A Guerilla Queer Bar event

The Washington Post reports that Guerilla, the LGBTQ group that hosts Guerilla Queer Bar parties in D.C., has retired. Over the past five years, the group pulled off 48 events in which groups of LGBTQ activists “invaded” a straight bar in the District for a night.

Now, the co-founders’ lives don’t allow them to plan enormous monthly parties anymore. The group threw its last party at Rhino on Friday, and celebrated their five years of success with lots of booze, “Single Ladies,” and Kenny Loggins.

It’s a shame they’re retiring, because they sound like a whole lot of fun. And what an obit!:

After five years, 43 bars, 48 events, and at least one instance of a guy whipping his shirt off and gyrating to Madonna in front of confused Georgetown University parents, it was time for a beloved gay and lesbian institution to end.

So on Friday night, an estimated 200 members of the GLBT community headed to Rhino Bar and Pumphouse for the District’s very last Guerilla Queer Bar, the friendliest of activist movements, in which gay men and lesbians descend on a typically “straight” bar for the evening and mingle among the regulars (motto: “We’re here! We’re queer! We want a beer!”).

Shirtless gyrating in Georgetown, you ask? Why yes, the group hit up Tombs during its lifetime, too.

Georgetown alumns do us proud, after the jump.

But best of all, Guerilla was the brainchild of a Georgetown Law student. Before he turned its leadership over to the people The Washington Post named as co-founders, Boaz Green had the idea to “shake things up” in the District. The Washington Blade writes:

Credit for the Washington social experiment goes to Georgetown Law student Boaz Green, who started the bar night a little more than a year ago at Saint Ex, a neighborhood bar near the gay up-and-coming U Street corridor.

In so doing, he revised a similar monthly experiment tried 10 years ago by Jarrett Barrios, now an openly gay state legislator in Massachusetts leading the fight for gay marraige, and Doug Hattaway, who was the spokesperson for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.

“I had been a little disappointed by the D.C. scene; it felt very homogeneous and segregated in many ways — age, gender, race, etc. I thought GQB would be a good way to shake things up a little,” Green said via e-mail from New York, where he is living for the summer.

Photo taken from Flickr user Circuitree under a Creative Commons license.

Update: Co-founder Christopher Trott is also a Georgetown (SFS `03) and Voice alumn! (Facebook, Voice site confirm).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Leisure, News, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.