The importance of Kansas City’s LGBTQ haunts, bars and fighting for safe havens for all
Jeff Edmundson cut off the gas, shut off the water and unplugged all the appliances.
It was March 2020, and the 55-year-old co-owner of Hamburger Mary’s and Woody’s KC — he runs them with his husband, Eric Christensen — didn’t know whether the establishments would survive.
Final paychecks were handed to employees, along with armfuls of perishable food to take home as the queer bar and grille prepared to close as a result of the pandemic.
Silas Gardner, a server, was in tears.
Hamburger Mary’s is where he felt safe and seen. It’s where he felt like himself. Where, more than a year earlier, he came out as transgender.
Gardner began the process of transitioning in 2019, about six months later he came out. Roughly half a year after that, coronavirus began creeping into headlines.
“Without Mary’s I would have never transitioned,” Gardner said. “And I think a lot of people wouldn’t have either. So when the pandemic hit, it was, ‘where do you go from there?’”
He’s not alone. At Hamburger Mary’s, Gardner works with other transgender people who feel safe and seen, including his boyfriend, who is a cook.
Queer bars have been a part of Kansas City’s culture for decades, though they didn’t begin to gain visibility in Kansas City until the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, said Stuart Hinds, curator of the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America at UMKC.
“The history and the significance [of queer bars] is centered around the fact that it was a safe place for people to gather,” Hinds said.
Compared to the ‘80s and ‘90s, the footprint of queer bars across the city has greatly diminished, he said, contributing to the fact, in part, that people have found other places to meet as a community.
That makes establishments — homes, in a sense — like Hamburger Mary’s all the more important as they turn the lights on again.
A place to come out
Gardner grew up in rural Missouri, and among his sisters, he was always considered the tomboy.
In his early 20s, living at home and working as a certified nursing assistant, Gardner heard from a friend about an opening at a bar in Kansas City. He jumped at the opportunity.
Inside the purple, glittering walls of Hamburger Mary’s, with its iridescent atmosphere, Gardner could fully explore who he was.
Less than a year later he was out to his family. Not even a week had passed when Edmundson, who said about a third of his staff are transgender, sat Gardner down and asked if there was anything he wanted to share.
“Oh, I think I’m like, I’m 100% trans,” Gardner said.
Edmundson began to cry. Gardner did too.
It’s one of the reasons Edmundson and his business have been so important to Gardner, who said he believes Hamburger Mary’s has saved many people’s lives.
It’s why he couldn’t help but cry when the lights went dark, and why it was so difficult for LGBTQ communities across the country when the pandemic forced queer havens to close their doors.
“It’s important to me to provide a place for my employees to feel safe for who they are,” Edmondson said. “That they won’t ever be ridiculed for who they are.”
According to the Trevor Project’s 2021 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, more than 80% of the youth surveyed said COVID-19 made their living situation more stressful; 42% considered suicide.
Gardner tried taking his own life.
He was a short time into transitioning, still working part time as a certified nursing assistant and at Hamburger Mary’s.
But when Hamburger Mary’s closed for a stretch, Gardner took up full-time CNA work again, working 16 hour shifts, six days a week. He traveled a lot. The environment was usually far from queer-friendly. He continued cutting his hair short, binding his chest before heading to work.
“I very much was female-presenting, just to make everyone else comfortable,” he said.
His name tag was still etched with his “dead name” — the name assigned to him at birth.
Once, a nurse overseeing him asked if he was “a homosexual.”
He felt alone, demeaned and talked down to. He worried that if he came out as transgender, he might lose his job. So he didn’t correct people when they misgendered him.
“When you’re living your true self for so long, and then you have to go back, it’s like starting from the beginning, like I had never transitioned,” Gardner said.
During the pandemic lockdown, Gardner felt he had few other options.
Queers bars shutter across the country
A short time into the Kansas City lockdown, Ace Torrez, general manager at Woody’s KC at the time, sat near the business’s iconic rainbow steps, taking a break from a day of remodeling the bar’s customer-less interior.
Broadway Boulevard was eerily quiet. He feared that inside Woody’s he was curating a space that would never reopen. A queer time capsule of sorts.
