But you know, it was a good experience, a good family venture that we went into.Īnd I never expected the bar would be just for Black people. They became friends with other gay customers and so forth, and they weren't gay. My brothers always knew that I was gay and I never tried to hide it, but they got a lot closer and understood every aspect of being gay.
And finally, when it got transferred into my name, my brothers came up, I had one brother who was a contractor, another brother who was an electrician.
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The white man’s name was John, and I knew him, and he approached me and he said, ‘Rodney, do you want to buy my bar?’ I said, ‘Wow, I'd love to, but I don't have money.’ So he said, ‘I want to sell this bar to a Black man.’ I said, ‘Wow, OK, I'mma figure on how to get money together and buy this bar.’ We got enough money to buy the bar and my family was active in every way to get it going. It was actually called the Eagle Creek Saloon. I always knew that there weren't any Black-owned gay bars in San Francisco. Rodney Barnette: I felt like we had an opportunity to make a difference in the community. How come there aren’t more people here?’ And almost in unison we all said, ‘Because it's a racist gay bar.’ It's not that she wasn't popular, there were things restricting access to her performance. Deniece Williams came out and she started performing and singing beautiful songs, and we started clapping and cheering and then between songs, she said, ‘Wow, you guys really liked the music. But we said, OK, we're going to go see Deniece Williams. and dress codes, so we never really went there. And we had already had bad experiences trying to get in there, carding us with three pieces of I.D. It turned out that she was going to be performing at one of these bars up in North Beach. Rodney Barnette: She had a new album out, and it was so beautiful.
So you always felt like you had to almost run to get away from being arrested.Ĭorey Antonio Rose: You told me a story earlier about Deniece Williams at a bar. But … when we left the bar, the San Francisco Police Department was waiting outside with paddy wagons and arresting Black gay people who were standing around talking, trying to exchange numbers. It was not in the Castro, It was called Bojangles. Rodney Barnette: There was a bar back in the 70s that Black people felt comfortable going to. That's how thorough the racism was.Ĭorey Antonio Rose: (narration) We brunch now, but back in the day, the bars were the cornerstone of the queer social scene … How are you supposed to feel welcome in a community if you have to defend your humanity every time you go out?Ĭorey Antonio Rose: Eventually you got the impetus to start to own a bar, to start a bar. They came up with the term Dinge queen-Dinge means dirty. You know, things were so bad that they even created racist language to depict if a white gay guy had Black gay friends or was attracted to Black people.
There were fights that broke out at places that I went to that got so humiliating that I swore I would not go back because it can be dangerous for me or somebody else to be there. Some of them had goons as security guards. The bartender, they were always white and they would bypass you. That's when we started getting carded, three pieces of I.D. They started opening more restaurants … and the more white gay men that came, the more racist it got.
Most of the activity was on Polk Street, but eventually things shifted to the Castro district. Rodney Barnette: When I first moved here, it wasn't known as the gay capital of the United States. Over 30 years later, Barnette speaks about why Black-affirming queer spaces are still needed, and what he took away from his experience operating one.īelow are lightly edited excerpts of the episode with Rodney Barnette and his daughter Sadie Barnette.Ĭorey Antonio Rose: Tell me about your first time getting adjusted to the gay community here in San Francisco. When Rodney Barnette first moved to San Francisco in 1969, he noticed that “it wasn’t all rah rah gay capital of the world.” His experiences with racism in San Francisco’s historic gay community led him to open the New Eagle Creek Saloon, the city’s first Black-owned gay bar, in 1990.