Gay bars once thrived in Saginaw, but none remain. LGBTQ+ advocates seek a revival. – MLive.com
SAGINAW, MI — Showered in a sea of flashing laser lights and surrounded by hundreds of dancing bodies at a Fort Lauderdale gay club, Kevin Rooker during his May vacation in Florida recognized a scene that hit him with a nostalgic thud.
“My God, it looked like it was 1980 again,” said Rooker, the 63-year-old Saginaw man who spent his 20s working as a DJ at similar establishments. “It looked like those days had never ended.”
In Saginaw and many other communities, though, the days of gay nightclubs did end — at least for now.
For decades, gay bars served as premiere gathering spaces for adults identifying as LGBTQ+. While such establishments still exist in cities with large gay populations such as Fort Lauderdale, those clubs thrive less today than years ago, advocates point out. Saginaw last housed such an establishment more than five years ago, whereas there were multiple establishments operating at the same time only a decade earlier.
The decline in part was the result of factors including the popularity of online dating services as well as the increased acceptance of LGBTQ+-identifying patrons at businesses that once shunned them, said Rooker and other gay advocates. Still, there remains a desire for local establishments where those groups can gather socially.
“There are amazingly wonderful pockets of acceptance and inclusion in our region,” said Lee Ann Keller, president of the board of directors for the LGBTQ+-centric nonprofit, Great Lakes Bay Pride. “Particularly for youth, though, there is a need to be able to walk into a place and feel as though they can be themselves. They don’t want to have to the worry that somebody is going to say something to them.”
A few years after Rooker came out as a gay man at the age of 18, he attended and began working in the 1980s at LGBTQ+-catering Saginaw bars and clubs.
“When I came out, the bars were packed, and they stayed that way on weekends for years,” said Rooker, a retired teacher. “The energy inside them incredible. There was a pulse in the bar and on the dance floors. It was really unique.”
Along with the entertainment value, those LGBTQ+-leaning Saginaw establishments offered a friendly atmosphere and sense of acceptance to a demographic seeking inclusion, said Leo Romo, a 71-year-old gay man and advocate.
Even before he came out as homosexual in his late 30s, Romo understood the importance of gay bars and clubs to members of that community historically in his hometown. Saginaw establishments such as Dutch’s and Tallulah’s Show Bar in the 1970s, Whispers in the 1980s, Bambi’s Bottoms Up in the 1990s, and The Mixx in the 2000s all were popular at one point to LGBTQ+ residents there.
Romo was a patron at The Mixx — the last-standing bar catering to LGBTQ+ crowds in Saginaw — when it closed unceremoniously in 2016. Only five years earlier, it was common to see lines of people regularly gathered outside the Old Town district site’s entrance on weekends, when attendees flooded its flashy dance floor or watched the drag queen shows hosted there on Saturday evenings.
“Until, like, 1973, if you were gay, you were considered a mentally-sick person,” Romo said. “So, these places were important to people. You could be yourself there.”
For individuals identifying as LGBTQ+, gathering with their peers inside a gay club provided a safe reprieve from people hostile toward those communities, he said. Even as anti-gay sentiment softened over the years, the desire for gay-catering clubs never disappeared, he said.
“There are still plenty of people who are out of the closet in the bars, but not when they step out in public — even onto the sidewalk outside of the bar,” Romo said. “There are people who still fear being seen (as gay) in public because they’re worried about their job, or something like that.”
In the vacuum created by the loss of local gay bars and clubs, organizations such as Keller’s Great Lakes Bay Pride continue to fill the gap by coordinating events aimed at the LGBTQ+ communities. Later this month in Saginaw, for example, the nonprofit will host a drag show at The Dow Event Center in downtown Saginaw.
Scott Ellis, the 31-year-old executive director of Great Lakes Bay Pride, was a patron at The Mixx when drag queen appearances attracted crowds that packed the building.
“Queer bars across the country, unfortunately, I think ran their lifespan in smaller urban areas like Saginaw,” said Ellis, who is gay. “The importance of (Great Lakes Bay Pride), as an organization, to really create those opportunities to network has become more important over the last few years.”
Great Lakes Bay Pride in recent years began collecting data and conducting interviews in part to identify barriers to inclusion for LGBTQ+ communities in the region.
“The most surprising thing that came out of that needs-assessment analysis was that people wanted a safe place to meet and gather,” Keller said.
The data was collected prior to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which slowed a response to the findings, the 58-year-old said. But Great Lakes Bay Pride officials hope to establish a site in Saginaw or Bay City that would serve as a social gathering space for members of the LGBTQ+ community, providing some of the comforts in part once offered by gay bars and clubs.
“We’re trying to find a place that is near a downtown and easier to get to through public transportation,” Keller said. “It can’t be in the basement of a building or in the far-back corner of some office. It needs to be something that people can call home. They need to be able to walk in and feel like, ‘I can be myself here.’”
Rooker said he and his husband — Bill Ostash, the first openly-gay member of the Saginaw City Council — feel “accepted with open arms” as gay men in many of the city’s social gathering spaces.
“But, you know, there’s still a thing about being in a place with hundreds of people who are kindred souls you feel safe with,” Rooker said. “You want to be able to be at a place where you can look at people and not worry you’re offending somebody. We’re missing that.”
Read more on MLive:
Saginaw High School-adjacent neighborhood focus of planned clean-up project
More than 100 proposals for spending Saginaw’s $52M stimulus; application deadline nears