In the early hours of Valentine’s Day of 1988, Pittsburgh police raided Traveler’s Social Club, a private gay club in the city’s East Liberty neighborhood.
The nation was nearing the peak of the AIDS crisis, with more than 13,000 dead in the United States that year alone. By the end of 1988, over 40,000 lives had already been lost.
Ignorance and religious zealotry were the order of the day. The federal government had barely acknowledged the epidemic. Ronald Reagan had only just uttered the word “AIDS” the year prior. When the disease was first identified in 1981, the government allocated a grand total of $200,000 to fight it.
It was against this backdrop of institutional cruelty and public despair that the police visited Traveler’s on a trumped-up liquor code enforcement action. They beat patrons, shouted homophobic slurs, and threw everyone out into the cold and dark of Hamilton Avenue.
In the aftermath of the raid, Pittsburgh’s gay community organized and fought back. The owner of the club and three patrons filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, Traveler’s Social Club v. City of Pittsburgh, alleging unlawful entry, excessive force, and homophobic abuse.
The attention brought by the case would expedite Traveler’s decline, as well as hasten the disappearance of queer social clubs from Pittsburgh’s urban landscape.
But the act of taking that fight to court, in the midst of crisis and under the weight of so much grief, was a remarkable act of courage.
Today, we find community elsewhere. We celebrate in well-lit bars with large plate-glass windows. We play on gay sports leagues. And we come together as a community in our public parks and city streets during Pride. Even these ways of being together in public are changing, as so much of queer social life has moved from the physical to the digital.
In 2020, during another moment of profound national reckoning, the City of Pittsburgh created the LGBTQIA+ Commission. The Commission serves as a sign of both how far we have come, but also as a reminder of how new our visibility remains. The Commission represents a new kind of gathering space: one rooted in public accountability and civic participation. It is in its early years, still becoming.
Our community has always had to adapt, building and rebuilding in the face of unimaginable loss. Spaces disappear, but the need to gather, to be seen, and to be safe never goes away.
In retrospect, Traveler’s Social Club v. City of Pittsburgh may look like a lost cause. The court sided with the city. The club closed. And yet, there is something uniquely queer and eminently brave about fighting for dignity in the middle of a disaster when the odds of success are low.
It’s about saying “we deserve better” even as the world tells you you’re disposable. In 1988, in this very city, the Pittsburgh LGBTQ community showed up in court to demand recognition and respect.
We are once again living through a moment of erasure and threat. The Supreme Court has greenlit a ban on transgender Americans serving in the military. The Trump administration has threatened to strip education funding from states like Maine simply for letting trans students play on sports teams. And a recent police raid of a well-known Oakland gay bar during a drag performance felt retro (and not in a cute, campy way).
And yet we are still here. We are still finding one another, in ways old and new. We are still building community. And we are still showing up, not just online, but in the streets, in our institutions, and yes, at Pride.
Pride is not just a celebration. It is also an act of memorialization. It is not enough to assume that progress cannot be reversed. Current events speak otherwise.
If Traveler’s taught us anything, it’s this: even in our worst hour, we can still find the strength to say “no,” to stand up, be counted, and come together.
Because even when it feels like we are losing, we are still here, still finding joy. And that is always worth showing up for.
Happy Pride, Pittsburgh.
City of Pittsburgh LGBTQIA+ Commission
