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Today, many LGBTQ Americans feel free to be their full selves in almost any setting. Atlanta had Waterworks, which a 1992 newsletter for the group Black and White Men Together called the city’s “only Black-owned gay restaurant.” Gay men frequented places like Orphan Andy’s, a campy diner from the same decade that’s still in business in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. Lesbians went to Bloodroot, a still-busy vegetarian restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that sprang from the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s. Many gay restaurants have closed in a time of growing inclusion and more fluid sexual identities but in several places around the country, they remain anchors of safety and community. (Gabriela Herman | The New York Times) Bloodroot, a vegan and vegetarian restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on March 4, 2021, which has roots in the lesbian and feminist civil rights movements of the 1970s. MeMe’s Diner, a popular queer restaurant in Brooklyn, permanently closed in November, citing shutdown measures and a lack of government support. The pandemic hit the country’s urban gay restaurants especially hard, said Justin Nelson, president of the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce.
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Restaurants fold all the time, perhaps nowhere more so than in New York, and perhaps never as much as during the COVID-19 era. Gay restaurants, said Frankel, Tony-nominated composer of the musical “Grey Gardens,” “made you feel like you belonged.”īut all those places he so fondly remembers are long closed, as are Harvest, Orbit’s and several others listed in an article, headlined “Restaurants That Roll Out the Welcome Mat for Gay Diners,” that ran in this newspaper 27 years ago. Manatus was so gay, it had a sobriquet: Mana-tush. Florent was around the corner from a notorious sex club in the meatpacking district. There was that incredibly hot Italian waiter at Food Bar. Universal Grill cranked “Dancing Queen” on birthdays. Scott Frankel’s favorite memories of New York gay restaurants aren’t about food.