Gay bars have operated as the most visible institutions of the LGBTQ+ public life in the United States for the better part of a century, from before gay liberation until after their assumed obsolescence. In The Bars Are Ours (Duke University Press, 2023) Lucas Hilderbrand offers a panoramic history of gay bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures. This talk will focus on the visual culture—advertisements, artworks, and ephemera—of gay bars and the archival research methods that undergird this historiography. These material traces present queer kinds of evidence of the fantasy images that bars constructed for their patrons and publics. 

Lucas Hilderbrand is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After; Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic; and Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright.