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Jim Tasker, manager at Cocktails bar“I think people are going out more now than they used to,” says Jim Tasker, who has managed Cocktails, a bar in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood, for nearly three decades. The Hawk boasts a steady roster of regulars and Old Brooklyn's Shade, the newest gay bar in the Cleveland area, is steadily building faithful clientele. Depending on the night, the dance floor at Twist is packed, the pool tables at Cocktails are full, the stage at Vibe is booked, and the (heated) patio at the Leather Stallion Saloon is the place to be. Nearly two years into the pandemic, things have returned to some semblance of normal at Cleveland’s gay bars. “We’re in it for the community, not to make money, we’re just trying to do our best.” “A lot of people don’t understand that many of these businesses are labors of love,” Myers says. Ken Myers, who has owned the Leather Stallion Saloon, near downtown Cleveland since 2014 and officially the city’s oldest operating gay bar, said that keeping a gay bar afloat – even before the pandemic – could be difficult. The number of LGBTQ+ bars and clubs has dwindled from a high-water-mark of over two dozen establishments serving a wide array of community niches in the 1970s and 1980s, to just six gay bars, most small establishments, when the pandemic struck. That rate has been much higher in Cleveland due to population declines. His research shows that 37% of gay bars and clubs nationwide closed between 20. Greggor Mattson, A professor of LGBTQ+ social history at OberlinEven with such events, remaining open before the pandemic was difficult for many such establishments, says Greggor Mattson, a professor of LGBTQ+ social history at Oberlin. And while most people obeyed mask mandates and social-distancing rules, others resisted the health orders. Social-distancing requirements limited the number of people who could be served and fear of COVID-19 restrained the number who wanted to be. There were new expenses-masks, sanitizers, signage.Įvents that bring customers and additional revenue to town – like CLAW, the national annual leather event downtown-were canceled. But the subsequent reopening in May posed further challenges. Like other gay bar owners in town, Briggs and his husband had other sources of income to keep the lights on through the three-month shutdown.
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“The bills didn’t stop just because we were closed,” says Briggs. The Payroll Protection Program eventually helped cover employee wages for Vibe and other gay bars in Cleveland, but business owners had to dig into their own pockets to cover other expenses: internet, utilities, maintenance costs. “We lose money, that’s one thing, but I was really freaking out about my employees,” Kevin Briggs says. They’ve often survived by tapping federal COVID relief for small businesses and by coming up with programming that has appealed to patrons’ desires for COVID-safe entertainment.īriggs remembers the anxiety he felt when he first learned of the shutdown, long before vaccines were available. Vibe, and the handful of Cleveland gay bars and nightclubs in business before the pandemic, remain open. Would the pandemic add to these closures? Not in Cleveland. Kevin Briggs and his husband John, owners of Vibe Bar & PatioGay bars and nightclubs in Cleveland and nationally had been closing at high rates for more than a decade before the pandemic, according to research by an Oberlin College professor. He and his husband John had owned Vibe Bar & Patio, a gay bar on Lorain Avenue near West 117 th Street, for only about a year.Įarly in the pandemic, they didn’t know how long the shutdown would last or if their fledgling business would survive it. When Ohio Governor Mike DeWine ordered bars and clubs to shut down in March 2020 to stop the spread of the coronavirus, Kevin Briggs panicked.