It’s 12:30 a.m. on a Saturday, and regulars are packed like sardines on the dance floor at Cocktail Mary. Beneath 20 disco balls, in the thick of fog and a crowd of sequins, rainbows, shimmer, ripped jeans and septum rings, Portland’s LGBTQ+ community is celebrating the queer bar’s last days at the base of Munjoy Hill.

It’s the final Loverboi, Mary’s signature dance party, and DJ Ben Spalding is spinning the event’s signature song, “Broken Flowers,” by Danny L Harle.

Demetri Kirchberg hears the first verse and rushes to the dance floor. Kirchberg wraps his arms around a friend and they share a friendly kiss as they’re swarmed by more dancers. The space has meant a lot to Kirchberg over the years.

“Cocktail Mary has been a place of free expression — of queer joy to the nth degree, an oasis in hard times,” he said.

Cocktail Mary poured her last drinks, served her last plates of “fridge pasta” and locked the front doors for good on Tuesday, Jan. 28, five years after it opened.

It was the latest of a handful of gay bars in Maine’s biggest city to have shuttered over the last 40 years, even as the state’s LGBTQ+ population has grown. 

Now, once again, a no-frills, warm, worn-in spot on the other side of town is the last capital-g Gay Bar in the city — and among the last in the state.

Blackstones has endured its fair share of financial hardships since it opened in 1987. The universal — recessions, the pandemic and rising costs of doing business in Portland. And the unique, like the HIV/AIDS epidemic that dealt devastating blows to the queer community, and repeated homophobic vandalism that kept the front window boarded up for nearly 30 years, until a manager declared in 2019 that “we’re at a point now where the bar is safe.”

What has allowed Blackstones to buck the narrative of Portland’s other gay bars? How has it stayed afloat when its peers sunk? Managers, patrons and academics say it comes down to the dedication of its lovingly loyal regulars.

“Blackstones is a second home for people who don’t have families of their own,” said longtime bartender Keith Bennett, eyes welling up with tears.

And that’s the gas in the engine.

ALL THEIR LOVE TO GIVE

Just off Longfellow Square in the West End, Blackstones’ bartop was surrounded by regulars on a recent weekday at 5 p.m., an hour after it opened. Two men were playing pool, three played cribbage in a corner and a group of friends laughed over mugs of rum-soda. People sitting at the bar grabbed treats and handed them out the door when they saw dogs and their owners stop out front.

These days, Blackstones is a magical cocktail. There are sparkly ingredients from each corner of the LGBTQ+ community — though the older gay community is still the strongest taste.

Drag queens get dolled up every week to host trivia and karaoke. The Harbormasters of Maine, a leather social club, holds regular events. There are weekly pool tournaments and watch parties for new episodes of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” There are potlucks on Super Bowl Sunday and Christmas. And, of course, Blackstones explodes during Pride Month, sometimes leaving a line of hopefuls down the block, waiting to get in.

Danielle Dior, Portland’s queen of queens, strolled in, shoulders covered in a fur coat, on a recent Wednesday night to kick off trivia night with a lip-synced rendition of Diana Ross’ cover of “I Will Survive.”

Tipping culture is standard at drag shows. For the House Mother of Portland, they will give it all. She strutted across the room, stroking the cheeks of familiar faces and grabbing the dollar bills patrons waved in the air.

When it came time for the trivia, Dior presented a mix of questions that were silly, campy, academic, Maine-themed and topical. Many were about her favorite basketball team, the Boston Celtics. (In between questions, she begged the crowd to answer quickly so she could run home and catch that night’s game.)

A regular came out victorious once all was said and done. And that regular followed his usual routine — buying a round for the bar with the $70 he won.

Then, more people flooded inside, hugged acquaintances, surrounded the pool table and filled up all the bar stools.

The marquee signs from five of Portland’s former gay bars line Blackstones’ walls and quietly tell the story of what the city’s queer community has been through.

PIECES OF THEIR BROKEN HEARTS

Gay bars have come and gone in Portland. The first known one arrived in 1967, when Roland Labbe opened Roland’s Tavern on Forest Avenue.

“For a long time, that was really the only way that gay people could meet each other. That was the social and cultural public space,” said Wendy Chapkis, a University of Southern Maine professor who has studied gay bars across Maine. “Gay bars really are important, not just to our individual story, but to our collective story.”

Queer people would travel far — even from Aroostook County — to find solace, community and a true sense of belonging in these spaces.

By the 1990s, there were at least five queer bars across the city. There were discotheques, nightclubs, a lesbian bar and a leather bar.

But the demand for these spaces began to drop over the next two decades. Queer people began finding alternative ways to build community outside of bar culture, Chapkis said. They could meet each other online (specifically on dating apps), at queer events and at dedicated spaces like downtown Portland’s Equality Community Center, which opened in 2016.

Chapkis said it became increasingly difficult for bars to draw in enough customers from an already limited population. And in Portland, where rents continue to soar, staying open became even harder.

Around 73,700 people, or 6.8% of the adult population, identified as LGBTQ+ in Maine as of 2021, according to data from the Williams Institute at UCLA. That’s up from 4.9% in 2017.

Some say that as other straight spaces have become more accepting, the need for dedicated queer bars has become less urgent.

Chapkis, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, vehemently disagrees.

