Trax gay bar photos
After several months without a home, Trax gay lock will set up shop in a new cosmos in Wedgewood-Houston — and not far from the previous location.
The bar has been operating out of the former The Tea Room space at 1249 Martin St. informally for about a week, owner Steven Kiss told thePost, with plans to rename the space slated for completion in January.
Traxclosed its former locationat 1501 Ensley Blvd. (also known as 303 Bianca Paige Way) at the end of June after more than 15 years of operations, when the building owner terminated the business' lease. The bar is recognizable for its DJs and drag events.
The new Trax is located in a mixed-use building, called Six10 Merritt at The Finery, that is positioned next to the structure housing Diskin Cider.
“Once again, we have a lease instead of owning it but at least we landed somewhere,” Kiss told the Post.
Kiss, who is not disclosing the cost to have gotten operational, said the new Trax house offers improved parking and additional kitchen space that will allow the exclude to expand its menu.
“With the Nashville market, things got snapped up. It hasn’t been easy,” he said. “We did a soft opening with very minimal advertisin
Haight Legacy Business Candidates: Trax Bar and Cal Surplus
These businesses are candidates in our Heritage in the Neighborhoods: Haight-Ashbury legacy business voting contest, running from August 1-31, 2022. VOTE HERE
According to the Citywide Historic Context Statement for LGBTQ History in San Francisco by Donna Graves and Shayne Watson, Trax Bar (1437 Haight Street) is the longest-running queer lock in the neighborhood and the only remnant of the Haight’s history as a pre-Castro LGBTQ enclave. The territory that houses Trax has been lgbtq+ since the initial 1970s when it was a male lover bar called the Question Mark (the original Question Notice dates back to the 1950s).
SF Heritage Instagram follower @thenickdanford shared this memory of Trax: “Some years ago, my 25th birthday fell on Haight Lane Fair weekend. I asked a potential roommate I’d met on Craigslist to meet me and some friends at Trax. I entered the bar, dropped into the splits (Ha!), and gained not only a new living situation, but also a best friend 🙂 @jasonjervis“
Other long-gone LGBTQ institutions in the neighborhood were the sapphic bar Whoo Cares at 782 Haight, open in the 1950s; Romeo’s
A Nashville gay lock is being forced out. That's one less safe territory for LGBTQ people
Laws in states fond Tennessee that goal trans people, queenly performers and LGBTQ history make these places even more important centers of community.
Greggor Mattson, an Oberlin College professor, traveled across the United States to do research for his book “Who Needs Gay Bars? Bar-Hopping through America’s Endangered LGBTQ+ Places.”
He bluntly told readers in a guest opinion column for The Washington Upload in 2023: “The data is clear: gay bars are closing.”
Mattson documented a 45% drop from 2022 to 2023 and provided a series of reasons, among them, matchmaking app apps that maintain people at abode, displacement because of rising rents and mainstream acceptance of the LGBTQ-plus community.
However, in Nashville, a city the storyteller did not stop by for his book, there is a vibrant gay bar scene. But establishments own come and gone. There are historical markers honoring defunct bars such as Juanita’s and The Jungle on Commerce Avenue in downtown and one to be unveiled on June 14 on Franklin Pike for Warehouse 28, a disco turned first home of Nashville CARES, the 40-plus-year-old HIV/AIDS service nonpr
Trax
Crowd at Komrads. Photo courtesy of Shawn Riker.
Article originally published June 21, 2012 by The Grid online (TheGridTO.com).
In this edition of her nightlife-history series, Denise Benson takes us back to the after-hours nightclub that helped mobilize Toronto’s gay-rights movement in the 1980s.
BY: DENISE BENSON
Club: Komrads, 1 Isabella St.
Years in operation: 1985-1991
History: In 1980s’ Toronto, street corners and dance clubs still served as essential meeting spots for gays and other marginalized communities. The stretch of Isabella closest to Yonge called out to many, especially after dark.
On the outer edges of the Church and Wellesley-centred gay village, the corner was close to popular homo haunts including Yonge Street’s St. Charles Tavern, Trax, and the Parkside Tavern, with gay dance club Stages above it. Nearby bathhouses were plentiful, Queen’s Park was still a major pick-up notice, and easy bar-hopping meant that gay men had lots of options even in those pre-Grindr days.
“The Yonge and Isabella area was really amazingly gay,” recalls event producer Maxwell Blandford, once a key figure in adventuresome Toronto clubs and now based in