For decades, East Broadway was more than a collection of gay bars. It was where queer Long Beach found community, organized, mourned, fought back and built a neighborhood of its own. As those spaces change, I think understanding what they gave us matters to whatever we decide to build next.
Walk down East Broadway today and you might not immediately realize how much queer history happened here. There are apartments, restaurants, coffee shops, bars and rainbow flags, but for decades these few blocks were one of the centers of queer life in Southern California.
The bars weren’t just bars. They were where people came out, met partners and found chosen family. During the AIDS crisis they became places for fundraisers, organizing and grief, and when anti-gay violence became bad enough, community members eventually organized patrols to help keep people safe on the same streets where they were trying to enjoy a Saturday night.
Before the Gayborhood
To understand why those spaces mattered, you have to remember what came before them. In 1914, undercover operations targeting gay men in Long Beach resulted in the arrests of 31 men on “social vagrancy” charges. Their names appeared in newspapers, and one of the men, prominent banker and Episcopal Church officer John Lamb, died by suicide after his arrest and public exposure.
I’ve written about the Purity Raids before, and I think they’re an important starting point because the Gayborhood didn’t emerge simply because queer people wanted a fun place to go out. For generations, having spaces of our own was also about survival, visibility and finding each other in a city and a country where being openly gay could cost you your job, your family, your reputation or your freedom.
By the 1970s, queer Long Beach was becoming increasingly organized politically as well as socially. The Long Beach Lambda Democratic Club formed in late 1977 in response to the Briggs Initiative, which sought to bar gay and lesbian people from teaching in California public schools. People were creating organizations, businesses and gathering places of their own, and Broadway was becoming one of the places where that community was increasingly visible.
When Broadway Became the Gayborhood
By the 1980s, Broadway had transformed. A 1985 Los Angeles Times story called the area a “Gay Mecca”, reporting that an estimated 25 to 50 percent of businesses along the Broadway strip were gay-owned, roughly 30 percent of nearby residents were estimated to be gay and at least eight gay bars operated along the street.
Paradise became one of the corridor’s anchors, alongside places like Falcon, Mineshaft, Sweet Water, Broadway Bar and The Brit, but queer Long Beach was never limited to Broadway. Silver Fox was founded in 1981 and became one of the city’s longtime gay institutions. Club Ripples opened in 1972 and became an important social and political center for Long Beach’s LGBTQ+ community, while places including Que Sera, Executive Suite, Details and Hamburger Mary’s became part of the city’s queer landscape in different eras.
I think it’s important to say those names even if we can’t tell every story here, because for different generations those places meant something. Paradise. Ripples. Silver Fox. Falcon. Mineshaft. Sweet Water. Broadway Bar. The Brit. Que Sera. Executive Suite. Details. Hamburger Mary’s. Some were places to dance, cruise or get drunk with your friends, but they were also places where people organized, raised money, found friends, built chosen families and sometimes mourned people they had lost.
The dangers outside those spaces were very real. By 1992, volunteers with the Long Beach Teams Project were patrolling a string of gay and lesbian clubs and restaurants along Broadway on Saturday nights, carrying walkie-talkies, whistles and megaphones and coordinating with police in an effort to prevent gay bashings. The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that at least 60 gay people had been beaten in Long Beach since August 1990.
That story gets much deeper than I want to go here, and I think it deserves its own article in this series, because there are people and stories behind those patrols that shouldn’t be reduced to a paragraph. Details hosted the patrol’s first meeting after its owners lost a friend, Kim Labourdette, a 38-year-old bartender at the Silver Fox who had been stabbed to death in July 1990. Attorney and longtime LGBTQ+ activist Stephanie Loftin would later recall the Teams Project working with the Long Beach Police Department, including police using undercover decoys walking Broadway holding hands in an effort to catch people targeting gay men.
There’s a lot more to unpack there, particularly when you compare that story with a police department that decades earlier had used undercover operations to target gay men themselves. That’s exactly the kind of history I want us to explore more deeply as this series continues rather than trying to squeeze every important story into one article.
When the Rooms Started Disappearing
Over time, some of those rooms disappeared. Paradise served its last drink on March 20, 2018, ending nearly four decades at 1800 E. Broadway. The space became Black, a skater-oriented bar catering primarily to a straight clientele, and Club Ripples followed in 2019.
Dating apps changed how we meet, neighborhoods changed, generations changed and rising costs affected businesses everywhere. Queer people also became increasingly comfortable gathering in places that weren’t specifically LGBTQ+, which is progress in its own way. I think all of those things can be true while also acknowledging that something is lost when a queer space disappears.
Sometimes we’re not just losing a business, we’re losing an archive: photographs nobody scanned, stories nobody recorded, the bartender who remembered everybody, the corner where somebody met their partner thirty years ago, or the drag queen whose name everybody knew then and almost nobody remembers now. A lot of queer history was never formally documented because, for a very long time, nobody outside our community seemed particularly interested in preserving it. It lived inside people and inside rooms, and when both disappear, sometimes the history disappears with them.
