Tag: Queer Spaces

This post is part 2 of a series that chronicles the history of prominent LGBTQ+ bars and nightclubs in Durham, NC, through an intersectional lens. Part 1 is available here.

By Mad Bankson & Duncan Dodson

To the 80s, and BEYOND!

As the eighties rolled around, gay people around the world were forced to become more visible. The AIDS crisis and increasing attacks from the Christian right led people to advocate for their right to exist and survive, necessitating more of a public presence. [1] This increased visibility led to a significant shift in queer culture, especially when it came to bar and club life. Though discretion was still preferred by many, there was more social space for gay establishments, and secret bars and informal gay spaces became less central in queer life. Though Durham was still a small Southern town, the changes of the eighties allowed it to expand into something radically beautiful.

The Power Company

Opened in the early 1980s, the Power Company was known as “the best gay club between DC and Atlanta .” [2] Jeff Inman, a DJ there from 1984 to 1988 said of the club, “The Power Company was a gay force. It was Grand [sic] period, packed with the who’s who.” [3] Located on Main Street in the building that is now occupied by Teasers strip club, the Power Company was expansive in size, sporting a multi-level layout with several bars, a mezzanine lounge, a dance floor lined with humongous speakers, artful lighting, and several disco balls. There was also a conspicuous staircase that served as a kind of unofficial stage for people to walk up and down under the gaze of fellow clubgoers. [4] In addition, the top floor hosted several “don’t ask don’t tell” dressing rooms that presumably offered privacy for more intimate encounters.

The Power Company provided a rare space of reprieve for people to truly let loose and be themselves without homophobic harassment. One former attendee said of their first trip to the club, “‘So this is what it’s like to be gay and open and not have to be beat-up or worried.” While it was explicitly named as a gay club, like many gay spaces in this time period in Durham, like-minded allies were also welcomed. The club was famous for having a large and loyal body of regulars as well as for being visited by many kinds of people, including Duke professors. 

Furthermore, the relative openness afforded by the space went beyond just sexual orientation and gender identity. According to late Durham queer leader Mignon Cooper, the Power Company was also known as a place where interracial couples, immigrants, older people, and even straight couples would come to enjoy a welcoming and joyful club environment with a wide variety of people. [5]

Unfortunately, the club shut down in 2000, marking the end of an era for queer Durham. This came after a period of controversy surrounding the club in the late 1990s, during which the club’s downtown neighbors were highly agitated by the noise level, resulting in frequent police visits. According to the WRAL article, Durham ponders whether nightclub is a public nuisance; the Power Company began to draw negative attention from police and city officials after these disturbances at the club culminated in a person being murdered outside. [6]

One former club attendee noted that the club closed “after the crowd gradually changed from gay to ‘urban’ and people got shot in the parking lot.” [7] While this comment about shifting demographics may simply speak to the eventual popularity of the club among all kinds of audiences, it resonates strongly with other racially coded negative discourse about the character of downtown Durham in the late 1990s and early 2000s. To this day, the Power Company is still a frequent subject of conversation in Durham, much beloved by gays and their allies who used to attend. [8]

Ringside

In 2000, Boxer’s Ringside Bar opened for business. Ringside was a four-story artist club and music venue located at 308 West Main Street, a building that is now occupied by startup offices. “An amazing dive of a firetrap,” the club was famous for its funky, eclectic vibe, with a library, a large, speakeasy style sitting area, and dance floor/stage space. [9] By all accounts, it lacked a coherent theme or aesthetic.

Ringside was never marketed as a gay bar, though it seems that it functionally operated as the primary queer hangout space in town at the time. The club’s owner, a gay man named Michael Penny, had previously owned Boxer’s, a smaller explicitly gay bar. Boxer’s, which opened in 1989, was located in “a flying saucer shaped building off 15-501.” When he decided to open Ringside, Penny said “I never wanted it to be a gay bar. I never wanted it to be anything.” He later remarked that it was “a gay bar for straight people.” 

The primary goal of Ringside was to create an anchor for the Durham music scene, which despite its many talented acts mostly performed in Chapel Hill. Alongside Duke Coffeehouse, the club succeeded at this goal and hosted many local acts during its lifespan. Unfortunately, the queer/art scene in Durham still lacks a solid anchor even today. 

