"The fact that it's been here and been able to make so long is important," he says. O'Shields says places like The Scorpio and its history shouldn't be overlooked. Brafford's several establishments and The Scorpio hosted fundraisers to support early groups like Metrolina AIDS Project. When no one else was stepping up to help gays suffering through AIDS, the gay bars did. The nature of gay bars changed, too, going "from whorehouse to the greatest saint it could ever be," Brafford said. They'd stop coming out and you just wouldn't see them anymore," O'Shields says. O'Shields saw similar declines at The Scorpio. Brafford says he lost as many as 500 customers over six years. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s changed the community, and with it the gay bars. The gay bars were tough places back then," Brafford says. White and black, gay and straight, out and closeted, drag queens and hustlers.
For a hundred miles around Charlotte, people came from all over, weekends especially."Īnd, everyone - literally, everyone - was welcomed. "For all these people, especially in all these little towns around Charlotte, Charlotte was the center of life. "It was like a family," remembers Brafford. O'Shields says being openly gay in public spaces could have been a "death toll." The bars offered safety, familiarity and community - the de facto "community centers" of gay life.
Outside of the bars, the world was lonely and dangerous. O'Shields and Brafford both remember what it was like in those early days. "You live your whole life in 1974 and you never knew anyone else in the world who was queer, and suddenly you find a whole world of queers. "It was like being Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz," he says. That's when O'Shields and Gregg Brafford began hitting up the bars, going out as soon as they turned 18.īrafford, who owns Woodshed Lounge and has managed or owned gay bars in Charlotte since 1984, went to his first gay bar, the Brass Rail, in 1974. The Scorpio originally opened on South Boulevard, moving later to South Tryon and finally landing at its current Freedom Drive location in the early '70s, just a few years after the tumultuous Stonewall riots. "They started it because they had gay friends," says O'Shields, noting how few other bars in the area catered to gay clientele. The Scorpio's original owners, Marion Tyson and her husband, Floyd, wanted to give gay people a safe space to be themselves. Wearing drag or dancing with someone of the same sex was illegal. Gay men cruised Trade and Tryon streets, and an arrest for gay sex landed your name, address and mugshot on the front page of the Charlotte Observer, ending your career and your marriage, if you had one. The Scorpio opened amid a backdrop and history of oppression. In 1968, Charlotte was a sleepy Southern town. That early march would morph into the LGBT Pride parades and festivals scattered throughout the year and across the world today. This year marks the riots' 45th anniversary.Ī year after the riots, on June 28, 1970, the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march was held in New York City. The ensuing three-day upheaval in the neighborhood would act as a sort of flash point for a nascent gay political movement. Years of police harassment and arrests culminated in 1969, when patrons - mostly drag queens, transgender folks, poor youth of color and street hustlers - revolted. On June 28 each year, LGBT people across the globe celebrate the anniversary of the riots at the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar owned by the mafia and often raided by police. Ten years later, the couple would own the historic nightclub - opened in 1968, a year before riots at a New York City bar would launch a nationwide upsurge in gay activism. That same year, O'Shields would take a bartending job at The Scorpio.
They immediately hit it off, became lovers and eventually settled down together. O'Shields met Wilds, who passed away in 2008, while working in 1979 as a bartender at The Odyssey, a long-closed local gay club.
That history is important to Donald O'Shields, who, with his late partner, Rick Wilds, bought The Scorpio on Freedom Drive in 1989. From hole-in-the-wall hangouts home to prostitutes and hustlers to modern-day dance clubs hosting hundreds of patrons and viewed as entertainment destinations, local establishments have made their own unique history. Charlotte's gay bar scene has been decades in the making - and has it been a ride.