Torrez had recently lost his father to COVID-19. Woody’s, where he’d worked for five years, was closed indefinitely. It felt like everything was falling apart.
Then he got a Facebook message from a stranger.
They were from a small Missouri town a few hours away. They wrote to Torrez about their hometown, where they felt they couldn’t be openly queer. For the past year, up until the pandemic, they had been making the drive to Woody’s once a week to take refuge. There, they didn’t have to fear being beaten up, spit on or thrown out.
“They felt like they found a family, they felt like they found a home, and they were really really sad, because they didn’t know what they were gonna do now that they didn’t have that space,” Torrez said.
It reminded him of his younger self, said Torrez, who grew up in rural Kansas. There was a time, decades ago, when he feared he’d die unhappy and unloved. Then he found a community.
As the messages continued rolling in, Torrez heard from people in southwest Missouri, northern Kansas and even Nebraska. They all told similar stories.
“If this proves anything,” he said. “These places are more than just a watering hole to get drunk, or to pick up someone to have sex with. These are community spaces.“
Across the country, many major cities have seen historic LGBTQ bars shutter, for now, for good. In Los Angeles, four iconic gay bars closed their doors forever. Lesbian bars around the country are becoming fewer in number and in New York, the financial future of the historic Stonewall Inn is threatened.
Torrez knows people who worked at now-defunct bars in other cities; he mourned the losses of the sacred spaces with them. At the same time, he knew he had to do everything he could to keep Kansas City’s institutions open.
Now, as vaccinations are readily available and mask mandates have lifted, it seems all of Kansas City’s LGBTQ bars and taverns survived the pandemic.
More work to be done
Gardner is back at work, serving hamburgers and drinks to the roaring crowds that fill in at the restaurant on Broadway Boulevard.
He’s started keeping his facial hair long. He’s rarely misgendered anymore.
During the day, Gardner is applying for nursing school. He hopes to change how the queer community is treated in the medical field, so that LGBTQ establishments aren’t the only places where the queer community feels safe working.
He’s the happiest he’s ever been.
“I like waking up now, I think that’s what happiness is for me,” Gardner said. “I know that I’m going to wake up the next morning. And I want to.”
Edmundson re-opened Hamburger Mary’s with people like Gardner in mind.
Though he got pushback when they opened their doors again in late May of 2020, he knew that staying closed longer could mean never re-opening. He understood the loss that could bring.
Edmundson grew up in the deep south of Georgia where he knew from a young age that he was gay. But he didn’t come out until much later in life, after he married a woman and had children.
Looking back, Edmundson said the bravest kid he knew was a schoolmate in Georgia who was openly gay, despite the constant beatings he took from his peers.
“So for me to help a younger generation who are dealing with the fear that I dealt with my whole life up until I was 40-something … “ he said, trailing off. “It becomes a gathering place, but hopefully also, besides just being able to go out and get together, it becomes a safe place.”
Still, however, those safe spaces don’t include everyone.
Korea Kelly, a Kansas City native and tireless advocate, has spent the last several decades fighting for resources and visibility for trans women of color.
Since 2008, at least 15 Black LGBTQ people have been killed across the metro, said Kelly, 42, who created the Trans Empowerment Society. Nine of the victims were trans women of color, she said.
Last year, a staggering number of violent fatal incidents against transgender and gender non-conforming people were reported, a record since the Human Rights Campaign began tracking the crimes in 2013. A majority were Black or brown transgender women. This year, at least 29 transgender or gender non-conforming people have been killed, according to the HRC.
Despite this, Kelly said, many programs and resources across Kansas City cater primarily to white queer people. That became even clearer to her when COVID hit.
“As a trans woman of color, we’re not involved in the bar scenes here,” Kelly said. “We don’t have an outlet here. We don’t have a place that we can actually call home.”
Edmundson agrees there is more work to be done. So does Justice Horn, vice chair of the Kansas City LGBTQ Commission.
Horn said local organizations are starting to break down silos and talk more about diversifying their businesses, transforming them from traditionally gay establishments to LGBTQ spaces.
“We’re not New York or Los Angeles,” Horn said. “We’re in Missouri, we’re in the Bible belt and we’re in the conservative Midwest. So I think it’s that much more important that we have spaces like this.”
This story was originally published July 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
