BEST GAY BAR CHICAGO SERIES
The excerpt was part of a series in which the Dutch public read in amazement about all the dark secrets of 1950's America.Īrticle (in Dutch) mentioning Gay Leather bars in New York City in 1959. In an excerpt of a Dutch newspaper of Mathere is a small eye witness report of the bars in New York City (see picture and translation below). Right: Owner Bet van Beeren in leather on her bike.īut the general Dutch public was unaware of those bars in their own country. Left: Amsterdam bar "het Mandje" (1927 to 1982) Until it was reopened in the 21st century. Her bar closed after 55 years in 1982 but it had been kept unchanged by her sister, frozen in time. And there was the famous bar 't Mandje ('the little basket') founded as early as 1927, that had been run by a "leather dyke on bike" for many years at that time. It was a specialized hotel for gay tourists. Amsterdam already had a thriving gay subculture. The early leather sub culture in Amsterdam is supposed to have been imported from England, Amsterdam being the first city on the continent to have bars like that. So even in Amsterdam bars had to be careful what they did.
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Although homosexuality was not punishable in the Netherlands since as early as 1811(!), making public sex possible was, as was making it possible for minors to come into contact with homosexuality. The rooms of the hotel could not be locked very well, so it was really a hotel for easy, heavy and masculine gay sex. This was where the first back room of Amsterdam started. The basement had a passage with a storage room to get to the toilet. It was a very simple place, the bar was actually the living room of the owners. It did not become famous for its hotel, but for its bar, the first leather bar in Europe according to oral history. In 1955 Hotel Tiemersma (between mid 19 renamed to Argos) in the Amsterdam Warmoesstraat opened.
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Right: 1997 for the bar that finally closed in 2015. According to Tony DeBlase (former publisher-editor of Drummer magazine and creator of the leather flag in 1989) one of the first bars opened in Los Angeles in the mid-fifties, but by 1957 they also existed in New York and Chicago.Īrgos advertisements, left: 1959 for the hotel and That was just after the first specifically gay motorcycle clubs were founded. In the mid 1950's the first ones were opened. The best and easiest places for leathermen to meet each other were and are of course the leather bars all around the world.