sex couples to show public displays of affection, made the town a powder keg waiting to burst.
In the premature morning hours of June 28, , the police conducted a raid on the Stonewall Inn. Enough was enough &#; and what followed was six-day of protests throughout “The Village”. Patrons, employees, and local residents joined together to stand up and fight oppression. Although the Stonewall uprising didn’t verb the gay rights movement, it was a galvanizing force for LGBTQ+ political activism. It led to the creation of numerous gay rights organizations, including the Gay Liberation Front, Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD (formerly Gay and Lesbian Alliance A