People interviewed in 1980 told journalists they wouldn't have been able to tolerate Green Bay without the bar and that it showed them there was a gay community here. In a 1980 story, the Press-Gazette called The Manhole "the gathering place for much of the younger gay community." It also became more than just drinking and dancing for many patrons over its five-year run. He said the bar was a former restaurant that Dziuda and Mallien turned into a bar with a dance floor area that "looked pretty good on a shoestring budget." He briefly DJed in a room above the Roxy, on the corner of Washington and Pine streets in downtown Green Bay, but moved to The Manhole, where he'd spin until Mallien and Dziuda closed it in 1981 and opened a new bar, Body Shop, on Bodart Street. Mariucci said he was 18 and "very much in the closet" when he first visited The Manhole. He told me 'My name's not Bruce,' but this obvious troublemaker now had to answer to his friends about why I knew him as Bruce. "So I looked at one and said 'Hi, Bruce,' like I knew him. "My cleverest thing I ever did is I opened the bar one afternoon and had one customer at the bar when these three toughies come in, and you could tell they wanted to make trouble," Mallien said. Once in awhile he would try to have a little fun with them. He said he got good at spotting people who came to the bar to pick on LGBTQ people or stir up trouble. He said The Manhole's customers routinely endured verbal and physical assaults. Mallien, now 85 and living in Milwaukee, said openly catering to gays and lesbians in the 1970s often drew backlash from teenagers, "Bible thumpers," as Mallien called them, and the larger Green Bay community. Joe Mallien, who, with Mike Dziuda, operated The Manhole from 1976 to 1981, recalled a few bars and restaurants that would serve LGBTQ people in Green Bay in the 1970s, but none as overtly as Gail's, Roxy and The Manhole. The Fox Valley Gay Alliance, a very early support group formed in 1972 in Neenah, often met in members' homes, and a frequent topic of discussion was finding a tavern that would be "openly gay-friendly." "One of my projects is to make a sign to hang above the back room that says 'Annie's Community Room' to honor (former owner) Ann Eiler." Confronting hositilityīefore the Roxy and The Manhole, LGBTQ people could find friendly faces in some restaurants and bars, such as the lounge at the Astor Hotel. "This truly is a community center," Pendergast said.
Their monthly drag shows, on hold during the coronavirus pandemic, also double as fundraisers or food drives for local LGBTQ support groups. Supreme Court upheld same-sex marriage, of course they did so at Nap's. In 2015, when Pendergast and DeSotel got married, the same day the U.S. Rascal’s Bar and Grill in Appleton is marking 28 years in business and the Napalese Lounge and Grille, on South Broadway until it moved to Cedar Street in 1999, continues to play that community center role in Green Bay, hosting a range of events, from monthly drag pageants to funerals, while also continuing to help young people who are grappling with their identity. Yet others rose to take the old bars' places.
With many of the businesses long gone and even the buildings they once occupied demolished or destroyed, Tenpenny said there's a worry the stories will be lost.
#Gay bars milwaukee wisconsin archive#
Tenpenny is working with the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to establish a Northeast Wisconsin LGBTQ History Archive to collect some of the history project's memorabilia from gay bars and clubs, like t-shirts and detailed histories of various LGBTQ bars and support groups that were active over recent decades. In 1980, the Green Bay Press-Gazette published a week-long series, "Gay in Green Bay," that called bars like The Manhole a “linchpin, a central place where its members can exist in the open without the fear of retribution from the straight world.” In these bars, LGBTQ people found their collective voice on issues such as equal rights, the AIDS epidemic, and support for people struggling with suicide and substance abuse.