G Lounge

In late 1996, Michael McGrail, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York and experience in Corporate hospitality, including the kitchens of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, as well as private bars and restaurants, along with 4 others, decided to build a new kind of gay bar in NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood. They located a space on 19th Street, with a huge archway entrance owing to its original use as a horse stable. They completely gutted the space and built a cocktail lounge with a huge window filling the archway, which provided an open view of the bar’s interior, at a time in which all gay bars had darkened windows, and smelled of sweat, beer and desperation. Enigmatically named, “g” (the lower case letter g in Clarendon font), and styled after a high-end hotel cocktail lounge, with its light wood-paneled interior, comfortable seating on couches and ottomans, and a smattering of cocktail tables, “g” featured a single, large, stainless steel circular bar – which was really more of an oval shape – at its center, and a juice bar / protein drink station at the back, and it was an instant success. Always busy, a live DJ provided music every day from happy hour until closing. It was the kind of place one might bring co-workers, gay or not, for drinks after work, or as the dignified backdrop for a gay man or lesbian to bring parents to “come out,” or where so many members of the gay community would meet their future partners (and ex-partners) or begin what are now, life-long friendships. One local services agreement, counseling newly out members of the gay community-based organization counseling those who had recently come out, would refer them to g to commune with other gay folk in a clean, comfortable, dignified, but decidedly gay environment. In the very gay Chelsea neighborhood, g and then g lounge, was “safe space.” A place where people found community.