Ringside was the type of weird and wonderful artsy bar that could never compete with today’s high rent downtown Durham environment. After looking for the space for two years, Penny chose the building specifically because of Durham’s dense urban feel and low rents. Even in 2002 when Ringside’s owners and operators were interviewed by Indy Week, there were already concerns about how urban development might impact the space. While the long-term vision was to create a sort of multidisciplinary art space “not just for white hipsters,” Penny and his counterparts were concerned that the owners of the building would soon realize its value and opt to “turn the area into a big RTP.” The exact reasons for Ringside’s closing are not easily clear in the public record, but it seems likely that the image of the future they feared likely came true. Wild and wonderful, it seems by all accounts that Ringside was indeed “too sketchy” to attract high traffic consistently in a city that was undergoing rapid change as tech and medicine money flooded the city. [10]

In contrast to highly beloved venues like Pinhook and Power Company, Ringside’s gritty underground history seems to have faded more from the popular consciousness in Durham. Though its strange, multipurpose artistic vision does remain in the digital journalistic record, the extent of the gay happenings and events that likely occurred there is not well known. However, one remnant of the bar is still with us. Ringside’s old sign is posted on the wall above the doorway at the Pinhook, Durham’s only surviving gay bar today.

The next post focuses on 711 Rigsbee Avenue, another important gathering spot for queer communities from across the Triangle. 

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[1]  Hull, B. (2001, June 21). Documenting the American South, interview by Chris McGinnis.

[2] Delgo, T. (2020, June 3). Power Company’s former patrons remember nightclub’s legacy. The Chronicle.

[3] Inman, Jeff. “Durham Nostalgia, Anyone? (Raleigh, Fayetteville, Jacksonville: Appointed, Houses, Schools) – Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary – North Carolina (NC) -The Triangle Area.” City Data, January 21, 2010.

[4] Delgo 2020

[5] Delgo 2020

[6] WRAL. (1998, December 28). Durham Ponders Whether Nightclub is a Public Nuisance

[7] Francois. “Durham Nostalgia, Anyone? (Raleigh, Fayetteville, Jacksonville: Appointed, Houses, Schools) – Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary – North Carolina (NC) -The Triangle Area.” City Data, June 27, 2008.

[8] Delgo 2020

[9] Mandel, A. (2018, February 1). Twenty Years of Bars in Durham. Clarion Content. 

[10] Clarion Content 2018

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Featured Image: 2019 Durham Pride. Photo Credit: Jo Kwon

By Mad Bankson & Duncan Dodson

Introduction

A 2019 Durham-based advertising campaign asserted that “Durham is the most diverse, proud and vibrant destination in North Carolina.”[i] For those outside the state, Durham is most well-known for housing Duke University and for its large research industry. However, the Bull City’s history is defined by the presence of vibrant Black communities like Hayti, Walltown, and Bragtown, Civil Rights demonstrations and activism, burgeoning immigrant enclaves, labor struggles in the textile and tobacco mills, and much, much more.

Interwoven throughout these narratives, less visible but no less central, is a diverse queer history. Durham has long been a location of queer celebration and activism and features a somewhat quieter history as a lesbian and transgender stronghold in North Carolina.[ii] In qualifying the City’s assertion of diversity, this series traces Durham’s LGBTQ+ community from the 1960s through the present by examining the history of the primary gathering spaces for its community members: bars and nightclubs. Historic and modern accounts of queer representation in the city affirm a queer community centered around safety, expression, and activism, much of which was cultivated by bars and similar queer enclaves.

This series chronicles the history of prominent bars and nightclubs in the area, with some discussion of such spaces in connection with other marginalized groups along lines of race and class. It draws much of its fact basis from the archival work of the Love and Liberation Durham LGBTQ+ History Project assembled by the Durham Public Library, online forums, oral histories, and alternative newspapers.

