Gay bars in arlington texas

Get the best experience and stay connected to your community with our Spectrum News app. Learn More. FORT WORTH, Texas — As employees watched flames engulf the bar they had just cleaned and closed down for the night, few understood the glowing embers in front of them represented the end of an era.

Inthe Rainbow Lounge was the setting for a national news story. Local police and TABC agents raided the then recently-opened bar on the 40th anniversary of the raid at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, which set off the Stonewall Riots and gave birth to the modern gay rights movement.

In Fort Worth, Police made several arrests for public intoxication, and one customer suffered severe brain and head injuries. The timing of the raid incensed the local gay community and its supporters.

Where did Fort Worth gay bars go?

The event galvanized a population that had long faced texas and fought to integrate. A Dallas filmmaker made a documentary about the raid, protests, and resulting dialogue with the city and police. When the Rainbow Lounge burned, the number of gay bars in the city was already comparatively low.

Bythere were only about six or seven in Tarrant County, and most of them were concentrated in a small corridor just south of downtown at the cross-section of Jennings and Pennsylvania avenues. Now, there are even fewer places scattered throughout the city. You can walk into almost any bar in the city of Fort Worth on any given night and find gay people in it being openly gay, kissing, being emotional, engaging in public displays of affection with no fear of repercussions because, for the most part, people feel comfortable.

According to his data, there have been more than gay bars in Fort Worth and nearby Arlington, with Club the longest-tenured at about 35 years and the Rainbow Lounge was later housed in the same buildingand a club called Trixx bar only one weekend. When prohibition ended, gays and lesbians were forbidden from drinking in bars. Businesses could lose their liquor licenses, or they could face shut down if they served the LGBTQ community.

Other gay clubs opened despite police crackdowns, Camp gay. Owners employed a lookout person who would flash a red light when police showed up to the clubs. It was strange. It was different. But it was a world that didn't bother them. That was always interesting to me, and that's an area we don't really know anything about. Dallas always had a much more thriving gay scene.

Countless publications have spent wells of ink opining the death of the gay bar in general. New York has seen many clubs shutter, such as the legendary leather bar The Rawhide — open sincelong-tenured dance club Splash, G Lounge, and others. Locals around the country say gentrification is to blame, and the LGBTQ community usually augurs coming development.

The cycle is now a familiar one: Gays move into a downtrodden area, build arlington up, create a community, and developers swoop in and price them out of the neighborhood. While the area surrounding the Fort Worth gayborhood has developed at the pace of the Game of Thrones opening, the buildings and bones of the cross-section are still mostly intact.

It's still scary.