September of 2017 marked the closing of Numbers, a bar on the edge of Hillcrest that had been the home of Pride parties, drag shows and the Club Sabbat goth night. The documentary ends with a long goodbye and a lingering debate. “It was a difficult time, but it was a time when the community rose to the occasion.”
“It was a nonstop 24/7 battle for seven or eight years,” says Susan Jester, founder of the San Diego AIDS Walk. It’s very difficult for me to talk about,” says “Papa” Tony Lindsey, a tribal elder in San Diego’s leather community. “Out of a community of 30 to 40 friends, I’m the only survivor. In one of the documentary’s most moving sections, survivors pay tribute to the friends they lost and to the spirit that helped hold their fractured world together. During the AIDS epidemic of 1980s, bars became the sites for meetings, fundraisers and way too many memorials. In the post-Stonewall 1970s, the gay-rights movement was born in the bars. Later, the bars became a place to organize and strategize. “We were popular then,” McCall says with a laugh. In between, the hour-long documentary remembers how places like the Circus Room, the Apartment, the Flame, and the West Coast Production Company kept their patrons afloat when the cultural tide was running against them. The documentary starts with gay life in post World War II San Diego and ends with the bittersweet closing of the Numbers bar in 2017. In “San Diego’s Gay Bar History,” which is part of the KPBS Explore Local Content program, the personal illuminates the historical. “It was the place where people in the community took care of each other.” “To hear the older generation describe the experience, before there were gay centers or gay community organizations, everything happened in the bar,” filmmaker Paul Detwiler said of his documentary, which debuts Thursday at 9 p.m. And in the new KPBS documentary, “San Diego’s Gay Bar History,” these storied spaces are being celebrated for all the things they were to their patrons, and for all of the things they had to be. In San Diego’s gay and lesbian bars, people could be themselves. Beginning in the closeted 1950s and continuing through the activist ’70s, the AIDS-shadowed ’80s and the Gay Pride ’90s, San Diego’s gay bars have been so much more than a place to drink and dance. But it was a place where people knew the real you, and that was all that mattered. For the pioneering members of San Diego’s LGBTQ community, the local gay bar was not necessarily a place where everyone knew your name.