Best gay bars in columbia sc

By Caleb Bozard Nov 21, When he can, he stays late to watch the drag shows and the younger crowds they bring. The 74 year old is the president of The Capital Club and one of its founding members. He has been president since the year it opened in Through discussions with bar owners and patrons and analyzing records from Historic ColumbiaThe Carolina News and Reporter uncovered a strange statistic: Columbia, inhas only those two gay bars, the lowest number in the city since The number peaked in the mids through mids, when 13 different such clubs spotted the city.

The clubs served as sanctuaries for LGBTQ people at a time when the state still had felony sodomy laws and legal same-sex marriage was more than three decades away.

Best Gay Bar in Columbia, SC 2021

The building was large, with a dance floor that could hold 2, people. Above the dancing was Berliner in his DJ booth, who prided himself on playing the newest underground dance music before it hit the radio. The club also featured live entertainment. Once a pair of backup singers played an unreleased song they had recorded two weeks before — the duo later named themselves The Weather Girls.

The new song? Like a lot of gay bars at the time, Rumors started as a private club with a guarded list of members. Private membership clubs helped protect patrons from being outed, which could cause them to lose their jobs. But members brought their friends, and eventually those friends started bringing straight people.

It was different. A sign by the door said the membership included gay, straight, Black and white, and anyone who caused trouble would be asked to leave. On the dance floor, you would see Black drag queens dancing with businessmen, he said. But Rumors was an outlier in that regard.

The club opened in under a different name and took on The Candy Shop name in It was there that a teenage Dorae Saunders saw her first drag show. Saunders is now a nationally renowned drag performer, impersonator and MC. The Candy Shop was where she got her start. You had gays there, straights there, you had everybody at The Candy Shop.

The Candy Shop was a place where Black LGBTQ people could find support in a close-knit community, including for those who had been cast out by their families, she said. It was also a place to get away from racism at other gay clubs, including for Saunders, a Black trans woman. The clubs were also separated by gender.

It was rare to see a man at Traxx, a lesbian bar on Lincoln Street that opened inpatron Tammy Lane said.