Gay bars mississippi
Greggor Mattson
I knew it was a lengthy shot that the Under-the-Hill Saloon in Natchez, Mississippi would be a same-sex attracted bar. It’s been listed in Damron’s since at least 2007, but there’s 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 1980s. A historical market quotes a riverboat captain’s 1833 description:
The lower town of Natchez has got a worse nature 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 same-sex attracted 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.
The saloon’s interior does a good job of looking like it’
Lastspring,Pat "PJ" Newton applied for a local business license to expose a bar and cafe in Shannon, Miss., two hours away from her Memphis, Tenn., place.
A few weeks later, at the mayor's request, 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 near Shannon and ran a bar there assist 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 nice gesture from everyone in that whole room." A man in the back stood and held up a petition signed by nearly 200 residents. "We don't crave 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., where she hopes to open a gay bar.
Mississippi is the poorest state in America. Shannon, populat
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Small Town Gay Bar, 2006, directed by Malcolm Imgram
Co-Founder’s Note: Hello again! I know, I know what you’re thinking: We didn’t have a Party Out Of Bounds post last week. Well, nagging nelly, we were all on vacation…or a bender…whichever you’d like to call it! Anyway, we’re 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 idea we would take a different approach and seek our faithful contributor Osman to take a glance at rural nightlife through the film Small Town Gay Bar. So grab a Bud and read 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 2006 documentary about two gay bars in deep deep Mississippi serves as a reminder of how not every dish is served with the same ease and hospitality to everyone’s plates.
Rumors in Shannon, Mississippi, the first of these tw
In 2006, Malcolm Ingram’s award-winning documentary Small Town Gay Bar (Frameline30) explored lgbtq+ 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 queer bar in Mississippi, with a profile of lesbian lock 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, determine separately to grip their cities’ first Pride celebrations in 2017, 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 gender nonconforming women shortly after the 2017 inauguration. Just Us Lounge restored their group after Hurricane Katrina leveled Biloxi and nearly destroyed the bar. Can they and Club Xclusive organize a Event even