One Thing or Another Podcast #67: A Conversation with Professor and Author Lucas Hilderbrand on his New Book, ‘The Bars Are Ours’
Fasten your headphones for a conversation with Professor Lucas Hilderbrand, whose latest book, The Bars Are Ours, offers a meticulously researched, scholarly and always engaging look at the history of gay bars and their place in queer culture over the decades. We talk about his life, his career, and his dedication to a subject that is as significant as ever.
About Lucas Hilderbrand
Lucas Hilderbrand is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, also published by Duke University Press, and Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic.
Hilderbrand lives in Los Angeles and teaches film and media, visual, and queer studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has written on the pleasures and politics of video bootlegging, the mediations of queer memory, and the ambiguities of experimental documentary.
He is the author of the books The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After (2023), Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic (2013), and Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (2009), as well as numerous essays and articles.
He is also Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California Irvine.
You can visit his faculty page here. Faculty page
Gay bars have operated as the most visible institutions of the LGBTQ+ community in the United States for the better part of a century, from before gay liberation until after their assumed obsolescence. In The Bars Are Ours Lucas Hilderbrand offers a panoramic history of gay bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures. Hilderbrand cruises from leather in Chicago and drag in Kansas City to activism against gentrification in Boston and racial discrimination in Atlanta; from New York City’s bathhouses, sex clubs, and discos and Houston’s legendary bar Mary’s to the alternative scenes that reimagined queer nightlife in San Francisco and Latinx venues in Los Angeles. The Bars Are Ours explores these local sites—with additional stops in Denver, Detroit, Seattle, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Orlando, as well as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Texas—to demonstrate the intoxicating, even world-making roles that bars have played in queer public life across the country.
Published by Duke University Press, November 21, 2023
“In his historical opus, Hilderbrand makes a comprehensive study of the history of gay bars in America from 1960 to the present day. Hilderbrand’s take on the subject doesn’t shirk from looking at the bad as well as the good. In the early days, gay bars were a seedy affair, usually operated by non-gay organized crime. Later, even as more gay people assumed ownership of the bars, many of those owners were of questionable character. But as the community evolved, so did the bars, becoming more crucial contributors to the building of a diverse, supportive, and positive community.” — Booklist
