Rainbow gay bar kansas city
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Pete's Pub is also mentioned in a March 1992 article, Women in Kansas City's Heritage.Ĭard for Pete's Pub. Donated by Evelyn Akers to GLAMA, the Gay & Lesbian Archive of Mid-America More information about Akers' scrapbook can be found here. The leaders of the group honored Akers for her leadership in the early years. In 2006, the International Gay Bowling Organization held its national tournament in Kansas City. The coed sports association lasted less than a decade, Akers says, but gay sports leagues proliferated. "Oh, if I had all the money I spent on booze, I'd be rich." We didn't have to be in the bars, though we usually ended up there." We always had something going on, something that was fun. "Then we went into the summer months, and we'd go to the park and do horseshoes. "In the wintertime, it was bowling and shuffleboard on Friday," she says. To gauge interest in different sports, she created a questionnaire, which was distributed in bars and churches that were popular in the gay community.
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But Akers, as president, kept things organized. The gay sports league was established over drinks on the upper floor of the Tent bar in 1982. That led Akers to spearhead a second mixed-gender endeavor: The Kansas City Co-Ed Sports Association. Everyone was really amazed that we got along so well." "Women and men did their own thing back then. "They were telling me how great we were in Kansas City," she says. At the founding meeting, Akers served as Kansas City's representative. The gathering led to the establishment of the International Gay Bowling Organization. In 1981, players in Pete's league traveled to Houston, Texas, for a national tournament. Kansas City wasn't the only town with a gay league.
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"Ron Thomas would wander through the bowlers, offering a sip of his drink he called 'shoe polish.' Only the brave or the drunk took him up on it." "Mission Bowl didn't have a liquor license, so David Dickerson, owner of the Tent, brought in a suitcase filled with bottles of vodka, bourbon, scotch, etc., so all you needed was a set-up from the snack bar," she writes. With 120 people packing the bowling alley, the league could close the doors to outsiders. Within three years, the league went from 16 to 30 teams. But I considered joining and it was one of the best things I have ever done."
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"Then my second thought was, 'What if someone sees me?' I went to the bars but shied away from being openly gay in public. "When I heard Pete was starting a 'gay' bowling league at first I was excited," she writes.
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Full names never appeared on the weekly league sheet. To protect the players, the name was vague: Pete's Mr. In 1974, Munhollon rolled out the idea of a gay bowling league. My friends and I always felt safe at Pete's - not that she wouldn't call you down if you did something she didn't like." It had to be operated as a private club with membership cards and someone on the door. "It wasn't easy to have a bar in a residential neighborhood, especially in Kansas. "Probably most of you that look at this book have never heard of Willine 'Pete' Munhollon," Akers writes. On the cover page of Akers' scrapbook is a card from Pete's Pub, an early lesbian bar that was later renamed Birds of a Feather. More than 100 pages brim with photographs of drag queens parading through bowling alleys and athletes drinking beer on the field. The cover is decorated with stickers of baseball bats and volleyballs. Her memories, packed into a thick binder, were another early donation to GLAMA. It was more underground because, you know, there were gay bashings." She struggles to suppress a giggle. "You didn't want people at work to know you were, and I didn't talk to my family about it. "When I first started out in this life, it was more or less underground," she says. The first sentence of her scrapbook admits: "History, to me, was never very interesting." She never considered herself an actor in local history.