From the McDonald’s emblazoned with a “Livin’ My Truth” banner to the fierce drag brunches at Urban Mo’s and the “3-finger pour, fab eats and sassy service” at the girl-friendly Gossip Grill, Hillcrest is a national epicenter of queer dining.
“If there’s a hot spot for gay restaurants today, it’s San Diego,” writes a New York Times journalist in a new book titled “Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants.”
This isn’t new. Late-night diners and breakfast joints have brought the local queer community together since long before Stonewall, serving as welcoming spaces to flirt, gossip, and gay out.
As the annual San Diego Pride Parade nears this weekend, here are questions and answers about local gay dining’s colorful and flavorful history. Stay tuned for tales of French fries and gravy at “Gay Denny’s,” the postwar downtown eatery where gay men gathered but couldn’t hold hands, and the diner called Brians’ named after two owners named – you guessed it — Brian.
What the Heck Is a Gay Restaurant?
Depending on whom you talk to, it could be a restaurant that’s popular among the queer community, has an LGBTQ owner, or is just mighty festive. Erik Piepenburg, the author of the book “Dining Out,” has his own definition, one that’s based on “who’s eating there and why.” As as he explained in an interview, “gay restaurants are restaurants where most of the people eating there are gay.”
They might be gay from dawn until dusk, or they could turn queer after the bars close when patrons show up in nose rings and feather boas. Whenever the gays happen to gather, the restaurants are always places for safety and connection even for those dining alone, as San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria learned at a tender age.
Gloria, the first openly gay man to be elected mayor of one of America’s 25 largest cities, remembers heading to Hillcrest as an anxious but determined 16 year old in the early 1990s.
One day, he passed his driver’s exam at the DMV near his Clairemont home, got into his parents’ Honda Accord, and drove straight to Hillcrest.
“That’s what you would do if you’re a young gay boy who’s looking for freedom,” he said in an interview. “I didn’t have any business going into a bar, so I parked, went into City Deli, sat down, and had a BLT.”
There was one problem: He forgot his wallet.
“I was fully prepared to wash every dish and clean the bathroom.” But co-owner Michael Wright let him go home and come back to pay, which Gloria did immediately.
“It was a perfect moment, being initiated to a community that I’d always be a part of,” Gloria said. “Michael extended me the kind of grace and care that wasn’t required but is what our community does. It was such a positive orientation that I’m telling you this story all these 30 years later.”
Are There Rules at Gay Restaurants?
No. They’re open and affirming even when straight people stroll in. There’s no queer secret handshake or gay ID check at the door, no testing of anyone’s skills at sashaying.
In fact, gay restaurants are less fussy than the gay bar scene, places where you can actually let down your hair (or your platinum wig).
“At a gay restaurant, you can actually hear people, actually have conversations,” Piepenburg said. “And you can cry at a restaurant. You really don’t want to be the queen crying at a gay bar.”
When Did Gay-Friendly Dining Get Its Start Here?
World War II brought plenty of gay men and lesbians to San Diego, where they found gay-friendly bars and restaurants in downtown. The authors of a sensational 1952 bestseller called “USA Confidential” complained that local sailors patronized dozens of “fairy dives” full of “prancing misfits in peekaboo blouses, with marcelled [hot-curled] hair and rouged faces.”
Many of joints were bars, but some served food too. Bradley’s, a posh eatery-turned-pizza joint, was known as a place where “after the dinner crowd started thinning out, you might be able to meet a sailor in the bar,” said local gay historian Walt Meyer. The restaurant building later vanished to make way for the Horton Plaza shopping center (RIP).
At the Brass Rail restaurant, located in the ornate and now-defunct Orpheum Theatre building at Sixth Avenue and B Street, “the gays would start to come in at five-thirty…,” former owner Lou Arko recalled to the San Diego Reader. “Then, at eight or eight-thirty, the piano would start. We had a woman playing, her name was Vera, and she played all kinds of old-fashioned songs — show tunes. Everyone would participate, and she was a good draw.”
Gay men had to be careful, however. To avoid trouble from the police, the restaurant “did require that you could not keep your hands under the table if you were sitting next to another man,” Arko said. “They had to be on the table.”
