Robert “Lucky” Johns passed away peacefully on the morning of June 18th, 2014. He was born to Italian-American parents in Pittsburgh’s Northside in 1935, at which time his mother nicknamed him “Fortunato.” “I’ve been Lucky all my life,” he said. The charismatic Johns was influential for forty years, helping to form Pittsburgh’s gay and lesbian community.
Except for his military service, Lucky spent his entire life in Pittsburgh. Working in bars and restaurants in the 1950s and ‘60s, he formed alliances with other gay men and eventually altered the ‘twilight world’ that gay men and lesbians inhabited.
Johns opened the city’s first gay social club, the Transportation Club or “T.C.” in 1967, at a time when commercial establishments were prohibited from serving known homosexuals. While there were always sympathetic bars and nightspots, Johns’s clubs – the T. C. Club, The House of Tilden, Travelers, and the eponymous Real Luck Café — became sanctuaries for Pittsburgh’ gay community for almost forty years. In its heyday, his clubs boasted 30,000 members across the tri-state area.
Johns’s work for the gay community extended well beyond the clubs he established. Along with other bar owners, he helped produce numerous community events including annual picnics for the LGBT community, and provided seed money for gay and lesbian social services, including the Lambda Foundation, the Tavern Guild, and the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. He is survived by the community he helped create.
Johns is also the subject of “Lucky After Dark,” the first inaugural show produced by the Pittsburgh Queer History Project. Harrison Apple, the Project’s curator said: “The bars were there before anything else, and Lucky was the key player in that world for decades. We owe him a great deal.” The Project is now collecting and archiving the material left by Johns.
A celebration of life for Robert “Lucky” Johns will be held Wednesday, July 16 at Donnie’s Place at 1226 Herron Ave., Pittsburgh from 5-8 PM
