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.”
The Alabama Public Library Service Board of Directors, which oversees the state’s public libraries, has voted to remove books discussing transgender identities from teen and children’s sections statewide.
On November 20 -- which coincided with Transgender Day of Remembrance -- the board approved an addition to an existing rule requiring youth sections to be free of "sexually explicit or other material deemed inappropriate." The amended rule now specifies that materials discussing "transgender procedures, gender ideology, or the concept of more than two biological genders" are inappropriate for library sections aimed at children and teens.
A Wisconsin man is maintaining his innocence after being accused of using Grindr to carry out a sinister catfishing scheme against another man.
Matthew Huebschman, 32, of Appleton, pleaded not guilty to a single charge of stalking during a December 15 hearing before Outagamie County Judge Carrie Schneider, according to Seehafer News.
Police allege that Huebschman used the gay dating app Grindr to impersonate the victim and invite men to the victim’s home without his knowledge, then watched from a nearby location as the men arrived.
When Martha Nell Smith was a child, she was given a book called The Golden Treasury of Poetry. "I was a nerdy kid, I liked to read," the 72-year-old academic says, adding, "I also liked to play. I was a very sporty kid too. I was a tomboy."
The book contained several poems by Emily Dickinson. "I thought these look so simple, but when you think about it, they are really weird," she says. "But you could say that about almost any Dickinson poem."
Smith recounts the long and winding path that led her to become one of the foremost experts on Emily Dickinson, with a particular focus on the poet's secretly romance-laden letters to her sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson.
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