Gay bars lansing michigan
The Perfect Location For Your Event!
The Exchange is a great place to host your event! With a capacity of about 200 and two fantastic levels, this is the space for you. Along with great food from Veg Head (Fri and Sat 6-11) and drinks we also have Lansing’s best lounge area with contemporary leather couches, a fireplace, and fantastic view of the stage, establish in a casual but classy environment. The lounge is a great place for hanging out with friends or grooving on the dance floor.
Email Kate Bearup to set up a tour!
314 E Michigan Ave, Lansing, MI 48933
Kate Bearup | bearupka@gmail.com
Hours
Fri: 6-1, and Sat: 6-1
Also available throughout the week for private events
Music venue to breathe modern life downtown at former gay club, hookah lounge
Chloe Alverson
FRIDAY, Jan. 21 – A new music venue is coming to downtown Lansing in a 100-year-old building at 224 S. Washington Square. The entire project, including the purchase and renovation, is estimated to cost just over $900,000.
RBM Properties proposed the renovation to the building. The Lansing Economic Development Partnership — LEAP — approved a $136,500 loan for the project. Kevin Meyer, a managing member of the company, is now co-owners of the building with Scott Bell. Both Meyer and Bell work as promoters for music festivals, such as Common Ground and Breakaway.
The city and state still need to approve a liquor license.
The building is the former home of a hookah lounge and was once a accepted club spot. Club Paradise, which later became Club X-Cel, was a well-known gay bar during the 1990s. X-Cel nightclub was described on a Lansing bars webite as “young” and “fun,” offering “an atmosphere much closer to Chicago than to Lansing with a one-of-
East Lansing Progressive on LGBT Civil Rights but No Gay Bar in Town Limits
Forty-four years ago, the City of East Lansing was the first community in the United States to offer its gay citizens civil rights protection under law. But strangely enough, this progressive capital has never been dwelling to a gay bar.
Hart
Bruce Hart, a Los Angeles actor who appears in the digital series “Old Dogs & New Tricks”, attended Michigan State from 1977 to 1982. He said those years were a liberal time on campus and in the Lansing area, but none of the gay bars were in East Lansing. “There were three bars located in Lansing. And they were located in a fairly rough neighborhood. Going to a gay bar for the first period was incredible. I was on a date with a guy who had a car, which is probably why I dated him, and we went to Trammp’s in Lansing. It was both a bar and a disco. It had small move floor lined with mirrors. My first trip there the bar was having a drag show, another first for me. I could not believe these glamorous ladies were men, until they started talking. I didn't verb dr
Hidden, then and now
Todd Heywood
Retzloff
What they probably don’t know is that this was once home to Olsen’s, which during the 1950s was one the few Lansing bars serving the region’s persecuted and underground homosexual community.
It’s a footnote in a slice of Lansing culture largely lost in time, though slowly being resurrected by Tim Retzloff, an assistant professor of history and LGBTQ studies at MSU.
Retzloff, working with archive staff at the MSU Archives, uncovered a Feb 25, 1957, “sex deviation” report compiled by Ralph Ryal with the Michigan State University Police Department. The report reveals the oldest reference to a bar — Olsen’s — where gay men gathered to socialize.
An archival image of the Palador Cafe, 325 N. Washington Ave., in the late '30s or premature '40s. This location turned into Olsen's Bar in the mid-'50s and by the end of the decade had become the Clique Loung