The fact that lesbians spend years groveling before men (gay or straight), begging them to open a facility that will ultimately make money for them off of women-well, that just shows that it isn't just a few insensitive or "sexist" beliefs that need to be changed. Maybe Wisely finds this an inspiring story I find it maddening. Thanks in part to the work of Kathy Jack and others like her, Sue Ellen's thrived and Caven Enterprises' employment practices changed considerably. Finally, they relented but delayed more than another whole year before Sue Ellen's opened. Jack never gave up and continued to suggest a women's bar to her bosses at every opportunity. When the Old Plantation changed into the Village Station and began to stay open until four in the morning on weekends for after-hours dancing, a large contingency of lesbians showed up from other bars. In spite of the many lesbian-focused bars that have thrived over the years in Dallas, no one at Caven thought such a place could succeed. She won them over eventually, but at first, the work environment was somewhat hostile.Ĭaven Enterprises, Dallas' largest owner of gay bars and clubs, formed in 1969 and has operated numerous nightclubs in the area since then, opened their first lesbian bar, Sue Ellen's, only in January of 1989 after years of lobbying by Kathy Jack. Even then, she recalled that on her first day as manager, the staff, made up entirely of men except for a single female bartender, called her "dyke" under their breath every time she walked past. Two months later, she was a manager there.
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Finally, the general manager took a chance and hired her as a door person for the Old Plantation. Caven Enterprises, who owned four gay bars, the Old Plantation, Throckmorton Mining Company, J. Yet, when The Unicorn closed and she needed a job, she encountered difficulties because she was female. She managed a lesbian bar called The Unicorn very successfully for four years. Kathy Jack, proprietor of Jack's Backyard in Oak Cliff and for the first sixteen years of its existence the manager of Sue Ellen's in Dallas, has worked in gay bars since the early 1980s.
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Jack also experienced anti-lesbian employment policies at the largely male clubs, which were dominated by a single conglomerate.
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Wisely's source for this information is largely drawn from her interview with Karen Jack, who has an extensive history working in gay and lesbian bars in Dallas. It was also common for sex (and race) segregation to be maintained by demanding extra identification from those deemed undesirable by the bar management. Dress codes, when applied equally to all customers, were legal and perfectly reasonable however, the same bars that refused jeans-wearing women allowed men clad in blue jeans with no difficulty whatsoever. This policy was not only discriminatory against all women, but was obviously focused on lesbians - and butch lesbians in particular - who were much more likely than heterosexual women to go out attired in jeans. In 1979, for example, several bars including the Old Plantation, Throckmorton Mining Company and Magnolia's, prohibited admission to women wearing jeans. When a bar decided that it wanted to focus on serving one particular gender (usually men), it most often issued a restrictive dress policy. Throckmorton Mining Company - a gay male bar But then the bars became increasingly segregated by sex. Wisely also tells us that the gay bars in Dallas were patronized by both gay men and lesbians till the 1970s-though, admittedly, the bars were dominated by gay men. Other lesbian bars that had the flashing red light thing include the Sea Colony in New York and the Canyon Club in Los Angeles. Another method of police harassment in gay bars was for the vice squad to conduct sting operations however, those were more common in the men's bars. For example, the door person for The Conference Room, a lesbian bar where businesswomen met after work, turned on a red light whenever she saw police or just someone who looked out of place near the bar. When that happened, the patrons inside would stop dancing, move away from each other and the underage crowd would sneak out a bathroom window. Police raids occurred regularly in the Dallas bars, just like in other cities, and the bars dealt with the inevitability of those events. While bars that catered to primarily homosexual patrons were able to exist in Dallas at that time, one should not assume that such a practice was widely accepted. Here's what she says about The Conference Room: Wisely called "The 'Dallas Way' in the Gayborhood" has some pretty fascinating material.įor our purposes though, I'm going to limit our discussion to a lesbian bar called The Conference Room and the gender segregation/control of space within the so-called LGBT community. Although "interesting" and "masters thesis" would seem to be a contradiction in terms, this thesis by Karen S.