(re)Constructions: Unprogressive Myths

By Jaysen Hohlen

Walker Publishing Filed to Visual Arts · Part of When is Art a Political Act?

Jaysen Hohlen, Corners (Demolition of the Cubicle Hotels in the Gateway District), 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

Stepping into the 19 Bar is like stepping into a bar that time forgot. My eyes adjust to fluorescent lighting from its windowless facade. I hear the crack of a cue ball cutting across the green felt of one of the pool tables and smell the cigarette smoke wafting in from the back patio. I taste a heavy pour in my gin and tonic sucked through a plastic straw. The dark atmosphere, cast in color by neon signs and a jukebox, has become my oasis over the last seven years. This era pales in comparison to the patrons who filled the bar stools for decades before me.

The 19 Bar originally opened in 1952 and was sold soon after in 1956.¹ Thus began its reign as the longest-running gay-owned bar in Minnesota. Since the 1980s, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II has hovered over the bar’s three pool tables; she was crowned the same year the bar opened. She remains a haunting sentinel under a Bud Light sign.

Those who have frequented the dark corners of the 19 Bar have witnessed its punky, queer clientele, often pool players looking for a grungy watering hole. On March 22nd of this year, a power line fell into the bar, causing a fire that damaged its basement, first floor, and roof. It was through the photographs of the wreckage that circulated online that I saw sunlight in the bar for the first time. Although the bar’s owner reportedly plans to reopen, the uncertain future of this historic gay bar has renewed an urgency in my work surrounding gay urban histories and geographies, urban renewal projects, and the corporate and state entities that profit from images of progress and queer visibility.

According to the Minneapolis Fire Department’s deputy chief, the lack of windows in the building contributed to its damage by impeding visibility and ventilation.² Windowless facades in gay bars were common architectural features, designed to block the public’s wandering eye and to protect the identities of the people inside. In his book Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, Jeremy Atherton Lin describes the famous Twin Peaks Tavern as the first gay bar in San Francisco to uncover the windows near its entrance in 1972.³ The owners denied any political undertones to this decision; rather, they said they wanted the bar to be an upscale, comfortable place for professionals to mingle. For Atherton Lin, the move to make the bar visible “did not so much provoke as to normalize.”⁴

From the 1930s to the ’50s, many of Minneapolis’s gay bars were located in the Gateway District of downtown Minneapolis. This district was originally known as a red light district, then later a vice district for its high density of bars, liquor stores, sex workers, flophouses, high crime rate, and heavy policing.⁵At this time, gay bars were not filled with rainbow flags, go-go dancers, and vodka ads. Much of the clientele arrived incognito, learning about these establishments through word-of-mouth and scribblings on bathroom stalls in tearooms.⁶ My particular interest in the pre-Stonewall era is the subsequent linkage of visibility and progress. The Stonewall riots, a gay uprising against police in Greenwich Village in 1969, is widely held as the beginning of the U.S gay rights movement, which often centered visibility and the advancement of certain coherent queer identities.

Between 1958 and 1962, the Gateway District drastically changed. Minneapolis was one of the first major metropolitan cities to receive funding from the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act to redevelop its downtown district. This redevelopment project displaced over 3,000 residents and demolished over 180 buildings.⁷⁸⁹ Inspired by German highway infrastructure during WWII, the goal of this federal project was to expand American interstate systems in the event that the military would need deployment during a land-based attack. Additionally, the legislation intended to “revive” the downtown districts of U.S cities across the country, promoting tourism to encourage the use of the proposed interstates. These interstates infamously cut through Black neighborhoods, after decades of national and local implementations of racial housing covenants.¹⁰Notably, the construction of I-94 bisected the Rondo neighborhood, a historically Black neighborhood in Saint Paul, and displaced its residents. Many gay residents of the Gateway District migrated south to Loring Park, the location of the 19 Bar, after the urban renewal project.

In the 1950s, John Bacich, a bar and flophouse owner, inadvertently began the most notorious documentation of the Gateway District and continued through its demolition in the 1960s. His 16mm footage, which would later become the film Skidrow, attempted to preserve the neighborhood’s culture and residents.¹¹In the 1980s, Jerome Liebling, a photographer and professor in the University of Minnesota’s Art Department, and his student added more footage and included voiceover from Bacich. The imagery in Skidrow is hard to watch. In one clip Bacich sets a free case of half-pints in an alley and films the frenzy of disheveled alcoholic men fighting over it.¹² At another point, a man pulls up his shirt to show his abdominal scars from a stabbing that occurred after trying to take someone’s drink.¹³ Bacich would even sell nickel beers in the early morning to those suffering from alcohol withdrawal to “straighten ’em out.”¹⁴

