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Show 147 settings." The Crystal and Radio City did not function as gay bars contemporaneously. Rather, each in turn bore the distinction of being "the only gay bar in town"--the Crystal did so for most of the 1950s, while Radio City enjoyed its heyday in the 1960s. Situated on opposite sides of State Street, the bars shared territory with a smattering of clothing merchants, barber shops, furniture stores, deteriorating theaters and, until 1960, the Public Safety Building housing the police department." The presence of gay bars in the heart of the financial district and within three blocks of the LDS Church's sacred bastion, Temple Square, seems anomalous today, when most of the city's gay establishments are more peripherally located. However, suburbanization and cultural blinders allowed the Crystal and Radio City to remain inconspicuous, and "blending in" governed the bars' physical appearance and the deportment of their patrons. In his study of gay bars in Denver, Thomas Noel describes how a desire for anonymity governed the bars' location and design: Within the urban ecology, gay bars are almost invisible to nonhomosexuals. As a rule they are nondescript, diminutive structures hidden in the inner city, where they are secreted in alleys, buried in basements, tucked into comers, or stored in upstairs rooms separated from the street by dark, steep, inconspicuous stairwells." Although Salt Lake's gay bars evolved from existing bars on street-level sites that seemed to favor visibility over anonymity, their narrow, unadorned facades did little to announce 6polk's Salt Lake City Directory; Branson, Thompson interviews; Craig Mitchell [pseud], interview by author, Tape recording, Salt Lake City, 9 January 2005. 7polk's Salt Lake City Directory. "Ihomas Jacob Noel, "Gay Bars and the Emergence of the Denver Homosexual Community," Social Science Joumal15, no. 2 (April 1978): 67. |
