Long Beach LGBTQ History, The Naval Port's Queer Aftermath

When the Navy demobilized after World War Two, hundreds of thousands of servicemen came through the ports and bases of Southern California on their way back to civilian life. Most of them went home. Some of them did not. Among those who stayed were gay men who had, during the war, found something they had not expected: community. In the barracks and on the ships, away from the surveillance of small-town America, they had found other men like themselves. When the war ended and the Navy told them to go home, some of them looked at the prospect of returning to places where their lives would have been invisible and unlivable, and they stayed near the water instead.

Long Beach, with its Naval Station and its harbor, became one of the earliest concentrated gay communities on the West Coast. What the Historical Society of Long Beach and the Long Beach Post have documented is that the leather culture which took root here in the late nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties was not merely a coincidence of geography. It was a deliberate adaptation of the only identity framework these men knew: military masculine codes, stripped of their institutional context and reclaimed as something new. Gay identity in post-war Long Beach did not arrive dressed in the effeminate stereotypes of pre-war culture. It arrived in work boots and denim, and it built bars on Broadway.

The Mineshaft on Broadway has been operating as a leather bar since nineteen seventy-two. That continuity spans more than fifty years of history in a single address: the years when gay men in Navy-adjacent Long Beach were subject to regular police entrapment, bar raids, and the criminalization of gay public life; the AIDS epidemic that devastated the community in the nineteen eighties and nineties; the gradual legal recognition of rights that accelerated after two thousand.

The Broadway corridor remains Long Beach's gayborhood today. The bars are still there. The community that built them came to this city because the Navy brought them close and the Navy's discharge papers sent them out, and some of them, reading the alternative clearly, chose to stay.