James Eli Shiffer covered the film in depth in his 2016 book, The King of Skid Row, which chronicles the life of sin, tragedy, and violence of the Minneapolis Gateway District.¹⁵ Although illuminating, historiographies often focus on obsolete and bygone times, as if immune to the progress that has come since. Moreover, they are predisposed to becoming evidence for a more actualized liberal present. In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay expounds on the relationship between institutional archives and imperial states that use narratives of progress to justify acts of violence and subjugation. Azoulay proposes the act of unlearning as “a way to reverse the role of the normalized milestones that structure the phenomenological field out of which modern history is still conceived and narrated, such as those of progress . . . followed (as if in later phases) by the imperial ‘generosity’ of providing for those dispossessed by imperialist policies.”¹⁶It is in this critical repurposing of unlearning that I locate a resistance to narratives of gay progress and the cultural and political frameworks they give rise to. Rather, it is the distinct “blight” of the Gateway District, its formulations of homosexuality, and how these come to bear on the contemporary landscape that interest me.

In another brief clip from Skidrow, Doc—adorned in a pinstripe blazer and red tie—gyrates his hips for the camera. It is the only time that Doc appears in the film, accompanied by a simple, yet poignant, voiceover describing him as “the old man of the gays.”¹⁷ I took pause at the lack of information on Doc; I could not help but speculate. Did Doc ever cruise the tearooms of the Gateway District, drink in the numerous gay bars (Rex Bar, Onyx Bar, Viking’s Lounge, etc.), or even rent a room in one of the neighborhood’s many flophouses? Peripherally, these spaces take a firsthand account in Ricardo J. Brown’s memoir,The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s, named after a gay bar in downtown Saint Paul during the late 1940s. Brown illuminates the cruising practices of the time through his friends, Betty Boop and Flaming Youth, who are at once territorial and contentious:

"When Betty Boop came swishing into the Montgomery Ward’s Midway toilet or the Golden Rule basement rest room to find [Flaming Youth] already there, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette, waiting for the kill, even if he already had his man marked, [Flaming Youth] invariably acknowledged the competition with a discreet, good-natured nod. Then he would bow out, and resume his hunt in less productive but unoccupied territory like the bus depot, the basement toilet in the public library, or the second-floor washroom in the Bremer Arcade.¹⁸"

Both men find some solidarity in each other, albeit one masked in the masculinist rhetoric of cruising and trade. Their nonverbal communication also indicates the latency of criminal persecution if caught. In his essay, Anachronizing the Penitentiary, Queering the History of Sexuality, Kadji Amin writes about the formation of pre-Stonewall homosexuality through its relation to criminality and backwardness. This analysis contrasts starkly to contemporary representations of gay men today, endowed with economic privilege and state-sanctioned rights to privacy, marriage, and military inclusion.

Amin challenges liberal formulations of gay identity and the notion of the pre-Stonewall era as always oppressive and antisocial. By resisting a chronological teleology of gay progressionist history, he writes, “Anachronism’s backward, disjunctive, and antidevelopmental temporalities unlock alternate conceptions of time and history... Layering time, creating disjunctive temporal universes, and bringing the distant past to bear on the present, the folds of anachronism nurture forms of queer life and make legible modes of queer belonging erased and demonized in the progressive discourses of historicism, sexual emancipation, and penal reform.”¹⁹ Amin urges us to open a space for unlearning by circumventing a stereotypical reading of the scene in Brown’s memoir, one that would prefer to devalue and vacate the kinship between Betty Boop and Flaming Youth as a tragedy of circumstance. He also does not advocate for recriminalizing certain queer relations, but rather locates an urgency in including contradictive, perhaps even counterproductive, historiographies with the more conventional readings of queer history. The history of the Gateway District is ripe with this potential.

The Pioneer Hotel was a flophouse on Nicollet Avenue in the Gateway District. Flophouses, also referred to as cubicle hotels, were the cheapest temporary housing options in urban space, often frugally built above storefronts. The layout of these unenclosed rooms consisted of four walls, 8 feet by 8 feet, covered in chicken wire with a suspended lightbulb, twin bed, and desk; each floor had a communal bathroom. These types of hotels grew in popularity at the end of the 19th century as many migrant laborers came to work the lumberyards in North and Central Minnesota or on the railroads.²⁰ In 1960, a team of photographers from the City of Minneapolis surveyed the Pioneer Hotel before its demolition. Apart from Bacich’s footage, the team’s survey images are the only documentation of the Gateway District’s flophouses that remains.

