![houston gay bars 80s and 90s san jacinto houston gay bars 80s and 90s san jacinto](https://img1.10bestmedia.com/Images/Photos/72061/p-brazos-river-bottom-club_55_660x440_201405301757.jpg)
![houston gay bars 80s and 90s san jacinto houston gay bars 80s and 90s san jacinto](https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/c8WR2j6WgrVq4aOBzcHryA/300s.jpg)
In its heyday it sported a “sleek” and “basically high-tech” dance floor “under a battery of blinking lights,” and…drum roll please…a game room.īig box retail has also apparently spelled doom for both forward-looking Echo Beach and nostalgic Rockabilly’s, an odd pairing of adjoining establishments anomalously situated on the frowsy corner of North Gessner and Kempwood. A CVS now occupies the Waugh at West Dallas address of Metropol, a “big sleek room with mirrors and a lot of vinyl booths” featuring “stylish customers who put on a real show.” Celebration, a Galleria-area disco on West Alabama is now a parking lot. Others have been vaporized, are as lost as the planet Alderaan. Then as now Anderson Fair was a folk / bluegrass club with uncomfortable chairs, and then there's soon-to-reopen Marfreless : “Definitely not a pick-up joint, this dimly-lit club has an upper tier lined with seductively soft sofas that we wouldn’t occupy with anyone we didn’t know quite well.” Hubba hubba. Two of the places seem more or less unchanged. Back then it was a hot-spot for “urban cowboys and preppies, post-college on up.” Who seemed easily impressed: “It’s easy to be loyal when the chips and salsa are always forthcoming from the kitchen in ample baskets.” The Carillon Center Sherlock’s Baker Street Pub still stands, but it seems unlikely that much of today’s bro-tastic clientele convenes there to discuss antiques, as the clientele of 1983 was reportedly wont to do. Sam’s on Richmond is now known as Sam’s Place (and adjoins the notorious Sam’s Boat). Rockefeller’s, then a showcase of “national and regional musical acts of every type,” is now a high-end function room. Yes, of the 25 bars and clubs listed, a few establishments remain, albeit most changed utterly in spirit. The Bayou City of 30 years ago might as well be Timbuktu, so strange and exotic were its ways. The past is also a different city, at least if the June 1983 Texas Monthly Houston listings / city guide is any indication. They say the past is a different country.