This March, Alibi Lounge temporarily closed due to the coronavirus. “We want to have places where we feel like we can identify with the culture, with the atmosphere, with the sound, with the lights, with the music, with the people that go to these places,” he said. Minko said he’s proud of what he created: a place where LGBTQ+ people in Harlem can go to feel “automatically accepted, understood, and embraced.” By June 2016, he officially opened Alibi Lounge’s doors. Though Minko’s primary career was in law, he had experience opening bars in partnership with others. “ I walked about 20, 30, blocks, and I didn’t see anything that represented the LGBT image whatsoever.” I fell in love with my street,” Minko said. Minko, who is originally from Gabon, opened Alibi after moving to the neighborhood in 2015. The Harlem-based establishment is reportedly the last Black-owned gay bar in New York City.
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“I was wondering, was it worth it?”īut after a prolific GoFundMe campaign and what he describes as a renewed sense of responsibility, Minko said Alibi Lounge is thriving, even in the middle of a pandemic. “I was 75% done with the business,” Minko said to NowThis. “It’s important to have this historical record, so we can do better.When the coronavirus temporarily shuttered businesses across the country, Alexi Minko was nearly ready to give up on his bar, Alibi Lounge. “The inhumanity and the vitriol in the language was striking, to say the least,” Mr. The penalties included shutdowns ranging from five to 240 days 10 bars lost liquor licenses altogether, and were closed.Īnd that may be just the tip of the iceberg.Īn unknown number of bars were likely targeted but shielded from enforcement because of ties to organized-crime factions prevalent in the middle and late 1900s. Ray Lamboy, a deputy attorney general at the A.B.C., and his team eventually unearthed 126 actions against 104 bars. Still, it took weeks to pore through the electronic records using keywords. The enforcement records, known as bulletins and originally published in “musty old books,” were digitized two years ago, he said. Graziano, the director of the state’s alcoholic beverage control division. That made the slurs and disdainful references to gay patrons, discovered over the last two months in state records, even more revolting, said James B. Grewal’s acknowledgment of systemic discrimination that dates to an era well before the modern gay rights movement was seen as groundbreaking by historians and gay rights organizations.Ī Key West reunion she held three years ago in New Jersey drew 400 people.
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The apology was considered momentous, if overdue.īut Mr. Two years ago, the commissioner of the New York Police Department apologized for a violent 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn, a clash that galvanized the gay rights movement. residents follows other moments of reckoning over the abuse of a population that was routinely and unfairly singled out by the authorities. New Jersey’s decision to grapple with its past mistreatment of L.G.B.T.Q. “The public,” he added, “needed to know that we hold ourselves accountable for our own failings.”
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“For 35 - probably more - years, this had a chilling effect on bars letting in gay patrons,” Mr. Grewal, the state’s top law enforcement officer, offered a formal apology for the decades-old enforcement actions. And New Jersey’s attorney general, Gurbir S. On Tuesday, New Jersey acknowledged that painful history for the first time.Ī trove of records unearthed by the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control was released publicly online, providing a wrenching historical look into policies that spanned four decades.