These images perform, to use José Esteban Muñoz’s concept, a disidentification through the removal of personal items, furniture, and decoration.²¹ In short, any significant trace of former inhabitants is wiped from the photographer’s frame. As viewers, we are left with dilapidated architecture, drinking ephemera, and the bodies of the survey photographers. With each click, their lenses gather scenes rife with tragedy. The photographic evidence would relegate the Pioneer Hotel and its inhabitants as obsolete by today’s housing standards. This lack of other first-hand accounts or documentation of inhabitants may be noted by some. However, their absence from archival materials should encourage us to speculate what histories did not make it into the archive; those whose traces are underlooked and how we may begin to restore them.

The way of life in the Pioneer Hotel appears contradictory to contemporary real estate, domestic architecture, and homeownership. For example, luxury condominiums have replaced the flophouse in the urban landscape of the former Gateway District. Now referred to as “mixed-use developments,” these buildings cater to a wealthy professional crowd. Their storefronts offer upscale coffee shops, healthfood chains, designer clothing stores, and commercial gallery spaces. Alternatively, the men who lived in the Gateway District’s cubicle hotels, according to Bacich’s narration, were considered deeply unprofessional: working summers, then collecting unemployment in winters to drink.²²Their assumed unproductiveness also comes into conflict with the “progress” of the hyper-performing workforce of today.

The Gateway District is now one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Minneapolis. In 2022, the RBC Gateway Building, housing the U.S. headquarters of the Royal Bank of Canada, an international wealth-management firm, and Minnesota’s first Four Seasons Hotel and luxury condos,²³ reached completion.²⁴As of February 2024, the remaining move-in-ready private residences, one- or two-bedrooms units, are priced between $1.9 and $3.5 million.²⁵ On the second floor is a skyway to the state-of-the-art Hennepin County Public Library, from which I have sourced the survey images of the flophouses. The Onyx Bar, a gay bar in the 1940s described as a “ratty old storefront,” once stood on the northeast corner of the library’s lot and a block away from the former site of the Pioneer Hotel.²⁶As the first addition to the Minneapolis skyline in over 20 years, the RBC Gateway Building is an obelisk of global and finance capitalism. The construction of the luxury high-rise signals a new era of economic prosperity, echoing the intent of the city planners of the original redevelopment of the Gateway District to re-emphasize the Twin Cities as a global corporate player.

Many gays and lesbians currently reap the rewards of market and global capital. Pinkwashing and corporate inclusion are framed as victories by certain gay-rights organizations. Many local corporations, like the Royal Bank of Canada and Ecolab, have been hailed for their LGBTQIA+ inclusivity that both builds a neoliberal workforce and reiterates their progressive reputation. It also imparts a certain racialized queer economy, which queer theorist Jasbir Puar refers to as the ascendancy of whiteness in her book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. This project “is assisted and benefited by homosexual populations that participate in the same identitarian and economic hegemonies as those hetero subjects complicit with its ascendancy” and “aids the project of heteronormativity through the fractionating away of queer alliances in favor of adherence to the reproduction of class, gender, and racial norms.”²⁷²⁸²⁹These identitarian hegemonies are also located in the illegibility of certain racial, religious, and queer identities. Succinctly put, “the homosexual other is white, the racial other is straight.”³⁰Further, white queers have long been considered economically redeemable subjects, championed by mainstream queer rights organizations like the Human Rights Campaign.

Each year, the Human Rights Campaign, an American LGBTQIA+ rights nonprofit, releases a Corporate Equality Index. The aim of this report is to analyze corporations within the United States and internationally that are “adopting equitable workplace policies, practices and benefits for LGBTQ+ employees.” In its 2022 report, the interim president, Joni Madison, said of the changing corporate landscape that “leveling the playing field for LGBTQ+ workers is not simply a societal good; it is also good for business.”^“31 The inverse question remains: what societal good do corporations do?

