Gay Guide to Minneapolis
On 18 May 1970 Jack Baker and Michael McConnell walked into the Hennepin County courthouse and applied for a marriage license. The clerk, Gerald Nelson, refused them. They were the first same-sex couple in the United States to try. They sued, lost at the Minnesota Supreme Court, and appealed to Washington, where in October 1972 the Supreme Court disposed of the case in a single sentence: the appeal is dismissed for want of a substantial federal question. No argument was heard and no reasoning was given. That one line stood as binding precedent for forty-three years, until Obergefell explicitly overruled it in 2015. Then, in December 1975, the Minneapolis city council added gender identity to its non-discrimination ordinance with almost no fanfare, the first such protection anywhere in the country. It is still on the books.
Downtown Minneapolis carries the bulk of the scene. The Gay 90's is the multi-room institution with drag running most nights, and the Saloon, the Brass Rail and Eagle MPLS sit within a short walk of it. First Avenue is not a gay bar but has been central to queer nightlife in this city for decades and belongs on the list.
The 19 Bar near Loring Park is the quiet, old, beloved one, and A Bar of Their Own is a women's sports bar, which is worth naming plainly because there are barely any left in the country. LUSH covers Northeast, Ground Zero runs the harder nights, and over in St. Paul the Black Hart and Camp Bar make the Twin Cities work as one scene rather than two.
Quatrefoil Library holds one of the largest LGBTQ lending collections in the United States, and the Smitten Kitten is a long-running feminist sex shop. Twin Cities Pride fills Loring Park in June.
The winters are genuinely severe and that has shaped things: the bars here function as social infrastructure in a way they do not in warmer cities, and they are busy on a Tuesday in February.