That’s one reason the work of the Historical Society of Long Beach’s LGBTQ+ collections matters so much. The Historical Society houses more than 20 individual LGBTQ+ collections containing photographs, event programs, flyers, Pride memorabilia, posters, newsletters, newspapers, business cards, oral histories, videos, correspondence and other material documenting nightlife, AIDS activism, political organizing, Pride and queer life in Long Beach.
A lot of the people in those photographs weren’t trying to become history. They were simply living their lives, and preserving those pieces gives the rest of us a chance to understand that the community we have now didn’t appear out of nowhere.
The Gayborhood Is Changing
The Gayborhood hasn’t disappeared either. Silver Fox, Falcon, Mineshaft and Broadway Bar remain part of Long Beach’s queer landscape, while The Hare now operates from 1800 E. Broadway, bringing a queer-focused gathering place back into the former Paradise space. Elsewhere in the city, WERK has brought queer nightlife into the former Executive Suite location on Pacific Coast Highway. The map isn’t the same one it was in 1985, but neither is the way queer people gather.
That’s the part of this history I keep thinking about as we build the Big Gayborhood Gathering and think about the future of Be Proud! Fest. I don’t want to recreate queer Long Beach in 1985, and I don’t think we should romanticize a time when queer people often needed those few blocks because the world outside them wasn’t always safe or welcoming. What I do want to carry forward is the sense of community those spaces created.
We still need places where queer people can find each other, where local artists, performers, businesses and organizations aren’t an afterthought, and where somebody can show up alone and realize there are people here who understand them. I also think we can build some of those spaces differently now, including in parks and other public places where you don’t have to be 21 or buy a drink to participate.
That’s part of what I want the Big Gayborhood Gathering to be, and it’s where I hope Be Proud! Fest continues to go. I don’t want to put a stage at one end of a park, vendors at the other and assume we’ve created community because we called it Pride. I want the community participating in what we build, with local queer artists, businesses and organizations helping create it rather than being decoration around the edges.
Meanwhile, Long Beach is also putting some of this history formally on the map. The City Council adopted the Strategic Improvement Plan for the LGBTQ+ Cultural District on May 21, 2024, and the project has since moved into implementation through Public Works. The first phase is focused on Broadway between Hermosa and Junipero, with improvements intended to recognize the corridor’s LGBTQ+ history and strengthen its identity.
I support preserving that history. I want the public art, historical markers and reminders of the people who made this neighborhood what it is, and I want somebody walking down Broadway fifty years from now to know that queer people built community here. At the same time, I don’t want our queer history beautifully memorialized while the queer businesses, organizations, artists and people who created that history can no longer afford to be there. Preservation can’t only mean remembering what used to exist; it should also mean creating the conditions for queer community to continue existing.
The City didn’t create the Gayborhood by naming it. Queer people created it over decades because they needed somewhere to belong, and they kept rebuilding community as the world around them changed. I don’t think our job now is to recreate their version of queer Long Beach. I think it’s to understand what they built, preserve the stories they left us and then ask ourselves what our community needs next.
The answer might be a bar, a nightclub, a park full of queer families and artists, a picnic or something we haven’t thought of yet. What matters to me is that we don’t assume the work was finished by the generations before us. They built what they needed in their time, and now we have the opportunity, and responsibility, to do the same for ours.
Sources & Further Reading
- Los Angeles Times — “The Long Beach ‘social vagrant’ investigations, 1914.” Archival reporting and historical documents covering the undercover operations, arrests of 31 men and the death of John Lamb.
- Los Angeles Times — “Business Is Booming for Long Beach ‘Gay Mecca'” (Aug. 4, 1985). Contemporary reporting on the growth of the LGBTQ+ community, businesses and nightlife along Broadway.
- Los Angeles Times — “Volunteer Teams Patrol Gay Strip” (Feb. 23, 1992). Contemporary reporting on the Long Beach Teams Project, anti-gay violence, Details and the killing of Silver Fox bartender Kim Labourdette.
- Historical Society of Long Beach — LGBTQ+ Collections and Long Beach LGBT History Project. Archival collections documenting LGBTQ+ nightlife, Pride, AIDS activism, organizations, political activism and community life in Long Beach.
- City of Long Beach — LGBTQ+ Cultural District Strategic Improvement Plan and current project information. Official documentation of the Cultural District visioning process, adoption and implementation.
- Online Archive of California — Long Beach Lambda Democratic Club Records, 1977–1996. Archival history of the organization and its formation in response to the Briggs Initiative.
- Los Angeles Conservancy — Club Ripples. Historical documentation of the longtime LGBTQ+ gathering place and its significance to Long Beach.
- Q Voice News — Paradise Bar & Restaurant closing coverage (2018). Contemporary reporting on Paradise, its history and role in Long Beach’s LGBTQ+ community.
- Q Voice News — Club Ripples closing coverage (2019). Contemporary reporting on the closure and history of the longtime gay dance club.
- Silver Fox Long Beach — About Us. History of the bar and its founding in 1981.
This article was researched and written by Salvador Flores-Trimble, founder of Playalarga. Artificial intelligence tools were used to assist with research organization and grammar editing, while the editorial voice, analysis, and storytelling remain the author’s own.
