The Marquette Social Club

---

The Marquette Social Club, Atlanta’s oldest LGBTQ+ entertainment establishment

Mr. Clifford Hunter established the Marquette Social Club on the west side of Hunter Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) in Atlanta, Georgia to provide a safe entertainment destination for Black patrons who were ignored by white establishments during the segregation of the Jim Crow era. It’s history and importance to the struggle for human rights is well documented.

As the Civil Rights Movement and its demonstrations came to Atlanta in the late 1960s, Hunter Street emerged as the “workplace of the Civil Rights Movement”. Its churches, soul food restaurants and lounges were legendary establishmentswhere civil rights leaders convened, conversed, strategized, and retreated to plan their tactical moves. All of these placeshave an important legacy: Frasier’s Cafe, Paschal’s Motor Lounge, the Busy Bee Cafe, West Hunter Street Baptist Church, Aleck’s Barbecue Heaven and the Marquette Social Club.

The Marquette was initially a straight establishment that did not attract a gay clientele. However, in the early 1970s, Mr. Hunter was approached by members of the LGBTQ+ community with an outcry that segregation and homophobia restricted them from having any safe places to congregate.

“The two worlds are utterly separate. This is not a matter of cultural isolation but of deliberate exclusion. The gay bars areowned and operated by whites and the policy is to keep blacks out,” documented Edmund White in States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, who reflected on the racial disparity of the black and white gay communities he visited in Atlanta during the 1970s.

“Most Black LGBTQ+ social experiences occurred at private parties or gatherings and in areas that LGBTQ+ people carved for themselves in straight bars and clubs” writes Atlanta historian Maria Saporta, in The Atlanta LGBT Historic Context, a report financed from the Historic Preservation Fund of the National Park Service.