A sense of safety was a crucial draw for gay restaurants even into the late 20th century.
“If you were looking for something to eat, you would try to go to a place that either advertised in the paper or your friends heard about it. Or you went with a group so you’d feel protected,” recalled retired architect Charles Kaminski.
When Did Hillcrest Become a Gay Dining Wonderland?
The Brass Rail moved to Hillcrest in the 1960s, turned into a bar, and became a prime mover in the rise of San Diego’s “gayborhood.” The bar continues to reign at Fifth and Robinson Avenues with a (slightly) new name: The Rail.
Prior to the 1970s, Hillcrest was a working-class neighborhood with plenty of senior residents. As the gay rights movement began, local gays started moving in, restoring Victorian-era homes and opening stores and restaurants.
The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were “the golden age of gay dining when windows weren’t blacked out, there might be a pride flags in the window, and gay restaurants advertised in local gay newspapers,” said Piepenburg, the author.
Landmark Hillcrest restaurants appeared around that era: Topsy’s diner, which became Brians’ American Eatery, owned by two gay men named Brian, hence the appropriately placed apostrophe. (It’s now Great Maple.) Hamburger Mary’s, part of a national chain. (It’s now Urban Mo’s.) City Deli, a diner at Sixth and University Avenues that closed in 2013 and is now a salon.
The 1980s also gave gay restaurants a new role as the AIDS pandemic set in.
“During the worst years of the crisis, restaurants became chapels and makeshift memorials, places where you could remember friends who had died,” Piepenburg said. They were also places for activist groups such as ACT UP to organize, he said.
What’s With the ‘Gay Denny’s’?
San Diego isn’t big on 24-hour dining, so it’s long been hard to find a restaurant that’s open past midnight. Enter the always-open Denny’s in North Park on El Cajon Boulevard, which is forever slinging hot coffee and Moons Over My Hammy.
Writer and musician David Klowden hung out at the Denny’s when he was a student at Patrick Henry High in the 1980s.
“Everybody called it Gay Denny’s, gay or straight,” he recalled. “It was place for queerness and weirdness of all types to converge at a time when it was dangerous to be a punk rocker or a gay person.”
Every night the Denny’s would get packed starting at midnight until 4 a.m. “You’d have people with dyed black hair and eyeliner, drag queens, and punk kids acting up and eating French fries with gravy,” he said. “It was a very tolerant space. It was boisterous, but I never saw a fight.”
Years later, Klowden and friends created a band called Gay Denny’s. “We’d all been around in the eighties, and we were asked to play at a party. We said we needed a name that evokes that time period. Someone came up with Gay Denny’s, and we were all instantly, ‘That’s perfect.’”
How Is the Local Gay Dining Scene Doing?
Gay bars have been in decline for years thanks to the rise of online dating. But gay dining are still thriving in San Diego, which is home to the San Diego Lesbian Supper Club, a Gentleman of Leisure dining group “for mature gay men and their admirers,” and a Black Tie Club chapter for gay men who “enjoy mixing and mingling over cocktails, exquisite dinners, and delicious wines.”
As for restaurants, Hillcrest boasts insideOUT, Baja Betty’s, Crest Cafe, and Gossip Grill, a busy bar and restaurant, is one of fewer than 30 lesbian bars that remain in the country, down from hundreds in the past. And North Park has Lips, a landmark drag queen dinner/brunch theater.
For his book, Piepenburg marveled at – and dined in — the multitude of gay restaurants along a single street, University Avenue. “It was shocking,” he said. “There’s no other place like it.”
For more about San Diego’s LGBTQ history, check our previous articles about local gay life at mid-century, a landmark 1970s criminal case that spurred gay activists to action, the role of AIDS in city politics, and the work of lesbian historian Lillian Faderman. Plus: Meet San Diego’s early LGBTQ pioneers (our contributor Randy Dotinga profiled one of them for The Washington Post), learn about local LGBTQ historic sites, and read about San Diego’s crucial role in the fight over a 1978 state ballot initiative to ban gay teachers.