D.C. lost yet another LGBTQ nightlife venue on Tuesday with the announcement that Cobalt, located at 1639 R St. NW, has closed its doors for good.
Owner Eric Little confirmed the closure in a message posted to the club’s Facebook page.
“It’s no secret that the building that housed Cobalt and the adjacent property recently sold,” Little wrote. “With the combination of the sale of the buildings, the start of demolition, costly infrastructure repairs and upgrades that we would need to shoulder to remain open for the short remainder of our lease (without an opportunity to extend the lease) along with a slow decline in sales we decided it was the right time to close the business to focus on our other businesses and some personal family needs.”
Even prior to Little’s announcement, speculation about the club’s fate had swirled for weeks, and hit fever-pitch after a photo was posted to Facebook showing the club’s main entrance door with a sign reading “CLOSED FOR WATER PROLBEMS” (sic) posted on the glass.
In the Facebook post, Little thanked the customers and staff who contributed to the club during its two-decade run, saying he was proud of Cobalt’s legacy.
“The gay bar industry has been changing over the past few years with the popularity of dating apps, changing social norms, and pop-up parties/events at non-gay venues and we applaud these evolutions as positive progress,” Little wrote. “And it is our hope that patrons will encourage these businesses to support the greater LGBT community to continue the good work and social change that Cobalt and all of the many other gay bars, restaurants, and businesses (past and present) have worked so hard to achieve.
“We understand the property will be redeveloped into residential use and we wish the new building owners and future residents the best of success and hope that the buildings will bring them all as much joy and happiness as it has brought the entire Cobalt family.”
A Manhattan judge sentenced three men to decades in prison for their role in a scheme that led to the deaths of two gay men.
Jayqwan Hamilton, 37, Jacob Barroso, 32, and Robert DeMaio, 36, were found guilty of murder, robbery, and conspiracy in connection with the scheme. They used illicit substances to drug and incapacitate their victims, deploying facial recognition technology on victims' phones to access and drain their bank accounts.
The scheme, which ran from March 2021 to June 2022, resulted in the deaths of 25-year-old Julio Ramirez, a social worker, and John Umberger, a 33-year-old political consultant from Washington, D.C.
A transgender man in South Carolina claims he was accosted in a bar by staff, called anti-trans slurs, and arrested by police for using the women's restroom -- the very restroom that conservatives would typically argue he should use due to being assigned female at birth.
Luca Strobel, who posts on TikTok as @FulltimeCowboy, recently posted a pair of videos in which he recounted going to the Sand Dollar Social Club in Folly Beach on Friday, May 16, as a designated driver for a friend, Caroline Frady, who was at the bar.
Following a massive outcry from community members and politicians, the National Park Service has canceled its plans to close down the park at Dupont Circle, long considered the center of Washington, D.C.'s historically LGBTQ neighborhood.
On Monday, June 2, the National Park Service announced that the park at the center of Dupont Circler would be closed to the public from June 5 to June 9, which coincides with the apex of the WorldPride DC 2025 festivities, a global LGBTQ celebration D.C. is hosting for the first time.
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