TAMPA, Fla. — Pride Month may be ending this week, but a special celebration of the Bay area's historic LGBTQ nightlife scene is just beginning.
What You Need To Know
- T-Shirt collection features logos, names of popular gay bars in the 70s, 80s
- Collection celebrates El Goya Bar, The Engine Room, The Wedgewood Inn
- Order t-shirts from the collection at thewowbiz.com
- More Entertainment stories
The center of downtown Ybor City is home to more than just great food, busy streets, and roosters.
It's also home to an important landmark of the area's LGBTQ history.
At the corner of 7th Avenue and 15th Street, is the home of the former El Goya.
“When this bar opened as El Goya, it put Tampa on the map of being accepting of gays as well,” said Art Smith, founder and designer of The Wow Biz.
“As you were coming of age in the gay world back in the 70s and 80s, you didn’t have the social atmosphere that you have now," Smith explained. "So in order to meet other people and feel accepted and not have people look at you strangely because you were hugging someone of the same gender, these were our homes. These were the center of our social life."
El Goya and dozens of other bars and clubs just like it here in Tampa Bay and around the country may no longer exist physically. But it’s what they left behind that’s fueled the passion for Smith’s latest design project.
“This kind of helps revive those memories- you see the logos, you see the designs,” said Smith.
Logos we haven’t seen in 30, 40, 50 years are now front and center on these "throwback" t-shirts Smith is making to commemorate history.
“It’s an important thing to have that history available for people, because young people don’t realize what we went through in those days,” said Robert Pope, former owner of The Engine Room and The Wedgewood Inn.
Pope looks at photos of his bars with fond memories, but some not so fond ones also.
He says his bars were constantly raided in the 70s for the simple fact that they were homosexual establishments.
When asked why Pope continued to operate his businesses under such difficult circumstances, Pope has a simple, straightforward answer.
“Because the gay community deserved to be treated like everybody else,” said Pope.
It’s a fight still being fought today, and that fight is part of what drives Smith's t-shirt project.
“It is, just like any other history project, people like to remember where they came from. Whether it’s grandma’s spinning wheel that she used to do her yarn projects on, or it’s a cast iron skillet from your childhood, or it’s a piece of furniture your mother used to have in the living room," he explained. "People like to have things to remind them of their history, and in the gay world there isn’t a lot of that."
Except this time, it doesn’t have to be a secret.
“To me, that’s a big part of how we got to have gay marriage, how we got to have more protections under the law, is because there were 50 or 100 years of struggle step-by-step, and these bars play a part in that struggle,” said Smith. “It’s a big part of history that many people don’t hear about.”
Check out the t-shirt designs at thewowbiz.com.
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New T-Shirts Celebrates Bay Area's Gay Nightlife Scene - Bay News 9
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