LGBTQ+ culture in Boston didn’t begin as focused on bars and clubs. Although they once populated the neighborhoods of Boston, only five exclusively gay bars now exist in the city. Today, though, few of these discreet bars remain. “The only other option was going to the Fenway and having sex in the bushes, bathrooms, all that sleazy stuff,” Cody said. “You would go into this doorway with no markings on it, so if someone saw you they wouldn’t know what it was.”īeyond that, Cody said, gay life in Boston was limited. “There were no windows and no names because of the closeted aspect, so no one would know what you were doing really,” Cody said. Even then, they were the center of an invisible network that connected the LGBTQ+ community in Boston. Such was the atmosphere around gay bars until the 1980s according to longtime Boston resident William Cody. This was not a place at which you wanted to draw attention to yourself. In and out of the door crept visitors, with surreptitious glances back and forth. It was a nondescript doorway, tucked away, with no view in and no name to mark it.
PARADISE GAY BAR BOSTON FULL
View the scrollytelling project in its full format here.
The article portion of the assignment can be found below. The project was to report a story that could be displayed in a "scrollytelling" format. The following was the final project for a journalism-minded web design class. The invisible disappearance: The loss of gay bar culture in BostonĬlass Project | with Alison Booth and Colin Thompson