“You can’t go to the Old Port, hit on the person next to you and start flirting in a straight bar. It would be a very uncomfortable situation, probably for everybody involved,” they said. “It’s one thing to feel safe from gay bashing. But that’s a different claim than feeling safe and welcome — knowing you’re going to be embraced in your community space.”

Roland’s Tavern burned down in a fire in 1981 that officials determined to be arson.

And nearly the rest of Portland’s LGBTQ+ nightlife scene had shut down by the end of the 2010s: the Underground, Styxx, Limelight, Cycles, The One-Way and Sisters.

Cocktail Mary, branded as a “queer bar,” filled some of that gap in late 2019. But she was smacked in the face with the pandemic shutdown months later and never quite recovered. Around one-third of 300 independent bars, restaurants and cafes in Portland shared a similar fate.

“Mary has never been profitable,” owner Isaac James MacDougal said. “That has never been in the cards for her.”

ALL THE STRENGTH THEY HAD

Make no mistake: Blackstones doesn’t have some magical ability to circumvent challenges. The bar has struggled, and battled crises, over the years.

In the first few years, its windows were repeatedly smashed in. The cost of countering vandalism became too much to bear; managers eventually boarded it up in 1991.

During the 2008 economic crisis, the former owner could no longer afford to keep a manager on staff. Joshua “JR” Robinson, who led the bar at the time, didn’t leave. Instead, he took a demotion — and a pay cut. But he and the rest of the staff picked up as much of the slack as they could. When the designated cleaner was laid off, the bartenders all became cleaners. When the owner needed help with bookkeeping, historically handled by the manager, Robinson jumped back in to the role.

“I didn’t ask for anything extra. It was a matter of helping each other, because we were kind of a family,” Robinson said. “And we still are a big family, including our regular customers. The community looks out for each other.”

A few factors have helped keep it afloat. Blackstones has the advantage of a lower overhead. It’s smaller than some of the shuttered nightclubs like Styxx, which struggled to fill the dance floor on weeknights. And, Robinson said, the landlords have been very amenable over the years to keep Blackstones alive.

It’s also not entirely hard to keep sales moving. Blackstones’ drinks are — to put it bluntly — cheap and strong. A tequila sunrise costs just $7 in a town where going out can break the bank.

But much like tipping Dior or buying a round for the bar, the spirit of generosity and dedication plays a starring role, too.

When Blackstones shut down at the start of the pandemic, the community raised $25,000 in two weeks.

And people love to lend a hand, even when there are no fires to put out.

For $55 a year, over 50 patrons pay to be in a “mug club.” They each have a mug handed to them when they order their drink. All of that money goes toward yearly upkeep like routine maintenance.

There aren’t personal special perks to being in the club — no guarantee to free drinks or a fast-pass to the front of the line. It’s just a porcelain mug.

“People really want to see the success of this bar because they believe in that community,” Robinson said.

LONG AS THEY KNOW HOW TO LOVE

This isn’t all to say that Blackstones has a permanent place in Portland — nor that it’s immune from any future crises that may come its way.

Longtime bartender Keith Bennet, former bar manager Carl Currie and Robinson all said that Blackstones must continue evolving with the times to survive.

The bar has struggled with making all people feel welcome to walk through its doors. Some queer people have taken issue with its predominantly white, gay male clientele, and Currie said that has contributed to a sense of toxicity. Transphobic and racist comments have been regularly made.

But things began changing in the late 2010s, in large part thanks to Blackstones’ in-house DJ.

Most nights, Theo Greene sits on his throne at the far end of the bar, phone hooked up to the speakers playing an assemblage of iconic gay hits, old and new.

Greene is the chair of the sociology department at Bowdoin College, where he has taught about gender, sexuality, urbanism and culture since 2015. Green has written about queer geography across the country — and is now writing two books centered on Blackstones and Portland’s queer community at large.

Greene has seen Blackstones go through a massive transformation since moving to Maine 10 years ago. It’s a change he partly led. As a Black man and academic, Greene said clients and bar staff, including Currie, have informally appointed him as the mediator between Portland’s Black, Indigenous and people of color community and the older, white and cisgender clientele. He’s helped educate regulars. And he’s worked with Blackstones staff to find effective ways for the bar to commit to diversity and inclusion.

“The complexity of the space shifted from a bar of a lot of longtime regulars to this group of young people that have a very different set of politics and cultural practices. That really jolted this place in a lot of ways,” Greene said. “There’s now these interesting cross-generational conversations and connections that have been happening in the bar.”

Greene said there are small details on an average night that reflect the remarkable change Blackstones has been through.

“You know how the place has changed because we shifted from Diana Ross to Cardi B,” he joked, as a player in that change.

There are still other bars in Portland that people consider unofficial queer spaces, like the Jewel Box, Flask and Geno’s Rock Club. And many queer groups have shifted to hosting pop-up events at regular establishments, including bar-takeover Guerrilla Queer Bar and Club 302. MacDougal will resurrect Mary for her first pop-up event — a Loverboi dance party, as it turns out — at the Jewel Box this Friday.

But pop-ups don’t carry the label or stability of brick-and-mortar establishments like Blackstones.

“This place is the last of its breed,” Greene said over the blare of music and laughter. “People would not let Blackstones go quietly.”

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