You can go to have a conversation and a hamburger making it a multi-purpose space for meeting, socializing, and cruising,” Ken says. “It’s the closest thing New York has to a pub.
Its menu primarily comprises burgers and other casual food at non-NYC prices. Yes, it serves food, and it has since the 1930s. In talking to Jay and Ken, I realized other details about Julius' that I had dismissed in my quick walks past and minor pit stops. “Why the second was so important, was because there was no other place in the world could go.” “Dick told me that in the sixties, the two biggest things were police entrapment and police harassment in gay bars,” Jay says. Jay and Ken got to know Dick Leitsch over the years, one of the members of Mattachine who participated in the Sip-In.
That refusal was covered in The New York Times and The Village Voice, forcing the State Liquor Authority to publicly disclose its policy and catalyzing a more open “gay bar culture.” Julius' was the third stop on their tour and the first that refused to serve them (as it had been raided previously). The Sip-In happened in 1966 when members of the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights group, accompanied by reporters, went to bars throughout New York to announce that they were “homosexuals” and then asked to be served. Stonewall was a key turning point, Julius' was one of the bars that existed before Stonewall and the Sip-In itself was the first, actual documented and photographed way of showing discrimination in a bar by the State Liquor Authority.” “There’s the misperception that the modern gay rights movement started at Stonewall,” Ken tells me. Shop Five Two Reusable Silicone Straws Now They have a helpful interactive map (that I’ll be using on all future tours) and have been instrumental in getting sites like Julius' on the National Register of Historic Places. Jay Shockley and Ken Lustbader work with the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, an organization that seeks to broaden people’s knowledge of queer history beyond Stonewall and to place that history within a geographical context. Turns out, Julius' played an enormous role in LGBTQ history, and if it were reported in textbooks like it should be, the bar’s citation would come before Stonewall’s. “I think that’s the oldest gay bar in the world,” I’d say. Only recently did I learn that another landmark, just a few steps away, I’ve had all wrong: Julius', a bar located on West 10th Street, was a staple of my walking tour, but I was always a bit dismissive of it. The uprising sustained for days and was one of the first LGBTQ actions to receive major media coverage, leading to the first pride parade. In 1969, riots broke out after a police raid. But according to my research, most of what I knew about Stonewall was right. (“I heard Patti Smith wrote an album there” “I think that’s where pastrami on rye was invented!”) A lot of times those brash declarations are wrong.
We take anecdotes we’ve heard from friends, bartenders, and cab drivers as truth. Just as a New Yorker knows what it means to play tour guide, most know the false sense of confidence we feel walking around the city. (No, not a pilgrimage to Carrie Bradshaw’s townhouse, just three minutes from my last apartment.) I’d walk them through a square of the West Village containing The Stonewall Inn, where many credit the modern LGBTQ rights movement's inception, and which will play a big role in this year’s World Pride-celebrating 50 years since the Stonewall riots. Given my location-in the heart of the West Village-I was also able to offer guests something special, whether they liked it or not.
Ironically, it was by 30, when friends starting having kids and visitors waned, that I had my tour guide routine down to a science: We’d share small plates and have too many negronis outside at Via Carota I’d become a member at MoMA for the $5 guest passes I’d politely tell guests if they wanted to walk the ever-crowded Brooklyn bridge to do it alone and I was a pro at satisfying everyone’s most popular request: to visit a rooftop bar. Being from Iowa and having went to college in the midwest, I spent much of my 20s hosting old friends in tiny apartments with miniscule bathrooms.