This story is part of a series at them. memorializing LGBTQ+ spaces that have shut down amid the COVID-19 pandemic, while also highlighting other businesses that are struggling to survive. Read more from the Queer Spaces Project here.
The first time John Robinson visited the Bike Stop, he was so intimidated that he held his friend’s hand for comfort. A four-story building located in Philadelphia’s bustling gayborhood, visitors enter through an alleyway with a dumpster on one side and a sparsely attended massage parlor on the other. Staffers say the space, which was a lesbian bar and a drag club before it became a leather bar in 1982, carries with it the spirits of its storied history but also actual ghosts. Closing up after a late shift, as the lore goes, may be peppered with the sound unexplained footsteps from the floors above.
But Robinson said that despite his initial trepidation, the bar almost instantly felt like home. As a “much larger guy” at the age of 22, Robinson said that he “didn’t fit the mold” expected at many other gay spaces, but what he liked about Bike Stop is that it welcomed the “freaks and the geeks.” He and his friend went back every night that week, and he eventually started bartending there.
“I started going there all the time,” Robinson told them. “It didn’t matter if it was five o’clock in the afternoon or if it was eight o’clock at night. It was just a crowd that I could feel comfortable with.”
These experiences are extremely commonplace among the clientele who have frequented the Bike Stop over its 38 years as the city’s premiere leather club. Although its weekly underwear parties and dimly lit basement have a reputation for being cruisey, Andrew Boyask, a regular at the bar for nearly two decades, admires the bar’s commitment to body and sex positivity, as well as racial equity. “The attention on perfect, white male bodies that is foregrounded in most gay spaces might exist there, but there’s also plenty of room for other body types, like mine,” he said. “I felt like I could show myself off, and people were instantly responsive.”
Jay Orne, an assistant professor at Drexel University who studied queer space for their 2017 book Boystown, said that Bike Stop is the kind of bar where they could show up one night “wearing a dress out for the first time” and then the next evening in a harness and a jockstrap. As a nonbinary person, it’s the rare leather space where they said they feel fully encouraged to bring their full selves and be embraced for it.
