That’s the conception—but of course, the city has always had a vibrant gay nightlife scene

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

We’re standing in the Crest, outwardly a nondescript little cinderblock of a bear bar on an industrial stretch of Cherry Avenue near Long Beach’s border with Paramount. Inside, there’s a fireplace, and out back a waterfall.

What’s a bear bar? It’s a gay or mixed (gay and lesbian) bar catering to larger, hirsute gentlemen—but in practice this just means not your two-percent body fat WeHo scenester. In Long Beach, at least on this Sunday afternoon, bears look just like you and I.

“Do I make you nervous?” a man named Don Smith has just asked me. “Sometimes straight people get a little nervous around gay people.” Why would that happen? Maybe because Smith has also asked if I’m just here professionally.

Then he explains how the gay-straight line blurs for some straight, married guys like myself: “Dump the bitch and make the switch,” Smith says, darting away to buy another beer. And there it is. I could totally dump the [my loving wife] and make the switch! Or not.

I found out about the Crest from a guy at the Mine Shaft, which, with nearly 40 years under its belt, is possibly—possibly—the Long Beach gay bar. (Its lesbian counterpart might—might—be Club Broadway.)

Not that there weren’t other gay places before. In his excellent book, Bohemian Los Angeles: and the Making of Modern Politics, Daniel Hurewitz devotes several pages to Long Beach and a bathhouse at the Pike Amusement park, where he writes, “Undercover police arrested dozens of men found in compromising sexual situations . . . during their month-long sting” in 1914. A month? Really?

One of the men, a florist named Herbert Lowe, withstood the misdemeanor charges and was eventually acquitted. “Historian [Sharon] Ullman read the acquittal as an expression of fear,” Hurewitz writes. “The Long Beach jurors, she argued, did not convict Lowe because he appeared so normal, so un-fairy-like.”

Un-fairy-like? How very 1914 of them.

In 2008, however, we’re gathered at the Crest for Lynn Lyons’ weekly barbecue. She’s a retired aerospace worker who worked on the Apollo project. Also? An Imperial Court of Long Beach member, and a former Long Beach Miss Gay Pride. When I arrive, she’s explaining how she fell off a ladder while trying to hang a plant in her living room and landed on the TV. It hurts just hearing about it, but Lyons says she just rubbed on some Bengay and walked it off. Sending a man to the moon must harden your spirit.

“I’m here every Sunday and I do cook for the holidays—big meals,” says Lyons, who also cleans houses. “For St. Patrick’s Day, I do corned beef and cabbage, and a turkey on Thanksgiving, and then on Easter there’s a ham.”

It sounds great; it sounds like family—and it is. By the time I leave, the place is starting to fill and nearly every man, single or coupled, comes up and gives Lynn a hug.

“I get along real good with all the guys,” Lyons says. “I prefer it being mixed. I get in a lot of trouble with the girls at some of the girl bars.”

If people make one criticism of the modern Long Beach bar and club scene—and they do—it’s that business is down, down, down. There are various explanations why, the most sobering being that the advent of AIDS silenced a generation of partygoers.

“If those people were still alive, they’d still be bar people, but then you’d still have the advent of the Internet and online, so it would be different,” says Bill “Uncle Bill” McHugh, a Navy veteran and 21-year bartender at the Brit. McHugh lost his longtime partner to AIDS 10 years ago in December, he says over coffee. It’s 10:30 on a Sunday morning, and the Brit’s wallpapered, darkly-wooded interior is quiet and comforting.

McHugh divides the scene thusly: “The Executive Suite and Ripples are your dance bars, and then the Mine Shaft and the Brit are your neighborhood bars,” he says. “The Mine Shaft and the Sweetwater [Saloon]. And then the Falcon, but it hasn’t been here as long.”

But wait, there’s more: You also get the Crest, and Pistons on Artesia Boulevard (the latter, a leather/bear bar). For the ladies, there’s also Flux, a newish lesbian bar on Lakewood Boulevard in Bellflower. And on Fridays, the Executive Suite and Ripples switch—meaning that the Suite puts on a boys night, and Ripples hosts Deborah’s, for women.

“They flip-flop for a night, which I think is really interesting,” says Steve Sheldon, Downtown Long Beach Associates’ marketing and special events manager. “I enjoy going to boys’ night because it’s always a different mix of people; it’s always diverse. I feel like you can go out in Long Beach and not be surrounded by people who are just there to be seen.”

He’s not the only person who feels it.

“It’s the mystique of going out in LA, whereas Long Beach is . . . it does what Long Beach does best, which is just kind of kick back and relax,” says McLean Fahnestock, who is earning her Master’s in Fine Arts in sculpture at Cal State Long Beach. “You can have $8 beers in LA or you can have $3 beers in Long Beach.”

Or you can drink at home.

“’Cause gay is getting gray. I’ll be 50 next month. I have my partner, I want to be with him,” says Jim LaSota, who embodies the long-held assumption that Los Angeles is for partiers, Long Beach for partners. LaSota will celebrate 50 in the same place he marked turning 40: in Paris—this time, watching Celine Dion.

“We have a house, cats—a life. I see a big difference from when I came out in the ’70s. There was a statement to be made, and now there’s a life to be had,” LaSota says. “You try to go to Europe and nobody cares. I don’t even think acceptance and tolerance are the right words. It’s a melding.”

This might explain the fact that as we talk, there are just five drinkers in the Mine Shaft, a former biker bar that “came out” in the late 1960s or early 1970s (dates are hard to recall. Similarly, the Brit was once Sam’s Place, and Pistons was first Mike’s Corral, then Jim’s Corral). But then so might the fact that, while we’re drinking in the city’s “traditional” gay district—on Broadway, between Alamitos and Redondo avenues—it’s Wednesday afternoon.

“For a neighborhood bar, it’s not bad,” says Mine Shaft manager Todd Martin when I talk to him later. “The Mine Shaft is known all over the world. People come here to go to it, but I still think of it as a neighborhood bar.”

So maybe business is fine, which would explain why the owners of Ripples and the Executive Suite didn’t return my phone calls. Or maybe there are just other things to do, and other places to go—like the Long Beach Pink Party, a new Pride Weekend kickoff at Smooth’s Sports Grille, whose hosts include Sheldon and LBPost.com’s Robert Garcia.

“We’re trying to collaborate more with bars to do mixers on nights of the week when it’s not so busy,” says Kimberlee Woods, executive director of the Center, which provides the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered community everything from health to legal to social services. “In June, we have a mixer that we’re going to do with Christie’s for women, and we haven’t decided whether we’re going to do something comparable for men.”

That’s okay; the men can amuse themselves for one night. Says Sheldon: “One of my favorite things to do is to ride Segways on the beach.” Which makes sense when you think about it: This is Long Beach, and the beach has been here longer than any bar or club.

Tags: executive suite, lgbt, Long Beach, pride parade, rainbow row, ripples, the crest, the mine shaft