Gay bars staunton va
Social club provides a harmless space for the queer community
CHARLOTTESVILLE - It's just about dusk on a Friday night in Charlottesville. Across the street from Bodo's Bagel and adjacent to the Cavalier Diner is a night club.
You can't tell from the outside, though. There are some Pride flags waving out front, but there's just a door by an Asian market and a Mexican grocery on Emmet Street.
You enter a hallway on the first floor. The walls are gloomy, there are various lights strobing about as you head up a staircase giving off hues of purple, pink and blue.
There's a faint sound of music playing — various artists from Britney Spears and Whitney Houston to Gloria Gaynor and Spice Girls.
This is Impulse Gay Social Club.
Kevin Morris-Lewis came out to his family with open arms.
"I have a very loving family," he said.
Morris-Lewis grew up in an old Southern family.
"I had several family members that were very much against it, but they came around," he said. "But it wasn't them I was afraid of. We'd go to the clubs and beer bottles would be slung at us, our cars would receive
Waynesboro's gay social club opening soon downtown
WAYNESBORO - Angus Butcher said he and his partner Kevin Morris-Lewis walked up to their gay social club in Waynesboro to find something odd.
It was something covered by a large leaf.
"It was just so silly," Butcher said. "We walked in and there was a little leaf over this rainbow rock."
Lifting off the leaf they launch someone had painted a small rock — just big enough to fit in the palm of your hand — that had rainbow colors and the Impulse Waynesboro icon on it.
"It was meant for here," Butcher said. "I love it."
Waynesboro will be seeing a fresh gay social club opening this weekend thanks to the vision of the two men.
They have been working on Impulse Queer Social Club that is located on E. Main St. right across the South River from downtown Waynesboro near the City Cow, Gio's Treasures and the Boy's and Girls Club. The club is an off-shoot of their Charlottesville location.
The new and-over club is set to own its grand opening Saturday. For members, the event is free, but those who aren't would remunerate a $5 cover impose
Mary Baldwin alumnus Craig Byrnes used his time at MBU to work with the Gay Bear community, and he gave back with a flag.
There exists a common misconception that men did not study at Mary Baldwin University (then college) before the institution went co-ed in In fact, men contain been earning credits and degrees at Mary Baldwin since the s, when the Adult Degree Program (ADP) started providing an opportunity for higher teaching to the broader community.
Craig Byrnes is proof that men did not only study at Mary Baldwin – they did groundbreaking, necessary, and meaningful labor as an elongation of their ambition in the classroom.
Byrnes came to Mary Baldwin from Virginia Beach in While studying psychology through ADP, he worked at the Staunton McDonald’s.
For his degree, Byrnes knew he wanted to explore the Bear Collective – a growing subculture in the broader gay collective and a collective that Byrnes identified as a part of.
Defining a Bear can be a tricky task, since everyone in the community is welcome to identify themselves as they please. The community formed sometime in the s
In early , Hospice of the Piedmont needed help with a patient who had less than a month to live. The organization’s purpose, then and now, is to care for terminal patients, but this patient had AIDS, and AIDS patients were different.
By the end of , there were 10 reported AIDS cases in Charlottesville, 42 in Virginia. A year later, the total number in the declare had jumped to , and Hospice board member Jim Heilman began pondering the idea of a group devoted solely to their treatment. Given the hysteria and fear surrounding the disease, as well as how fast and miserably the patients died, AIDS cases required a unique kind of care. When a particularly horrific case came to the door in , Heilman called Blaise Spinelli, a year-old med tech at UVA, and asked him if he wanted to help.
As a medical technician at UVA, Blaise Spinelli saw the first local victims of the AIDS epidemic in the early ‘80s and helped establish the AIDS Services Group of Charlottesville in Photo: Billy Hunt
The patient was a young male in his mid- to lates, living outside of town with his sister and her husba