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Pictured is various paraphernalia from old, extinct gay bars in Charleston: T-shirts, pamphlets, membership cards and matchbooks from former nightlife businesses. Andrew J. Of course, hearsay is good, but not the stuff upon which newspaper columns ought to be built. So I went looking for more information. The College of Charleston archivist, head of the school's Special Collections, has been hard at work collecting oral histories and documentation on queer life in the Charleston area through the decades for the Documenting LGBTQ Life in the Lowcountry Project he launched in The work is going well, Greene told me.

Keep in mind that, until , the New York Times wouldn't even print the word "gay" as synonymous with homosexuality. Greene and his team have compiled a list of those locations, and specifically name-check those establishments during interviews to see if their interviewees can provide more information about them. It's all about getting a fuller, more detailed picture of the spaces in which LGBTQ people once cut loose.

Were men and women there? Were black and white people there? What was it like? Many interviewees, especially those older ones who were partying in the bygone era when South Carolina joints wanting to serve liquor had to issue their patrons club membership cards, have also shared valuable old paraphernalia from those days. Among the "tangential materials:" A brochure advertising a campy ripoff performance of Mommy Dearest; a T-shirt heralding a special event at the now-shuttered Les Jardins; and a matchbook heralding Dudley's former King Street address as "the gayest spot in town!

Which creates another predicament: Participants so far have not mirrored the Lowcountry's cultural and racial diversity. By Greene's own admission, most of their subjects so far have been gay white men. And he hopes people from those communities will reach out to the documentation project, too. Otherwise, their histories will remain unpreserved in readily accessible form, and among other things, the bars and dance clubs where they socialized may be lost to the sands of time.

Theoretically, this is at least partly positive: Society has gotten more equitable and inclusive for LGBTQ people, and bars along with it. Of course, as Kludt and others have pointed out, there are other forces at play, and not all of them benign. The rise of LGBTQ-specific dating apps has rendered bar-going not to mention cruising less of a necessity for finding hook-ups; gentrification has remade one-time gay neighborhoods wholesale, driving rent up and gay bars out; and so on.

Preserving this history, he continued, is a way to show future generations of Lowcountry LGBTQ people that they've always had a rightful place in Charleston's vibrant scene. It's come up in two separate oral histories lately one with Fox , and they're honing in on a basic location: on the far end of Folly, the area that "had the reputation for being the cruise-y end of the beach," said Greene.

Now they'll cross-reference old city directories of the area in hopes of pinpointing exactly where it once stood, and whether it had another, more official name.

gay friendly hotels charleston, sc

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