Gay bar san antonio military

Mixon revisits gay bars, community formation, racial dynamics, policing practices, cultural representations, and military suasion to highlight the ongoing need for further exploration and study of historic gay spaces across Texas. Gay remembered back to my coming-out days in San Antonio, Texas, in the early s and realized that I had lived long enough and been out military enough to be historic.

I never expected to come across photos of gay bars in pre-Stonewall San Antonio or a short story Weathers had written about her time in them. But as seasoned researchers already know and novices quickly learn, the archive is full of such surprises. Structurally, I begin with a brief history of San Antonio to situate us in place before analyzing how Weathers narrativizes her experience in the city in her self-published short story "Cheers Everybody!

I develop the bar sketches primarily through my interview with Weathers—with occasional references to how she fictionalizes them in "Cheers"—and the archival photos from ONE. In other words, although attentive to patron activities, demographics, and police encounters, the bar sketches investigate how these histories influenced the creation of gay space, which racialized subjects had access to gay space, and how that space was racialized or imbued with ideas about race as a consequence.

The origins of San Antonio's two nicknames—Alamo City and Military City, USA—lie in the city's history bar a contested colonial space and as home to one of the largest concentrations of military bases in the United States. After its independence from Spain, the newly established Mexican government began offering free land grants to Anglo-American settlers, who primarily took up residence in lands northeast of San Antonio.

Sparked by the Battle of Gonzales on October 2,the Texas Revolution resulted from decades of rising tensions between Tejas residents and the Antonio government, ranging from the Mexican state's abolishment of slavery in to its prohibition of new Anglo settlers in As the EUM sorted out its leadership and organizational structure, it failed to exert strong control and governance from Mexico City over the distant San.

"Out long enough to be historic": Racialized Gay Space in Pre-Stonewall San Antonio

Thus, the Mexican government's gradual steps towards bar slavery in —which, in the eyes of many Anglo settlers, reneged on Iturbide's promise to let them practice chattel slavery in Tejas—and the prohibition of new Anglo settlers in the Law of April 6, —which was precipitated by fears that the United States would annex Tejas and resulted in Mexican officials and troops being dispatched to enforce Mexican law in the province—encroached on the rights and privileges that settlers had grown accustomed to.

The presidential gay of Santa Anna only exacerbated these issues, as he threw out the Constitution ofmilitary allowed him to centralize control of the government by eradicating provincial or state governments, and also imprisoned Stephen F. Austin, the first empresario of Tejas and primary Texian representative, for a year.

But San Antonio remained a contested colonial space for decades after the Texas Revolution. Although contemporary San Antonio's diversified economy financial services, health care, energy, oil, and gas attracts international and domestic job seekers, recently earning San Antonio the title of fastest bar city in the United States, population growth in recent decades pales in comparison to the boom between andwhen the city's population more than doubled, rising fromto , as a consequence of mass military mobilizations during WWII and a growing military job sector.

Halperin New York: Routledge,— Post-WWII suburbanization, which caused property prices in urban cores to plummet, making it easier to purchase real estate and open gay bars and nightclubs, as well as the founding of homophile civil rights organizations, such as the Mattachine Society — and the Daughters antonio Bilitis —whose respective gay, the Mattachine Review — and the Ladder —reached readers across the United States, enabled the growth of gay and lesbian neighborhoods, reading publics, and social networks.

In San Antonio specifically, gay and lesbian culture "grew dramatically in the s and s," writes Amy L. Antonio"and built upon a tradition of local nightclubs that had attracted female impersonators. Products of the May Actwhich gave military police the authority to surveil and restrict access to places associated with prostitution and homosexuality, these "off-limits" lists, composed and released by military officials, conversely resulted in giving gay bars more publicity and patronage.

If discovered in such venues, military personnel faced certain punishment, if not discharge. A native white Texan and self-identified lesbian born inCarolyn Weathers entered the San Antonio gay scene in her early twenties, at a time of increased scrutiny and persecution as a consequence of "antigay laws, the medicalization of homosexuality, military panics about homosexuality as contagion, and anti-Communist organizing against homosexuality.

Born in the central Texas town of Eastland to a san Baptist family, Weathers spent her early childhood in Cleburne before moving to Brownfield in the Panhandle. The second daughter of an educator, Alida Nabors Weathers, and a Baptist preacher, Jones Weathers, Carolyn followed the geographical trajectory of san only sibling and older sister by two and a half years, Brenda, moving to Dallas, San Antonio, and ultimately Southern California.

Kicked out of Texas Women's University in Denton for "lesbianism" in at the age of seventeen, Brenda introduced her sister to the queer worlds that she discovered in Dallas and San Antonio of the late fifties and early sixties. Carolyn came out in while living with Brenda in San Antonio.

Carolyn also contributed to the Women in Print Movementcreating Clothespin Fever Press in the mid-eighties with her partner at the time, Jenny Wrenn.