The scene in the 50/60/70s
1955
?At the time the bars were fabulous - in the fifties and sixties, all the bars were fabulous. There were still a lot of American bars, still a lot of people who drank cocktails in those days, gin and tonics I suppose. There was the Imperial up Temple Street, it had an American cocktail bar, fabulous bar, really super and the bar stewards were sympathetic, to say the least, but just occasionally there would be unpleasantnesses. Opposite there was an old black and white building, the Trocadero, that was very gay and the Temple Bar in Temple Street where the front of the old New Street Station used to be. Wonderful hotel, fabulous hotel. It was favoured by the reporters, press people, and us, of course, and we graced the premises and those went for ages and we used to go between the three. The Temple Bar was quite an elegant bar, it was full of lively intelligent people not like reporters today who just think up an answer rather than investigate. ?I did wander between the three of them during the course of a Saturday evening and then go up to the Grosvenor, the hotel and the private club on the Hagley Road. I think the whole quality has changed now ? and I haven?t been in these bars since I came back, I keep promising myself I?ll go. It was all pulled down for these concrete things they call the Bullring Centre now. The Bullring Centre, in fact, St Martins, there used to be a great sweeping road that went right around up into New Street.?
?When we were courting that (the Bullring) was just being built because we walked along this road which was just sand and gravel. I?m not sure we shouldn?t have been on it but we walked over this road being built up to go and see My Fair Lady which had just arrived in Birmingham at one of the big theatres and I remember walking, forty years ago.?
?Gay men did drink pints, of course they did, but I never did. I might manage a half of lager but it was that period when lager was a little bit suspicious, it was a new fangled thing, quite frivolous, yes. So you?d ask for half a lager but sometimes you?d get a long look which was very peculiar, now you wouldn?t think about it, would you? It?s the way of the world. No, I used to drink cocktails, I was very posey in those days and I do recall everybody smoked, everybody including me, everybody smoked. So some places if they weren't maintained properly, some places would be very smoky?.
?By the 1970s the gay bars weren?t seedy. Early sixties they were certainly behind boarded up windows, yes, and that was an unfortunate time but then we were all having a bad time before the Wolfenden Report and that was a real watershed. That helped, it didn?t help the licensing to any great degree, a JP is not going to issue a license to a gay bar, certainly not in the mid sixties. They were coming out of all that nonsense by the seventies but I?m not proficient enough or knowledgeable enough to pass too much comment on that.?
Contributed by: Robin McGarry, 66