It’s interesting that these matchbooks can represent, in this way, loci both of freedom claimed outside the square world, but also an unfortunate breed of inter-underground repression.Ī third factor in the shrinking number of gay bars in L.A.
Personally, I like for anybody who wants to be involved to be involved.” Jonesy is pleased that anyone who identifies as male - trans men, for example - are now more welcome at gay bars than they were in the past. “I’m not one of them,” Jonesy says, “but a lot of gay men my age and a generation older like to talk about the days of male-only spaces and what that meant to them. It also can be argued that the ongoing expansion of just what queerness can mean could have made a segment of gay bars, which thrived in a sort of self-identified exclusivity, obsolete. The closing of many east-side gay bars can be blamed, in part, on gentrification’s effect on rents. The Eagle is my regular bar, and I’m thrilled to have it.” But I don’t want to completely dog what we have left. You have three bars on the east side that people go to: the Eagle, Akbar, and the Faultline. It’s lost some of the freakishness and the weirdos, which I miss. Now things are much more concentrated and assimilated. You would make the rounds rather than just go to one place. in the early ’90s, there were more than a dozen on the east side.
“As Silver Lake - and the whole landscape of gay Hollywood and the east side - changed so much I always had this idea in my head of turning the place back into Cuffs for one night,” he says. Jonesy, along with a group of artistic collaborators, threw a party last summer that re-created Cuffs in the same space it once inhabited, now home to the Hyperion Tavern. Working there was a real challenge,” he says with a laugh, “especially when you were trying to clean up using a tiny penlight.” “Bar service stopped at 2 but they kept it open until 3 and the lights went out for that final hour. (One Archives at the USC Libraries)Ĭuffs “was incredibly dark and super cruisey,” Jonesy recalls.