I saw clusters of gay communities in Reading, Allentown, Norristown, Phoenixville, Philadelphia, New Hope, Lancaster and Harrisburg. When we went private, people would fill out a membership card, and I would take these cards and put them in a database. “Then, we had the opportunity to have a private after-hours license. “I used to manage the West Side Club in Norristown,” he said. That’s how Guerilla Gay Bar got started,” he said.Ī bar manager, going back as far as the 1990s, Buttacavoli drew on data he collected over time and observations he made to envision a plan for a thriving LGBTQ community in Montgomery County, that now will have its own Guerilla Gay Bar. They texted everybody the address, the time and the venue, and they would converge. A group of gay men would pick a bar, contact one another on pagers, and “it would almost be like flash mob. At that point, bar owners and managers didn’t want gay men in straight bars. 11 at Coyote Crossing in Conshohocken.Īccording to Buttacavoli, the concept of the guerilla gay bar began in the 1980s in California. Local community activist Richard Russell Buttacavoli is resurrecting a tradition in Montgomery County in the form of Guerilla Gay Bar, which has its next event Jan.