Minnesota’s own Fortune 500 company, Ecolab Inc., has made HRC’s Corporate Equality Index for 11 consecutive years.³² From its corporate offices in downtown Saint Paul, Ecolab defines itself as a “global sustainability leader offering water, hygiene and infection prevention solutions and services that protect people and the resources vital to life.”³³ Perhaps the most recognizable markets for its products are food safety and medical facilities; its logo is plastered on hand-soap dispensers, cleaners, and sanitizers across the nation. But its former headquarters, located at Ecolab Plaza, on Wabasha Street in downtown Saint Paul, once occupied the original site of Kirsmer’s, a gay bar in the 1940s and the central location for Ricardo J. Brown’s memoir The Evening Crowd at Kirsmer’s. In 2022, Ecolab changed the park’s name to Osborn Plaza, after Ecolab’s original founder.³⁴

The Kirsmers who owned the bar, though straight, were much like the rest of the bar’s gay and lesbian clientele—“plain working-class people,” as stated in the foreword by Allan H. Spear.³⁵³⁶³⁷ Spear mentions the importance of this distinction, in contrast to the coastal gay elite, like that of San Francisco and New York, who had the wealth to expand their closets to exclusive bars and private apartments. Many people who frequented Kirsmer’s lived with their parents and worked ordinary jobs.

Rice Park, which became Saint Paul’s first public space in 1849, was a popular cruising ground in the 1940s, a time when homosexuality was illegal, making looking for gay sex risky. Brown himself refers to the park as “The Last Chance.”³⁸ In his chapter on the 1946 Winter Carnival, an annual Saint Paul festival still held today, Brown describes the festive atmosphere as a free-for-all, with many out-of-town queers descending on Kirsmer’s. The chapter follows Red, a Kirsmer’s regular, who was caught fucking in a car in Rice Park. The criminal act was covered in the local newspaper the next day, eventually leading to Red losing his job; he never returned to Kirsmer’s. Brown goes on to describe Red’s sexual partner that evening, noting how the law treated the apparent normative partner:

"Red’s partner that night, the drunk he was caught fucking, turned out to be a married man with four kids. He was one of those poor, anonymous men who haunted Rice Park—where Red had picked him up—only in the dead of night, even in the chill of winter, and only when they were drunk enough to later claim that they didn’t know what was happening. The married man escaped with a fine. The law had decided that he was the victim."³⁹

A decade later, the park underwent a transformation. By the end of the 1950s, the Women’s Institute of Saint Paul lobbied for its beautification, which entailed installing a brick plaza and fountain in place of foliage.⁴⁰ The removal of a natural visible cover made cruising in the park impossible. Cruising migrated out of downtown Saint Paul into other, more peripheral locations.⁴¹⁴²⁴³

At first glance, Ecolab seems relatively concerned about the environment we all share. Over the last decade and half, Ecolab has acquired both Upstream and Downstream oil production companies through a myriad of mergers, spin offs, and both direct and indirect subsidiaries.⁴⁴ Nalco Holding Co (now Nalco Water) in 2011, a chemical company notorious for having produced the oil dispersant Corexit 9500 and 9257 that was used in the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico.⁴⁵ Their now indirect subsidiary Champion X, originally acquired as Champion Technologies in 2012, has long produced proprietary drilling equipment for Deepwater Horizon oil projects across the world.⁴⁶ The alarming profit cycle between producing proprietary drilling equipment and the chemicals that are used in both oil maintenance and cleanup operations, take on a particular importance in the Twin Cities, which often appears removed from global oil operations.

During Ecolab’s 100-year anniversary last year, hosted in Rice Park, the company announced a $2 million investment to build a green space outside its headquarters in downtown Saint Paul. The current concrete roundabout would be transformed to include trees, native landscape, and benches to encourage community gathering.⁴⁷ Ecolab CEO Christophe Beck said the proposed beautification project intends to both celebrate the company’s 100 years of growth and “the ongoing connection between our people, our communities and our environment.”⁴⁸

Between the beautification of Rice Park and Ecolab’s proposed greenspace, the cyclical and imperial nature of progress comes into view. Beautification projects are framed as revitalizing, regardless of those displaced, and favor the corporate and state entities that implement and benefit from them. Visibility also plays its role; the invisibility of the destruction reaped by Ecolab’s oil-exploratory and oil-dispersant products versus the clarity of good publicity for Ecolab’s new greenspace and queer corporate inclusion. I advocate for an urgency of unlearning this flavor of progress. The subjects, communities, and histories that evade this type of progressivism need to be preserved and removed from the public’s prying eyes.

I was told the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II survived the fire at the 19 Bar. I wonder if she will still be there when the bar reopens. Will the renovation introduce windows into the bar’s architecture? Sunlight would wash out the dive bar, casting beer-soaked carpets in sobering clarity, its neon glow extinguished. As I and others bide our time for the bar to reopen, many of us will temporarily migrate to other watering holes. Waiting to see what new form the bar will take, we may acknowledge a sense of loss in the interim. The core of the 19 Bar, the bartenders and regulars who have grown to depend on its community, hangs in the balance.▪︎