Leon’s Backroom, a gay bar in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood that has operated since 1957, is temporarily closing following the death of longtime owner Ron Singer earlier this month.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday, July 15, Baltimore’s oldest gay bar announced that it would open from 4 to 9 p.m. for “one final, special shift” before closing temporarily. Staff said they would try to reopen the bar as quickly as possible.
Leon’s said in an earlier social media post that it was accepting only cash as staff navigated the transition and worked to keep the business operating, according to The Baltimore Banner.
Neither post offered an estimated reopening date.
According to its website, Leon’s Backroom, located at 227 W. Chase St., operated daily from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. The bar regularly hosted karaoke nights and drag shows and offered daily drink specials.
According to Baltimore NBC affiliate WBAL, the bar said in a social media post that Singer, who died on July 7 at age 66, “made Leon’s a place so many people were proud to call home.” Each year, he hosted a Thanksgiving dinner at the bar, offering a free meal to anyone with nowhere else to go.
Singer, who owned the bar for 20 years, told WBAL that the tradition began after he learned why one of his bartenders had volunteered to work on Thanksgiving.
“I asked him more and more questions and found out a lot of the guys here don’t have anywhere to go — be it broken families, be it part of the LGBTQ community, a lot of single people out there — so I provided, for the first time, the first Thanksgiving meal,” Singer told WBAL at the time. “It’s the right thing to do and there is a lot of wrong in this world, so if I could just do just a little bit right, that’s what it’s all about.”
A report from the Wanda Alston Foundation and the LGBTQ+ Politics Research Initiative at Loyola Marymount University finds that many LGBTQ young adults in D.C. are struggling with housing costs, financial instability, mental health challenges, and feelings of isolation.
The "Out & Counted Research Report," based on a survey of 304 LGBTQ young adults, aged 18 to 30, living in Washington, D.C., highlights several challenges facing the community and identifies areas where government agencies and local nonprofits may need to provide additional support.
A new report from SafeHome.org, a home and personal security assessment firm, ranked all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on how safe they are for the LGBTQ community.
Thirteen states earned "A" grades for LGBTQ safety based on their comprehensive pro-equality laws and low rates of hate crimes against LGBTQ people. At the other end of the spectrum, six states received "F" grades due to discriminatory laws and high rates of hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people.
The rankings were based on a composite score combining a law score and a hate crime score, which were translated into a final letter grade.
The Malaysian government is following through on a pledge to replace references to LGBTQ identity with the term "budaya songsang," which translates as "deviant culture."
In February, Marhamah Rosli, the deputy minister in the Prime Minister's Department (Religious Affairs), argued that replacing "LGBT" with "budaya songsang" in public discourse and on social media would prevent online algorithms from surfacing LGBTQ content and, in turn, prevent the "normalization" of queer culture.
"The more we utter, write, or state , the more 'pop-out' content related to it will appear," she said. "Without realizing it, we are promoting the culture unknowingly."
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