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None of the butch narrators who participated in this study was ever prosecuted for cross-dressing, but several remember the anxiety they felt about going to the bars.
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After a short time Nancy gave up the lease on the Famous Door and opened the Psych-Out, which legally changed names several times throughout the 1970s but always referred to as the Psych-Out by patrons. At the time, the Twilight Lounge catered to both gays and lesbians however, when Nancy took it over lesbians predominated. The bar had originally opened as the Twilight Lounge Tavern. She subleased the Famous Door from a lesbian couple who had previously owned the Raven and the Aristocrat.
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Nancy, one of the narrators, entered into the lesbian bar business in 1969 when she took over the lease for a bar named the Famous Door. Memphis's first primarily lesbian bars opened in the late 1960s. However, even that history is buried in the location's subsequently more famous history as a gay male bar known as George's.įrom a book called Carryin On In the Lesbian and Gay South, specifically the chapter called " Softball and Alcohol : The Limits of Lesbian Community in Memphis from the 1940s through the 1960s" by Daneel Burring: Location: 1786 Madison, Memphis, Tennessee, USAĪs far as I can tell, Famous Door was a (predominatly) lesbian bar for only a few months in 1969. From the Famous Door's later incarnation as a gay