Introductory Essay

by Ashleigh Williams, September 7, 2025

In 1964, the Guild Book Service of Washington, D.C. published the Guild Guide (also known as the International Guild Guide). This guidebo*ok operated much like the more well-known Negro Motorist Greenbook but where the Greenbook helped Black motorists safely navigate the Jim Crow South, the Guild Guide provided a list of establishments that were friendly, or at the very least tolerant, of gay customers. The guide was dependent on its readership to provide updates for any status changes on locations named in previous iterations and to send in new, detailed listings. The guide was just one of many Stonewall-era travel guides available in the 1950s and the early 1960s when there were distinct changes in the policing of LGBTQ+ individuals throughout the United States. While many state governments codified anti-queer legislation such as sodomy laws in the eighteenth century (i.e. Virginia, 1792), increased collaboration between local, state, and federal policing agencies in the mid-twentieth century resulted in a more robust legal framework by which “asocial individuals” were targeted. Police forces developed new methods to identify LGBTQ+ persons and their meeting spots, like the use of undercover agents and entrapment schemes. For example, between 1919 and 1921, the U.S. Navy carried out sting operations to root out “perverts” within their ranks that military authorities perceived as threats to naval discipline and readiness. Those sailors who were caught in uncompromising positions were arrested, jailed, and eventually dishonorably discharged. ¹ Throughout the next two decades, homosexuality increasingly became pathologized. Medical professionals labeled homosexuals as sex variants who could undergo electric shock therapy as a corrective for their supposed mental illness. ²

By the 1940s, massive demographic shifts within the United States drove societal change. Urban centers exploded from in-migration and highly populated areas offered LGBTQ+ individuals an opportunity to find community under the cover of anonymity. Homosexuality also increasingly became part of the larger discourse in the United States thanks to a few highly publicized court cases and newly published literature. ³ In the post-WWII period of heightened anxieties about the spread of communism fueled sex-crime, widespread panic led to a federal law that identified gay men as psychopaths. This law, coupled with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s explicit linkage of homosexuality to communism, conflated homosexuality with undesirable behavior. ⁴ As a result, state governments established language in their legal codes with the intent of excising sexual deviants from open society. Virginia, for example, added an addendum to a 1930s prohibition law that authorized the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Agency to revoke the liquor license of restaurants/bars that served or even employed “known homosexuals.” ⁵ Laws like these ultimately changed the form and function of policing so that bar raids, entrapment schemes, and violence towards the LGBTQ+ community were part of the new normal in many 1960s urban centers. Furthermore, the lack of specificity in the laws regarding punishment of gay sex gave local police carte blanche in their approach to law enforcement. Like the sodomy law, Virginia’s 1954 prohibition law was not frequently enforced. However, because homosexuality was still perceived as linked to obscenity, criminalization of the latter sanctioned the criminalization of the former. As long as the state of Virginia continued to criminalize same-sex sexual intimacy and the federal government upheld anti-sodomy rulings, the law continued to be utilized to discriminate against LGBTQ+ Virginians. ⁶

In this atmosphere of new discriminatory legislation and more coercive policing, travel guides like the Guild Guides were ways in which queer individuals could protect both themselves and their spaces. Historians generally acknowledge that the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement began with the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City. However, prior to and certainly during the 1970s and 1980s, many activists and organizations labored to bring LGBTQ+ civil liberties to the forefront of society in the United States. The two decades following the Stonewall Rebellion were especially perilous for queer individuals. The social and cultural changes of the 1960s resulted in a conservative backlash in which the Christian Right fought against gay rights. Southern states became particular battle grounds for these fights to take place. In Virginia, anti-gay legal challenges were met with the activism of groups like the Gay Alliance of Students at Virginia Commonwealth University (1974) or the Richmond Lesbian Feminist Organization (1975). As the LGBTQ+ movement gained speed in the 1970s, activists created many other organizations – some of which worked with national civil rights groups. Like other states across America, Virginia’s queer history and activism is attributed to the events/organizing that took place in the major urban areas. Additionally, many groups focused their attention on making changes on the state and national levels. While macro-level change was absolutely necessary, broadsweeping cultural change was slow to come. Thus, local activism was even more important as these types of changes impacted queer individuals within their communities daily.

Moreover, LGBTQ+ people could be found in many more places than simply cities. In fact, guidebooks like the Guild Guide encouraged the submission of entries throughout the entirety of the United States, to include suburban and rural locales. One Virginian example was Ruth’s Tea Room located about sixty miles west of Washington, D.C. Ruth Jackson, a Black Virginian woman, opened Ruth’s Tea Room in 1925 during the period of Jim Crow segregation. The restaurant became known to its patrons by the 1960s and 1970s for its incredibly accepting environment of all types of people, including Northern Virginia’s LGBTQ+ population. Ruth even hosted several cabarets throughout the month. Though less well-known than the restaurants featured in this project (i.e., Freddie’s Beach Bar or the French Quarter Cafe), the Guild Guide included Ruth’s Tea Room in multiple volumes as a safe haven for travelers – Black, queer, or otherwise. Attention to this restaurant has increased over the years because public historians and artists have worked together to push these types of overlooked stories to the forefront. ⁷ This project aims to do exactly that for Northern Virginia’s LGBTQ+ history. It challenges dominant narratives that center contributions to LGBTQ+ history in major urban centers to highlight the queer life and activism in NOVA’s suburban areas. ⁸ Our starting point was the discovery of a small bar’s major role in the defeat of Virginia’s 1950s homophobic prohibition law. The owner of the French Quarter Cafe, a new establishment in Alexandria, Virginia, faced potential shutdown in 1991 when an anti-LGBTQ+ would-be politician attempted to use the outdated law as a way to get rid of the restaurant. The bar and its co-plaintiffs in the civil rights case succeeded in overturning the damaging law. Local organizations, like the Alexandria Gay and Lesbian Community Association (AGLCA) were instrumental to Northern Virginia’s LGBTQ+ civil rights cause that eventually led to increased rights for Alexandria’s queer community in 1988. Outside the legal sphere, decades of activism in Alexandria, and more broadly, in the state of Virginia, meant that much more tolerance existed throughout the state by the end of the twentieth century.

Stories like these should be included in the history of Virginia, and thus more broadly, the history of the United States. This digital project comes at a time of deep-rooted political and social polarization in the United States. Though queer activists and community historians have continued to labor in the push for equal rights and social justice, LGBTQ+ rights have taken hits, particularly those protecting trans individuals. Our goal in presenting this history to the public is to accurately document all contributions to LGBTQ+ history. In doing so, the project hopes to build community in the Northern Virginia area and subverts recent attempts to erase queer history.

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