Rick Karlin wants to take you on a bar crawl. Not one that starts at LIT and ends at Tropics. He wants to take you on a bar crawl through history.
He’s debuting his new book, “Last Call South Florida: A History of 1,001 LGBTQ-Friendly Taverns, Hang-Outs & Haunts,” which he co-authored with Fred Fejes, a former Florida Atlantic University professor and expert on queer history in the state.
To celebrate the book’s release, Karlin is holding a “meet the author” and book signing at Hunters on Oct. 15 from 6 to 8 p.m.
The thing that makes queer bars important to a community is that they often become de facto community centers. For example, Hunters is a popular bar that hosts dozens of community-centric events every year, including the release party for this book.
The bars are intrinsically tied to a town’s LGBTQ community, especially in places where there is just one, maybe two bars.
“Our bars are where our history was made. For a long time, they were our community centers, our support groups, our family reunions. So many of the community organizations we take for granted now started with people talking at a bar, and coming up with an idea, and jotting down notes on a bar napkin. During the 1980s, it's where our AIDS organizations originated,” Karlin said.
It’s not uncommon for a bar to pop up out of nowhere, have 15 minutes of fun and fame, and then disappear. It’s that transient nature that makes researching a book like this very difficult. Karlin and Fejes poured over ancient “gay guides” like Damron.
Sometimes addresses didn’t match, or the time was off. It’s hard to trace back through old business records for any business, much less 1,001 of them.
And while bars do come and go in South Florida, Karlin says the longevity of many of our haunts surprises him.
“There were so many queer bars that occupied the same location, sometimes over the course of decades. For example, the space that now houses Smarty Pants has been the site of a queer bar going back to the time the mall was first built in 1956.”
This isn’t Karlin’s first foray LGBTQ-bars and how intertwined they are with our history. “Last Call Chicago” explores the history of LGBTQ in the Windy City. But he says South Florida’s geography made this a very different creative experience, as each county developed its own culture.
“Until the 1950s, there was a kind of ‘live and let live’ attitude that surprised me, especially when it came to female impersonators. In Chicago, it was against the law to wear more than three items of clothing of the opposite gender. Here, society matrons in Palm Beach considered it a feather in their cap to have a female impersonator at their parties, and Miami was even wilder!”
In addition to being an author, Karlin also works for OutSFL serving in the role of Arts & Culture editor.
