Because there wasn’t this much night life there was much at-home entertaining.” The late Buddy Markwell, who arrived in Broward in 1962, agreed. “People stuck together a lot more than they do know because they were more closeted. In spite of all that, Mitchell, now deceased, remembered the gay sixties and seventies as a simpler and friendlier time. They showed the negatives but people were recognized. “The police raided it, around 1965 or 1966, with TV cameras, TV coverage, the whole bit, and they showed pictures of people entering and leaving the club on TV. And there was one in Hollywood, Garth.” It was a time of frequent bar raids, like the one on Oakland Park’s “Val’s Catering Service,” which Mitchell witnessed from a distance.
“There was the Wine n’ Stein and the Zanzibar and a couple of others but way back then those were the two bars. When Jerry Mitchell came out in 1962, Broward County was not the trendy gay resort that it is today. Twenty-three years later, during LGBT History Month, the article still allows us to look back at Broward’s gay history in the days before we had groups like the Pride Center or communities like Wilton Manors, Oakland Park, or Palm-Aire. This article first appeared in 1994 as part of a series about South Florida LGBT history that was published in Miami’s The Weekly News (TWN).
