Despite closing its doors in March, the club appears to have adapted quickly.
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It’s a one-stop-shop for a full night’s worth of entertainment.Īccording to the venue’s Facebook page, the shutdown has forced Club Cafe to close for the first time in its 37 years (representatives were contacted, but could not be reached for comment on this story). The club plays host to drag brunches, lounge singers, LGBTQ+ fundraisers, techno dance parties, trivia nights, and every kind of drag show imaginable. It’s piano bar, the Napoleon Room, is a homage to long-gone Boston gay bar and speakeasy, the Napoleon Lounge. It’s also a fully-functioning restaurant, a nightclub, and a cabaret. While many Gen Xers and Millennials have probably never heard of the Metropolitan Health Club, Club Cafe grew from what the article describes as a “small, annexed afterthought” into an 8,000 square-foot multi-purpose venue which remains the beating heart of Boston’s LGBTQ+ community. The investment worked, and by the mid-1980s the investors split the business between the downstairs health club and the upstairs Club Cafe. In an interview with Boston Spirit in 2013, owner and founder Frank Ribaudo said he and three other investors were inspired to open a gay-friendly gym because of the harassment and discrimination such clientele faced at a nearby Back Bay Racquet Club (Club Cafe is located between the affluent Back Bay and the South End neighborhood, which in the 1980s was a decidedly more seedy gay enclave). All bear the imprints of Boston’s LGBTQ+ history.Ĭlub Cafe began in 1983 as the Metropolitan Health Club. None appear so far to be in imminent threat because of the shutdown, although for one, the story’s a little more complicated. Two of these have survived previous social upheaval and public health crises. All have been mainstays of the LGBTQ+ community for over twenty years (one for significantly longer than that). To learn more about the impact of the shutdown on local LGBTQ+ venues, I took a closer look at three of Boston’s longest-running and most-loved queer institutions. While the shutdown affects all businesses, the dwindling number of LGBTQ+ establishments makes them particularly vulnerable. Now, what stalwarts of the LGBTQ+ community remain are facing another obstacle: the coronavirus shutdown.
At around the same time the LGBTQ+ rights’ movement was gaining steam in the 2000s, many of the city’s gay bars either closed completely or morphed into non-queer specific establishments. People of all sexualities tend to congregate freely in shared space. In my adopted hometown, Boston, the distinction between “gay” and “straight” social gathering venues is slippery. But the gradual induction of LGBTQ+ rights and the social acceptance queer folk have gained have subsequently diminished the need for the traditional “gay” social space. On one hand, LGBTQ+ bars, clubs, and venues have provided a vital safe space for marginalized groups to congregate and affirm their existence on both a personal and political level. In recent years, the purpose of queer-specific establishments has been juxtaposed between the historic need for such spaces and the push to integrate.