Opening the New Eagle Creek Saloon was Rodney’s attempt to create a haven for queer Black people from the racism they and other people of color experienced on Castro Street. Last year, she transformed a mug shot of her father and cold, bureaucratic documents into four-by-five-foot drawings made with stencils and powdered graphite and adorned with roses drawn in colored pencil - recuperation through love. Sadie has reworked those documents in various iterations, including in her recent projects Dear 1968, … and Black Sky.
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When the family filed a FOIA request for his FBI dossier, they received a 500-page surveillance file. He founded the Compton chapter of the Black Panther Party, maintained the security detail for Angela Davis in San Jose during her infamous 1972 trial, and worked as a union organizer. Rodney, now in his 70s, has a biography that has served as a productive source for much of his daughter’s work. The work is a glittery shrine standing slightly outside time and space, a transmission beam from the past lighting the way toward future utopias.Ĭhicago house fliers from Juana and a pink booklet of archival images produced by Barnette. Gone are the wood panels and ceiling fans of the Market Street original in Sadie’s version - which she created in 2019 and staged here in conjunction with the Studio Museum in Harlem - gallerygoers will find a slim horseshoe-shaped bar with pink neon lighting sleek, geometric barstools in white leather and modular couches in holographic vinyl. The real New Eagle Creek was San Francisco’s first Black-owned gay bar when Rodney opened it in 1990.
#BLACK GAY BARS IN CHICAGO SERIES#
Juana was one in a series of DJs brought in to activate The New Eagle Creek Saloon, an installation by artist Sadie Barnette that reimagines her father Rodney Barnette’s bar in San Francisco and is on view at the Kitchen through March 6. There’s only one way to heat up a dance floor. Most of the patrons stood wiggling along the periphery until Juana made a shivering motion, spread her arms wide, and beckoned everyone to come in. It was all a bit of theater, a bit of simulacrum the cavernous dark and the bone-penetrating bass line allowed us to pretend it was nighttime at the club and not daytime at an art space near the High Line. DJ Juana, in a black T-shirt, a black mask, and hoops, spun house records while episodes of the ’80s dance show Attack of the Boogie played overhead. On a recent Saturday afternoon, amid emergency alerts for snow squalls, a dance floor in Chelsea lit up with beats from Chicago.
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Photo: Charles Caesar for New York Magazine Also take a look at the Chicago Gay Bathhouse and Sex Club Guide, which has plenty of advice on where to meet guys looking to hookup around Chicago.Juana spins at Sadie Barnette’s installation The New Eagle Creek Saloon at the Kitchen. Here's a more in-depth look at these Downtown and South Side Chicago gay social establishments. It's also a bit of a distance to reach these bars, but they're both legendary nightspots that are well-worth checking out, especially given that many of the nation's gay African-American hangouts have steadily disappeared over the years.
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Additionally, on the city's South Side, you'll find a pair of gay bars that cater predominantly to African-American patrons, Club Escape and Jeffery Pub. You can find extensive lists of establishments in the Chicago Lakeview Gay Nightlife Guide and the Chicago Andersonville Gay Nightlife Guide. These neighborhoods are a lot of fun, but they're also a bit of a haul - by cab or public transit - from downtown Chicago, which is where most of the city's hotels are.įortunately, there are a couple of very fun gay nightspots right in the heart of downtown, not to mention an almost endless supply of terrific restaurants, many of them with mixed gay/straight followings. Although Chicago has among the greatest selection of gay nightspots in the country, the majority of these hangouts - from bars and discos to LGBT-popular restaurants - are in popular mixed residential-commercial neighborhoods on the north side of the city.