Silver lake california gay bars

Apart from passing through the overwhelming, smog-filled circular behemoth of LAX, I had never visited Los Angeles prior to the two-day job interview that led me to live in the city for over five years. During that interview, a company manager took me on an expedition to visit neighborhoods where my family and I might settle.

Halfway through, I called my husband in tears. Later in the day, after visiting the West Side and the Valley and a blur of other neighborhoods, we drove under the Freeway gay into Silver Lake. In fact, it felt positively leafy set amid a city that seemed silver un-green to me—especially coming from Atlanta, a city in a forest.

It also had, in its people, a thread of old-school bohemia that made me feel instantly at home. Two months later, my husband and son and I moved into a modest two-bedroom bungalow just off Rowena Avenue, and were welcomed by neighbors who had found their homes in Silver Lake many years earlier. It was a neighborhood of artists and outsiders, people who had left small towns to find a home more suited to their needs for freedom and creativity.

Deeply engrained in that culture was a long-standing queer community. And at the center of that community was The Other Side. The Other Side was not my bar in any lake. It closed down about a month after I moved to LA, and I only went there once. But it represented something vital about Silver Lake—an older Silver Lake that was seeping away just as I arrived.

When the bar opened init was one of many gay bars in the neighborhood, and one of quite a few bar bars in in the city. It became The Other Side in the late s when it was bought by Paul Hargis, an intensely private man who has since moved to Florida. We ranged in age from old to young; various ethnic groups were welcomed.

West Hollywood was never like that. Longtime Silver Lake resident Jane Cantillon discovered The Other Side in the early s, and eventually decided to make a film about it. The California Side was a common target of such raids.

Ken's River Club

Cantillon re-cut the movie in when the bar closed, capturing its last night in operation. The sadness of the interviewees is practically unbearable. Both Cantillon and a number of men interviewed in the film blame the death of the piano bar—and the vast gap between piano bars and modern gay bars—on the missing generation of men who were lost in the AIDS epidemic.

This gave The Other Side the feel of a VA bar—a place that catered to men who had come through a common war together and lost many comrades along the way. In the years after The Other Side closed, more and more families with young kids moved into Silver Lake. They were moneyed creatives attracted by the good elementary school and those verdant hills.

The Other Side, meanwhile, was replaced by a bar called Hyperion Public, opened by a group of neighborhood guys with young families—a place where dudes with beards could take their toddlers and drink craft beer. In the years The Other Side was open, very few neighborhoods in America, or the world, were quite so welcoming to queer folks as Silver Lake was.

Neighborhoods change, and the narrative of that change is so common that it can feel a little cliched.