'Because they felt safe': A glimpse into the history of Pittsburgh’s gay bar scene

By Allie Miller / For the Post-Gazette

Though gay bars have existed in America since the late 1800s, the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village made them much more visible.

Many were owned by straight people — except in Pittsburgh.

Nearly every single one here was owned by someone in the LGBTQ+ community, according to Chuck Honse, 73, co-owner of The Holiday Bar in Oakland until it closed in 2007.

While helping put together a Gay Rights Ordinance for Pittsburgh in the 1980s, Honse traveled across the state seeking support from bar owners.

“I took a trip to Philadelphia and Harrisburg to talk to other gay bar owners about putting up signs for this political vote to try to get this ordinance statewide,” he said. “Almost every bar owner that I ran into in those cities, and every other city that I’d ever been in the country, were straight. The bars in our country were not run by us, by and large.”

In the early 1980s, about a dozen of Pittsburgh’s gay bar and bathhouse owners formed an association, the Tavern Guild, under leadership of the late Chuck Tierney. The group’s original purpose was to discuss issues ranging from police raids to what glassware to buy, said Honse, one of its last living original members.

As time went on, the Pittsburgh Tavern Guild gained political power, Honse said. It began hosting fundraisers for a slew of causes, especially HIV research and aid. In 1985, the Frank Borelli AIDS Fund was established. By 1998, over $93,843 had been raised for and distributed to people living with AIDS and their families, and for AIDS education and prevention efforts.

The AIDS crisis

The advent of the AIDS crisis in 1981 became a reason to both gather in and avoid the city’s gay bars as the disease became more and more prevalent. People were terrified of contracting it, while others used it to fuel homophobia.

“That was another reason to hate gay people,” Honse said. “The college kids would say things like, ‘You're causing AIDS,’ and things like that, as they would try to beat us up or flatten tires. Actually, the early ’80s were probably the toughest in my life.”

The 1980s and the ’90s were a time of loss, tragedy and uncertainty for the LGBTQ+ community. Yet Pittsburgh’s gay bars often served as a beacon of hope and a place of community.

One rallying point was the Pitt Men’s Study, which began in 1984. Its founder and principal investigator, Charles Rinaldo, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh, utilized the Tavern Guild to find gay men willing to participate in the HIV/AIDS research study.

The study’s researchers became known as “vampires” since they would often take blood right there in the bars from customers who agreed to participate in the study.

“The vampires have arrived,” the bar owners and patrons would say.

“We set them up in the basement at The Holiday and we would coax our friends and good customers to get down there and give their blood,” Honse said.

One of his longtime customers, widely known as Uncle Bill, recruited many other gay men to participate. Sometimes, when someone would come back up from the basement with a Band-Aid on their arm, Uncle Bill would buy them a beer as a reward.

Gay bars seemed an obvious place to recruit study participants since they were “a centerpiece” of the queer community, Rinaldo said. As nurses and technicians took blood from arms stretched out over pool tables late in the night, the Pitt Men’s Study began to build momentum.

“I can still remember in the evening in one of the bars ... where we all came together with the owners of the time and we listened to them and their concerns and presented to them our ideas about what we could do,” Rinaldo said. “Because we saw this, quite frankly, as an obvious way in which we could recruit men into our study.”

In the first year of recruiting in the bars, around 1,000 bar patrons agreed to participate, he said. Forty years later, the Pitt Men’s Study is one of the longest running HIV/AIDS studies in the U.S. today.

Scott Noxon, 64, former owner of Pegasus in Downtown and The Eagle on the North Side, said he has watched 100 of his friends die of AIDS.

Lesbians were among the strongest supporters of those with HIV, said Noxon, a former member of the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force.

“The lesbians are the ones that are standing up for everybody while you were burying your friend, your cousin, your lover,” he said. “The lesbians have the wherewithal and some of the money to come up with things to take over what the men weren't doing.... It was terrifying.”

Nancy Pribich, 78, owner of The Real Luck Cafe in the Strip District since 1989, was one of those who helped. In one year alone, she said she traveled to 25 funerals across the U.S. for men she knew who died of AIDS.

“Many times people that were sick, or we heard of them being sick, the bar helped. We helped quite a few people,” she said.

‘Hidden in plain sight’

Over the years, Honse and Tierney have co-owned a handful of gay bars spanning the city, including The Holiday Bar, New York, New York and Images. Though people knew they were gay bars, it wasn’t obvious to passersby.

“Gay bars at that time had to be kind of hidden in plain sight, no big signs. You’ll see there’s just a small sign above the door, it says ‘Holiday,’” Honse said.

The building “was bricked up when we bought it, and that was to keep people from throwing bricks through the window because it was a gay bar. That’s the way things were in the ’70s and into the ’80s.”

At the time, dance floors in gay bars and nightclubs were usually located on the second floor, Honse said, because the Liquor Control Board or police would sometimes raid the facilities. That location gave queer clientele a few minutes’ warning to stop dancing before they were arrested, he said.

But when the police were needed due to violence stemming from homophobia, Honse said they were no help.

“There were lots of college boys that came down there and gave us trouble all the time. I can’t tell you how many times we had to fist fight out in the streets, and of course, the police did nothing to help us,” he said.

“They would come and maybe take a report, but nothing ever came of it.”

Noxon said The Eagle, which closed in 2012, was a destination when the gay bar business was at its peak. Though the building had a maximum capacity of 1,200, it once had 1,417 people inside, with some hanging out of the fire escape. He bought eight parking lots to ensure his clientele had places to park.

Noxon said The Eagle was a “basement bar,” the kind of place every city had.

“That’s where they hide all the gays and, well, this was that.”

The fall of gay bars

Though gay bars were harder to spot in Pittsburgh 40 years ago, far more existed then than now. The city and suburbs once supported dozens of gay bars but now there are no more than 10. And Pittsburgh is not alone. As of 2023, there were 45% fewer gay bars in the U.S. than in 2022, according to The Washington Post.

Reasons cited for the decline include the introduction of dating apps like Tinder and Grindr, increased anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in some places and less social acceptance of queerness in others.

Pittsburgh gay bar owners who have watched their own businesses shutter over the decades say the rising popularity of dating apps is a chief reason. Noxon blames the internet for the closing of The Eagle, which had seven or eight bartenders a night plus security guards.

“Eventually, it was the internet that killed that bar,” he said. “The people started staying at home, and they could hook up online. But we needed so many people to break even.”

“It went down, and now all the other bars are slowly going down,” Noxon said. “They’re getting hit by these apps on the phone that says, ‘Oh, look, this hot one’s like 500 feet away from you,’ and you’re looking all around the bar for them.”

Honse also said the rise of social media was a “death knell” for gay bars.

“It’s a matter of supply and demand. There's not enough clientele, and that’s why there are less…. You fight for the rights for gays and lesbians to go where they want to, they will. And there’ll be less need for your business,” he said.

Another reason gay bars have closed is that the gay community is finding more acceptance at straight bars, Pribich said. Yet there is still a need for gay bars, she said. 

“I still think that to a degree, we’re still not 100% accepted in straight bars.... I think there’s a lot that likes us or this and that, but I also think there’s still a bit of prejudice that’s out there with gay people,” Pribich said.

Despite Honse’s struggles and seeing his bars and others like them close, he takes pride in the role of gay bars in Pittsburgh’s LGBTQ+ community.

“People came to gay bars because they felt safe. I wasn’t out there fighting in the streets just for myself. I was trying to keep my business safe.

“I had to protect my business.”

Allie Miller ([email protected]) is a freelance journalist living in New Stanton.