PORTLAND, Maine — The August 1976 edition of the Maine Gay Task Force Newsletter sported some outrageous, over-the-top and campy headlines.
“Free dope on pinballs,” read one. “Poop on Pope Paul,” read another.
The biggest, and fanciest hand-drawn headline on the photocopied publication’s front page shouted, “Exclusive discovery of long-lost historical nude centerfold of Frederick the Great.”
In contrast, the scant ads inside the paper are all low-key and understated, such as one for Sybil’s, a lesbian bar then on Middle Street. Its simple text only ad reads: “A comfortable reality for gay people.”
That’s it.
The ads are just what Megan MacGregor was looking for when she spent months of her COVID-19 lockdown combing the LGBTQ+ archives at the University of Southern Maine for information about Portland’s historic — but long-gone — gay bars.
In all, MacGregor was able to confirm the existence of 17 historic gay bars. As part of June Pride Month, she will lead a virtual multimedia tour of the culturally significant and historically important locations on Thursday, June 22.
She’s calling the event the Big Queer Historical Bar Tour.
“There were a lot of them, especially for a city the size of Portland. It was surprising,” said MacGregor.
MacGregor is a queer historian and librarian at the Glickman Family Library on the Portland Campus of the University of Southern Maine, where the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Collection is housed. The collection is part of the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine.
The collection’s manuscript hoard dates from the early 1970s to the present and includes a series of 42 newspapers by LGBTQ+-related community groups and publishers around the state. It also includes oral histories and photographs.
MacGregor, a lesbian, moved to Maine from Pennsylvania just before the pandemic got underway. One of the reasons she said came north was for Maine’s greater uniform LGBTQ+ legal protections.
“In Pennsylvania, some of it is still county-by-county,” she said.
But Maine went into lockdown soon after MacGregor arrived. To pass the time and get to know her new state better, she dived into her library’s archive, much of which has been digitized and is available online.
“I was digging, and digging, and digging,” she said. “It was a good time to do that.”
MacGregor gave an in-person, on-foot tour of the gay bar locations last October. The online tour she will present this month will not just show buildings where bars used to be but will also incorporate historic photographs and audio from the LGBTQ+ archive’s oral history component.
One of the bars MacGregor identified comes from one such oral history.
“It was called Avies,” she said. “And that’s the only evidence we have that it existed somewhere.”
Besides the Maine Gay Task Force Newsletter, other papers in the collection include the much more serious Our Paper, which began publishing in the early 1980s, as well as the Community Pride Reporter and Mainely Gay.
Though MacGregor found 17 separate gay bars, they did not all exist at the same time. Several opened and closed in succession at the same location.
An ad for the bar Entre Nous appeared in the June 1986 issue of Our Paper. It read, in part, “Owned, operated and staffed by women,” and “We’ve come a long way, baby!!!”
Along with the text, two hand-drawn women with short hair smile at each other.
Entre Nous operated at 117 Spring St., where several other LGBTQ+ bars, including the Spring Street Gym, The Chart Room and the similarly named Somewhere, Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Somewhere Else, all operated.
Flask Lounge occupies the space now.
Farther down Spring Street, Styxx, The Underground, Limelight and Rumors — all LGBTQ+ dance clubs — each occupied the same space, in succession.
Presently, Blackstone’s on Pine Street is Portland’s only explicitly gay bar.
MacGregor sees that as progress — where the LGBTQ+ community feels safe in going to most any bar — but also as a loss.
“It’s a weird, double-edged sword,” she said. “Because gay bars were always more than bars, they were like big living rooms.”
MacGregor said the city’s LGBTQ+ watering holes were both hubs of good information during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and important spaces for political organizing.
“Dale McCormick used to organize at The Underground,” MacGregor said.
In 1990, McCormick became the first openly gay member of the Maine Legislature and then the first openly gay constitutional officer when she was elected State Treasurer in 1997.
Though all but gone now, MacGregor said it’s important to preserve Portland’s gay bar locations and memories for historic, demographic and academic reasons but also as simply proof that gay people and their gathering places have always existed.
Opened in the early 1970s, Roland’s Tavern on Cumberland Avenue was the city and state’s oldest gay bar MacGregor could confirm.
“But that’s just out of the ones we know of,” she said.
MacGregor’s Big Queer Historical Bar Tour starts at 5:30 p.m. on June 22. Pre-registration is required and the cost is $10. Money raised will go to support the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Collection at the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine.
