He could remember only one episode, back in the early days, when the bar really got violent: A woman hunting down her husband at the bar threw a rock through its window. Mack, “People like that there was no fear there.” “It’s a place I can come and not be bothered by homophobic people,” said Timothy Yates, a young publicist sitting at the bar, who added that he had been taunted with gay slurs in the neighborhood.Īnd it’s not just a safe place for gay people it’s a safe place period.
one recent Sunday, it was packed with young women, two of them nuzzling each other’s necks, and men of all ages circling their hips with abandon to old-school, creatively spun house music.Įvery neighborhood bar feels like a safe haven to its regulars in Crown Heights, that cliché has a more literal meaning. Saturdays starting around 11 p.m., the bar fills with a mostly gay clientele, and by 2 a.m. Lo,” according to Willie Rowe, 66, who has been working at the bar for 40 years). And Fridays offer a drag show (the star’s “a real J. Karaoke night on Thursdays draws a mixed-race crowd of straight and gay patrons. on a weekday, the typical patron is a straight, black older resident from the surrounding blocks. Nowadays, the Starlite is not exclusively a gay bar its personality changes with the time of day and week. “We’d go over to the Seville in our furs, and then put them in our cars and head over to the Starlite.” “The Seville was for the upper-, upper-class experience, and the Starlite was sort of for the ‘Brokeback Mountain’ types,” recalled Bob Mack, who frequented both and worked at the Starlite as a manager. It was in the early ’70s, when a well-known Crown Heights resident named Mackie Harris bought the bar, that its distinct cultural history began.īack then, it was one of the few gay-friendly bars in the neighborhood. The Starlite has sat in the same location, at Bergen Street and Nostrand Avenue, since at least the 1960s, according to its current owner, Linda King, who inherited it from her brother, a popular D.J.
Surely the annals of real estate law should provide some special dispensation for what the Starlite’s management identifies as the “longest black-owned nondiscriminating bar” in Brooklyn history? The forthcoming eviction might be technically fair, but it somehow does not seem right. The bar’s owners counter that no one seems willing to negotiate with them in good faith.) (Besides, a building manager said, it lacks a lease. The Starlite Lounge, a hot spot that has been a quiet part of Brooklyn’s gay history since the early 1970s, seems destined to close its doors now that the new management of its building is demanding that the bar vacate to make way for urgent repairs. Most do not, and Crown Heights may not for long. Why shouldn’t there be a bar in Crown Heights that is popular with white and black, gay and straight people, where gentrifiers and locals with long lineage drink the special punch next to one another on bar stools, where young, beautiful club types sweat it out to house music alongside 50-something veteran party organizers and standard-issue retirees who happen to live down the block? Doesn’t every place have one of those? The Starlite Lounge in Brooklyn is one of those institutions that have been around for so long, neighbors no longer stop to notice how incongruous their presence really is.