Gay bars in mississippi
Lastspring,Pat "PJ" Newton applied for a local business license to open a bar and cafe in Shannon, Miss., two hours away from her Memphis, Tenn., home.
A scant weeks later, at the mayor's petition, she attended a meeting at the Shannon town hall. As she arrived, she noticed the parking lot was full. Latecomers had parked on the street. Newton, 55, grew up adjacent Shannon and ran a bar there back in the '90s. She'd been by the town hall many times. She had never seen so many cars parked there.
Inside, she was met by a contingent of 30 or so townspeople. The crowd was "stone-faced," she recalled. "There was not one smile or gentle gesture from everyone in that whole room." A gentleman in the back stood and held up a petition signed by nearly residents. "We don't want another bar here in the town," Newton remembers him saying. The petition declared that the bar would offer "no benefits or enhancements to the citizens of the Town of Shannon." At the end of the meeting, the town's aldermen voted 4 to 1 to reject Newton's application.
PJ Newton stands on the site in Shannon, Miss., wher I knew it was a adj shot that the Under-the-Hill Saloon in Natchez, Mississippi would be a gay bar. Its been listed in Damrons since at least , but theres nothing on the internet to corroborate: none of its effusive Yelp reviews mention anything remotely queer. The town is a regional tourist destination chock-full of beds and breakfast in Antebellum mansions built when Natchez was the cotton-and-slavery capital of the middle Mississippi. The bar is part of Under-the-Hill, the rough section of town from the steamboat era that was revitalized in the late s. A historical market quotes a riverboat captains description: The bring down town of Natchez has got a worse character than any place on the river; every house seemed to be a grog shop, and I saw ill-favored men and women looking from the windows. Here the most desperate characters congregate There are no signs that this is a gay bar. The almost-rainbow windsocks belong to the gift shop next door. The Harleys out front are driven by men in sleeveless Affliction t-shirts who dip snuff. T Small Town Gay Bar, , directed by Malcolm Imgram Co-Founders Note: Hello again! I know, I verb what youre thinking: We didnt include a Party Out Of Bounds share last week. Good, nagging nelly, we were all on vacationor a benderwhichever youd like to call it! Anyway, were back now, ready and revitalized for our weekly nightlife madness. Since our last few posts have featured quite a bit of New York nighttime history, we thought we would seize a different approach and ask our faithful contributor Osman to take a look at rural nightlife through the film Small Town Gay Bar. So grab a Bud and study forward, intrepid readers: Needless to say, the city makes us people spoiled. The abundance of possibilities and limitlessness of the outreach perpetuate a lifestyle centered around endless shuffling and seeking the ‘newer’, ‘the prettier’ or simply ‘the better’. Small Town Gay Bar, Malcolm Imgram’s documentary about two gay bars in deep serious Mississippi serves as a reminder of how not every dish is served with the matching ease and hospitality to everyone’s In , Malcolm Ingram’s award-winning documentary Small Town Gay Bar (Frameline30) explored gay bars in rural Mississippi. Gay bars are often the only safe communities for small-town LGBTQ people in the Deep South’s Bible Belt, and bigoted forces—Fred Phelps, Tim Wildmon, and more—have long tried to shut them down. Now, after the election of Donald Trump has emboldened anti-LGBTQ hatred in the region, Ingram returns to document the travails of running a gay bar in Mississippi, with a profile of lesbian bar owners in Biloxi and Hattiesburg. Lynn Koval, the white owner of Just Us Lounge, the oldest gay bar in the state, and Shawn Perryon, Sr., the black owner of the nine-year-old Club Xclusive, settle separately to clutch their cities’ first Pride celebrations in , as a rebuke to the “open-season” mentality encouraged by Trump, as well as to Mississippi’s Religious Liberty Accommodations Act, the Pulse nightclub terrorist attack, and the murders of three Gulf Coast transgender women shortly after the inauguration. Just Us Lounge restored their community after Hurricane Katrina levele
Greggor Mattson
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