Interview with George Adams in 2004, wherein Adams talks about early experiences finding gay communities in Atlanta bars. Courtesy of the Atlanta History Center, Atlanta's Unspoken Past Oral History Project.

WSB-TV footage of the gay adult bookstore and private club Down Under after an explosion gutted the building in April 1980. Courtesy of Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, WSB-TV newsfilm collection.

Video footage of drag queen Charlie Brown getting ready backstage with Lena Lust and discussing performing at Backstreet. Copyright to this item is owned by Mike Maloney. Courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections, LGBTQ Institute's Mike Maloney Collection of OutTV.

The ability of LGBTQ+ live entertainment to thrive depended on the venues that hosted shows and their audiences. When cross-dressing and homosexuality were criminalized, urban gay bars provided a safe haven and access to queer performing arts. Some bars became home bases for regular shows: the drag show Charlie Brown’s Cabaret was hosted at Backstreet in Atlanta for twenty-four years before the club’s closure in 2004, and the drag dining restaurant and “show palace” Lips opened a location in Atlanta in 2013. But LGBTQ+ bars and clubs have also been targets of police raids like those documented at Mrs. P’s Atlanta in 1980 and even as recently as 2009 at the Atlanta Eagle, and of homophobic and transphobic terrorism. In 1997 the Atlanta nightclub Otherside Lounge was bombed with a nail-filled explosive in an anti-gay attack by Eric Rudolph. Five people were injured, and several cars in the parking lot were destroyed. The damage didn’t end there: Memrie Wells-Creswell, the most seriously injured victim of the bombing, was publicly outed by Mayor Bill Campbell when he named her as a victim, and as a result, she was fired from her job. The club owners, partners Beverly McMahon and Dana Ford, were remarkably resilient, reopening the next week and sustaining the business for roughly two more years. Even long after its closure, they received letters from former patrons for whom the bar had been a safe and fun place.

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