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Events tagged with "Imperial"

Imperial Hotel

The Imperial Hotel bar on Temple Street. The building still stands but has been converted in to offices. This was the most popular bar for gay men in the 1950s and 60s....

The Trocadero

The Trocadero or the 'Troc' was originally a long narrow bar running from Temple Street through to Bennett's Hill. Although not a gay bar in the sense we know one today, gay men were 'tolerated' there. The bar was the site of an infamous murder in th...

Women's access to bars

Pre 1960s Prior to the 1960s, and well into the 1970s there appears to have been very little opportunity indeed for lesbians to get together openly in a social or public space. All the bars noted as being popular with the gay crowd in the 40s and 50...

Memories tagged with "Imperial"

First Gay Bar, The Imperial

"I first went to my first gay bar, the Imperial Hotel, in Temple Street when I was 13, in 1962. There was one opposite, called the Trocadero. If you were a smart queen you went to the Imperial, if you wanted a bit of rough you went over the road to t...

Laurie Williams recalls the 1940s

“One source of information was Laurie Williams who would tell me about gay sex during the blackout in Birmingham in the war; there was active cottaging and cruising; a circuit of notorious toilets to visit; clubs that were accessed by going up the ba...

Outrageous Imperial

"My friend took me to the Imperial Hotel Bar “He said ‘I will show you what a gay pub is really like, we don’t want to go in the Troc(adero)’. The bar was predominantly gay and the men used to ‘camp it up’ in there. The first time I went I was the on...

The Nightingale was born

After the ‘Queen Victoria’ closed, there was a barren period in Birmingham in respect of club life. ‘La’ (Laurie Williams) approached me one night in the Imperial Bar and told me he had found a backer who wanted to put up the cash to start a gay memb...

The scene in the 50/60/70s

“At the time the bars were fabulous - in the fifties and sixties, all the bars were fabulous. There were still a lot of American bars, still a lot of people who drank cocktails in those days, gin and tonics I suppose. There was the Imperial up Temp...

Vinegar Tits

in the Imperial Hotel Bar there were two old biddies behind the bar, one was Molly a charmer and the other was known as Vinegar Tits (Eadie) she was a right bitch, if you kept treating her to Gins you were the greatest, but otherwise she had the tong...

Vinegar Tits at the Imperial

Fred went out much more in the 1950s to the Imperial Hotel, “a great big square bar, open every night, usually full of gay people. There were two bar maids, Molly, and Edith, who was a misery, they used to call her 'Vinegar Tits'"....

Women only disco at the Imperial

There was quite a divide between the political and non political lesbians, so Pam never went to the Old Mo or the Women’s Discos at the Star Club. She would go to “the rubbishy ones at The Imperial on a Wednesday evening, to chat someone up, not to g...