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"This Is It will soon be seeking your services." "Wood paneling and wall carpet purveyors beware," Schneider added cryptically. "We are fully committed to an expansion so precise and perfect that you’d never know the bar had even been expanded." "We will maintain the integrity and aesthetic of the original bar, while creating an exciting new performance and dance space for our customers," said George Schneider, co-owner of This is It. Details are forthcoming, but the vision and commitment are clear. For so many, many reasons, this is a triumph not only for the bar itself but for the greater community.Īs This Is It honors its past 50 years with an action-packed weekend schedule, its owners have announced – stop the presses! – ambitious plans to expand at its current address. Since 1968, this Cathedral Square classic has been a consistent LGBTQ landmark, making it one of the top 10 longest-running gay bars in the nation, and quite possibly one of the top five. Staff, guests and visiting dignitaries – including Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett – will mix and mingle at the jubilee of the summer. Wells St., celebrates a golden anniversary of national historic importance. Andrew’s cross, but that’s our fetish area.This weekend, This is It, 418 E.
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At the back of those rooms, there is a fetish area so we have 10 fetish rooms that have shackles on the double beds and slings in all of those rooms. On the first floor right now, it’s rooms and lockers. There was a 15-member hot tub down there that’s been closed… showers. I don’t know, it’s the only steam room I always ever in so I don’t know if it was the largest but we said it. We used to say it was the largest steam room in the Midwest. Nowadays what’s left in the basement, there is a wet area and a very, very large steam room. It was one of our winners Tom out of Hamburg, Germany that came here and said, “Oh, this is great. Leather, we actually moved the notion of using condoms from the United States to Europe.
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We brought in condoms and from here they spread out to the bars. When AIDS hit and health departments in other areas of the country were closing bathhouses or removing doors from the rooms, our reaction was to contact the City Health Department and work very closely with them. In fact, Chuck underwrote they’re mobile vans so that we could take the testing we were doing here out to the bars, not that we would take it, but they would take the testing out to the bars. RELATED | 10 Things I Learned From Working in a Gay BathhouseĮven pre-AIDS, we did STD testing out of here what would become Howard Brown really got its start here. The uniqueness is that you were doing a show but you were still inside of a bathhouse where strippers could strip naked and we did that up until probably four years ago. Bistro closed in ’93 and the room was returned to Man’s Country and we started with male strippers and porn stars. We had shows on the stage your Divine, Boy George, Village People, all of the disco divas like Thelma Houston and Pamela Stanley. And from ’87 to ’93, it would see a thousand people on a Friday or Saturday night. In 1987, in a reaction to the drop in business due to AIDS, this room was carved into Bistro 2 which was a dance bar. We had I think the best sound system in the city and we had DJs and lights and we were the bar that wasn’t a bar so you could stay here 24 hours if you wanted. This room was the after party if you’ve done in any of the gay bars in the city you’re liable to be here after that bar closed. In the original Man’s Country days, so we’re going back to the ’70s and ’80s, we did entertainment four nights a week out of this room. There was entertainment that was going on. So we had sunrooms and there was a snack bar. There would be a number of things to do other than just to come have sex. You could come here for a day or two days. He opened this with the notion that it would be like a country club. And this was a place where you could go and meet someone that you knew wanted to do the things that you wanted to do. It was a place where you could go and find somebody to hook up with pre-app days, nowadays you can do it on your phone, but back then you had to go somewhere and meet someone. We’ve transcribed the entire interview with Ehemann here:įrom the gay community standpoint, Man’s Country represented when it opened a place where you could go and be free. Thankfully for us, the Tribune filmed their tour and it provides a nice bit of queer history reflective of a time when bathhouses served a meaningful purpose for gay men to be around people just like them.