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There definitely has been this split in the gay community and the queer community about how to press for equality.
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Talk about the multiple fronts of the movement. I realized that, earlier, there must have been this time of happiness and optimism and excitement that I needed to know more about. To some extent, we had forgotten about the 1970s because, in the 1980s, everyone was consumed with trying to stay alive and stay healthy and to nurse their friends and to watch them die. When I dug deeper, I realized that there are major pieces of queer history that have been overlooked. This nightclub was open for nearly 10 years, just between the Stonewall uprising and the dawn of the AIDS epidemic. But Sweet Gum’s story is also a way to track the development of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement in Atlanta. When I started to read stories about it, they were all focused on the drag shows-and Atlanta is known for drag. I had no idea that it had existed because it closed in 1981. It was in a space that was right next door to where I lived. I thought I knew and had been to just about every gay bar in the city. I started rereading material, and I came across this nightclub called the Sweet Gum Head. The gay community had all these bars on Cheshire Bridge Road and all this history, and I really didn’t know anything about it. It’s always been a place where you could buy alcohol when other counties were dry, where you could go to a gay bar, a strip club, then have some fried chicken at the Colonnade.Įventually, I started focusing on what was immediately outside of my door. It’s that transition place between Buckhead and Morningside and Emory that I always kind of thought of as the gutter-in a loving way. I have lived within about a mile or two of Cheshire Bridge Road since 1997, and I started to look around for story ideas. Along the way, the Cheshire Bridge Road nightclub itself (named after the Florida hometown of owner Frank Powell) emerges as a symbol of the South’s heady gay reverie and revolution, capturing the essence of a fleeting era bracketed by the Stonewall uprising and the AIDS epidemic. Norton, journalist Martin Padgett sutures this context into the accounts of two main subjects: Bill Smith, who helped lead the Georgia Gay Liberation Front, worked as a city commissioner, and published the South’s leading gay newspaper, the Barb and John Greenwell, who rose to drag stardom performing as Rachel Wells at the Sweet Gum Head nightclub. In A Night at the Sweet Gum Head, released this month by W.W. The antipathy lingered throughout the decade, though the city’s changing demographics shifted political weight in favor of Maynard Jackson, who had become not only the city’s first Black mayor but a determined ally to the gay community.
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In 1970s Atlanta, there was wide disdain and police harassment toward the LGBTQ+ community-even as the city was growing more tolerant off of civil rights–era fumes.