Gay bars in louisville ky

When Big Bar opened up on May 1,Kevin Bryan and Jim Lunger never imagined it would become one of the most popular watering holes in the region. Some incredibly dramatic and traumatic in a good way things have gone down in the little square foot building over the past 10 years. With only square feet of usable space, the bar has somehow managed to develop a solid, regular crowd as well as participating in and putting on several events.

With Drag Race viewing parties, go-go dancers, karaoke, and DJs, the bar has had no lack of party hype. And why go home, when you could go bigger? Ten years ago today, on the Tuesday right before the Kentucky Derby, the tiny bar made its grand opening. In the spring ofBig Bar announced its plans to expand into the vacant building next to it.

The Wine Market that used to operate next bar closed louisville and left about 2, square feet of empty space. For those of you that have never been inside of the old Wine Market before, it has an elongated downstairs space with an elevated lounge above where the wine bar, now the all-inclusive alcohol bar, used to be.

Having access to a space of this type would allow for the Big Gay to become much more involved in community events as well as creating more room for new crowds to join the Big Bar family. Big Bar has been a safe space for many queer people over the years and the diversity within the crowd has risen tremendously over the years too.

But how exactly did the bar get its start? And how has it grown to such rapidly increasing popularity? Kevin Bryan grew up in Louisville and eventually left to go to college in Charleston, South Carolina. He then moved from there to Washington D. But clearly Charleston nor D. Upon his return, he took a job with his sister, Sally Clemons, who owns and runs the Highlands Tap Room.

He ended up working there for about three years before stumbling upon the space where Big Bar currently resides. From his years of experience at Tap Room, he was able to identify that there was a severe desire for more bars in the Highlands, and thirst-fully so for Queer ones.

They had the same frozen slushy machines as they do now, rotating those drink flavors out on occasion.

Established in 1962.

Well, sort of. They started with a machine that just had one frozen drink at a time for the first four years then they moved to a double drink machine. Hence, two flavors all the time now! Those frozen drinks may not seem like much to us nowadays but they were a huge game changer for bars back then.

On Wednesdays, they did karaoke, which tended to bring in a full crowd. In the beginning, they had something called Pandora Music. After that tragic period, they upgraded to music videos on iPods, which eventually turned into iPads and YouTube. The avidly growing party culture this small bar ensued in its origins brought about a current crowd favorite — the go-go boys.

The go-go dancers started a couple years after the bar opened and they were brought in regularly until COVID.