to your cadaver city.
What Happens at the Woodward
Detroit, MI
AARON K. FOLEY
A former coworker of mine posted a photo of herself on Facebook with a bruised, swollen eye, and cuts on her face still fresh. Shortly after came another status saying she had been hit in the face with a bottle during a fight. And then after that, another status saying that it had happened at The Woodward and, according to her, the staff had not been helpful when she lodged a complaint.
How a cisgender, heterosexual woman got caught in a bar fight at a gay bar should be a mystery, but not in Detroit. She had posted that others had told her about The Woodward, and “that’s what happens there.” Those folks, unfortunately, are right. That is how it is at The Woodward Cocktail Bar, located at the intersection of Grand Boulevard—we call it “the boulevard”—and Woodward Avenue just a few miles north of now-bustling downtown Detroit.
As a black gay man, The Woodward, which largely caters to men (and once a week, women) like me, is supposed to be my scene. I’ve been gay-clubbing and bar-hopping in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, even as far away as Milan and Melbourne, and there’s no place quite like home. (Well, except maybe Atlanta.) I resist the word “urban” at all costs when it comes to describing anything black. It’s what the bar is described as when compared to other gay bars in Metro Detroit that play top 40 music. The Woodward plays hip-hop and R&B, and not just the generics. It plays eastside Detroit hood shit, hustle—a very specific Detroit-style brand of line dancing, trap, jit, baby-making jams from ten years ago that still sizzle, and, on specific days, old school from way back in the day. There are no dance remixes of Adele. There are house remixes of Kelly Price.
It is the hub for Detroit’s black gays, and perhaps the last time a white gay was there—except for the charming Russian behind the bar—was when, on a whim, I brought along the one I was dating at the time. (People stared at us crazy, by the way—My bad.) The drinks, despite being made with liquors found anywhere, are unusually strong, and have reached mythical status in their city—never more than two if you want to make it out alive. And speaking of the bar, it famously only takes cash, even in the age of Square and other such money-exchange methods. The younger gays are on the dance floor in one room, while the older gays are in the front room at the bar. All ages can be found smoking weed on the patio.
I’ve flirted here, and hooked up later, as a single man. One of my exes flirted here, and likely hooked up later now that I think about it, while we were together. I once ran into his cousin here coked out of his mind. I’ve ran into guys who, like me, were closeted in high school. I would see regulars here for years who’d turn up dead later, announced via Facebook. While working in the mayor’s office of Detroit, I brought our very-recognizable-in-the-public-eye chief of staff here for the first time. Another co-worker I took for the first time learned the hard way about what happens after two drinks. Everyone’s got a Woodward story about the good times. Everyone’s also got a story about the time they had to evacuate the club because of a fight, got caught in the middle of a melee in progress or the stampede out, or, once in my case and more than once in many others’, dodged bullets from gunfire outside.
We’ve got a culture of violence at The Woodward that everyone’s quietly accepted since, well, as long as I can remember. It’s not like it happens every single night. It doesn’t. But there’s always the risk of a fight breaking out on the dance floor—or in one of the parking lots—over some dumb shit. “He was looking at my man.” “He stepped on my shoe.” “He think he cute.” “He owes me money.” There’s never a good reason. It’s just how it is. It may be the strong-as-hell drinks. It may be because we’re from Detroit, a city that for all its greatness, has been mired in violence for as long as anybody, young or old, at the club has been alive. It may be petty gay drama. But whether we accept it or not, our relationship with The Woodward is complicated.
I think about where The Woodward fits into Detroit’s larger story a lot. As a majority black city where, for decades, a significant part of that population has lived in poverty, it can sometimes be survival of the fittest. You have no choice but to be forgiving of people who have always been disenfranchised and put into circumstances out of their control. If black Americans have always had the short end of the stick during our time in this country, many Detroiters have had nothing at all to grasp onto. So we fight, physically. We grow up knowing how to fight for our lives, and in the case of many gay men, perhaps knowing how to fight for that before having to defend yourself against someone calling you a fag. It’s just the way it’s been in Detroit, and that carries over to The Woodward.
I don’t think, however, The Woodward has kept up with the change in LGBTQ culture around it. At a time when the community has moved more toward community in the face of adversity, even if that community is, frankly, still fractured along racial lines, it seems more and more that The Woodward prides itself on being reflective of Detroit and only Detroit—to a fault. So much of a fault that we just look away from the fights and come back the next weekend. Except now, Detroit feels like it’s moving on, seeing a resurgence after years of decline. And there’s a larger conversation about the changing demographics of the city that’s happening alongside this renewal.
For all its faults, The Woodward is very much Old Detroit. People have never fought at the new gay bar downtown by the RenCen, the first new gay bar to open in the city—and actually last for more than a year—in more than a decade. But that bar is also very downtown, and often very white. There’s something nostalgic about a bar that only takes cash when everywhere else is striving toward Apple Pay, but in a city where many people may not even have the means to open a bank account, it somehow feels accessible. Another gay male coworker of mine notes the history of the pre-fighting Woodward, about how back in the ‘80s and well into the ‘90s, it was a space where the kinds of house music that Madonna and other musicians would take mainstream first flourished, and how that history should be preserved in the face of gentrification, which may or may not be, depending on who you talk to, rapidly moving in The Woodward’s direction.
The Woodward sits at the end of the QLine, a much-derided light rail that runs 3.3 miles in each direction from the center of downtown to the edge of New Center where the bar is. Despite many criticisms of the train itself—it’s slow, it malfunctions, it’s generally faster to take a bus, ride a scooter or even walk—the property values along the route have risen. More new housing and retail are being built along Woodward. The old coney island across the street, from where those bullets I once dodged flew out when a guy fired his gun at another guy and broke the plate glass window, has closed. There are more white people in New Center than I’ve ever seen in People still pack The Woodward night after night. But a common horror story in Detroit is longtime businesses shuttering or changing identity when a landlord buys out, or prices out, a tenant. I tried to contact the owner or a manager of The Woodward to find out where they stand, but getting a hold of that information is a challenge. Half the time someone might pick up the phone, half the time they’d say call back another time. But then, I think about the fights.
Sometimes people say to keep Detroit as Old Detroit is to keep as many elements of Old Detroit there as possible—including our violence.
I’ve joked on Twitter, the same way people told my old co-worker who got her eye busted open, that there’s always a fight at The Woodward. Part of that is self-deprecation as a member of Detroit’s turbulent black LGBTQ community. But another part of that is defense, in a weird way. What would Detroit be without The Woodward? Would this place become another stale top-40 gay bar that, like that infamous one in Chicago and probably everywhere else, explicitly bans hip-hop as a subtle way to keep the black people out? Would it even be a gay bar at all and just become another overpriced cocktail bar with drinks made with fresh herbs, Japanese whiskeys and revived spirits du jour? Do we, or I, worry too much about the fights because of what