No comprehensive research project of this sort exists, therefore this series aims for breadth over depth, addressing the reality that much of queer history is challenging or impossible to recover. As Durham continues to rapidly grow and bring new interests, it still stands to be seen what will come of queer bars and meeting spaces in an area with exacerbating economic issues, soaring rent, redevelopment pressures, and growing divides among people of color and white communities in space. Tracing gay bars and inclusive spaces through space and place offers some insight into these divides and helps identify what has been lost and which vacuums remain to be filled in Durham’s queer nightlife spaces.

This series is broken up into three parts. Part I tells the story of some of the first queer spaces in the Research Triangle through from the 1960’s through the 1970’s. The second part chronicles queer spaces from the 1980’s to more recently, focusing on notable spaces such as The Power Company and Ringside. The last section of this series focuses on Durham’s current queer bars and night clubs.

Pre-1970s

In attempting to create a historic archive of Durham’s LGBTQ+ community, researchers at Durham County Library remarked that “Little documentation about LGBTQ life prior to the 1970s exists, especially for trans people and people of color.”[iii] Because queerness was considered a vice, gay happenings were rarely put into the written record. Much of what we know from this period comes from oral history, particularly an interview with Bill Hull, a white gay man born in 1947 who lived in the area his whole life. Hull describes the Durham-Chapel Hill gay community prior to 1970 as “insular, but friendly — centered mostly around small, underground gay bars, close friends and private parties.”[iv] Though they were far from accepted by mainstream society in a conservative Southern state, available accounts suggest that gay people during this time were mostly left alone as long as they were not publicly visible or flamboyant.

The most famous bar location from the 1960s is the Ponderosa. Located in a “nice little colonial house” near the entrance of the Hope Valley subdivision between Chapel Hill and suburban Durham (“the boonies” according to Hull), the Ponderosa was a private club that required a secret passphrase to enter. The property had a small diner with a drive-in grill setup. Behind the diner was a large concrete building where people would party and dance, an extremely rare type of establishment for the time. Both men and women attended the well-known queer parties here. In addition, one visitor recalled that the Ponderosa was almost always attended by at least a few black people even in the 1960s.[v]

The Ponderosa attracted little outside attention. Though some attendees experienced gay-bashing from Marines (who Hull speculated were likely closeted themselves), the club amazingly had few police interactions. The city authorities were aware of the illegal land use and gay meetings, but “as long as there was no trouble there, as long as people are discreet and don’t break traffic laws and don’t do it in the street and scare the horses, there would be no problem.”[vi] In keeping with the general theme of queerness being allowed to exist in Durham so long as it was not hyper visible, Ponderosa never experienced a raid in its almost decades-long lifespan. When or why it closed is not well known.

Chapel Hill and Raleigh had more active queer scenes during the1970’s. While Durham gays gathered unofficially in places such as the Washington Duke Hotel bar (now Jack Tar restaurant), both cities had official established gay bars. Chapel Hill, home to a very large and connected queer community, was generally much more open than Durham (at least for white gay men). Bill Hull spoke of the cruising scene of UNC’s Wilson Library and several residence and academic buildings. There is less information about Raleigh, but it did have at least one gay bar called The Anchorage that opened in the early 1950s. It should be noted that gay men and lesbians did not interact much very much at these places. Many gay Durhamites made the drive to these places as well, just as today there is significant interchange among the various queer nightlife locations in all three cities.[vii]

The next post continues this narrative into the 1980’s and beyond.

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[i] Strahm, A. (2019, June 20). LGBTQ Pride in Durham, North Carolina. Discover Durham.

[ii] City Data. (2008). [AfAm LGBT in the Triangle? (Raleigh, Durham: Chapel, Home, Neighborhood)] Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary – North Carolina (NC) -The Triangle Area – City-Data Forum.

[iii] Durham County Library (2016). “Before the 1970s.” Love + Liberation: A History of LGBTQ+ Durham.

[iv] QNotes Staff. (2011, July 8). Durham bar to close, reopen under new management. goqnotes.com.

[v] Hull, B. (2001, June 21). Documenting the American South, interview by Chris McGinnis.

[vi] Hull 2001

[vii] Hull 2001

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Edited by Eve Lettau

Featured image courtesy of Durham County Library, Meredith Emmitt Papers