To help highlight these impacts, The Valentine will provide a thorough and entertaining history lesson with their upcoming Lesbian and Gay History bus tour of Richmond.

“We cover a fairly wide range of  history,”  said local LGBTQ historian Beth Marschak, who will be leading the tour along with The Valentine Director Bill Martin. ”Some of the earlier time period things may be new to people and folks who’ve lived in Richmond may have some knowledge or memory of {them} and there may be some people who don’t know any of it.”

The annual tour will be held the day after Virginia PrideFest, this Sunday. Over the course of three hours, tour attendees will explore significant places, events, and people that brought the local LGBTQ movement to where it is it today.

And Marschak ‘s isn’t only knowledgeable of Richmond’s LGBTQ movement, she helped define it and pioneer many of the community’s efforts.

As the founder of the Richmond Lesbian-Feminists about 40 years ago, Marschak was hired by the Virginia Coalition on Lesbian and Gay Rights as the first lobbyist at the General Assembly on behalf of LGBT issues. She also paved the way for the beginnings of LGBTQ rallies and festivals here, and is the author of the definitive LGBTQ history book in RVA, Lesbian and Gay Richmond.

On the tour, attendees can expect to hear about the literary and cafe society of the 1920s-40s, out musicians at the Hippodrome in Jackson Ward, early clubs and sports groups, and the rise of the LGBT rights movement.

“We’ll go up into Church Hill, people will see some of the neighborhoods that gay men and lesbians were sort of the pioneers in, the revitalization of Church Hill,” she said. “Were also see the location of the old Scandals nightclub, which was a real big gay spot.”

Guests will also see locations where bold women, who dressed in men’s clothing, helped serve as Civil War soldiers – some of the first inklings of a lesbian presence in Richmond.

“Shockoe Bottom was where one of the confederate prisons was where they had a number of women convicted of impersonating men, who were fighting for the union and also for the confederacy, for both sides,” she said. ”One of the people who was in that prison was Dr. Walker, who was the first commissioned woman in the U.S. Army.”

A marker at the Virginia State Capitol for Anna Maria Lane, the first documented female soldier from Virginia to fight in the Revolutionary War, is also scheduled on the list of historical stops.

The author, historian and LGBTQ activist also said the tour will make a stop at the Federal Reserve Bank which flew the rainbow flag during Pride Month in 2011 – the infamous flag, which stirred ire from conservative lawmakers, has since been donated to Martin’s  Valentine History Museum.

Richmond has been a part of some of the earliest rallies, events and advocacy for LGBTQ rights, according to Marschak. The first local gay rights rally, which she helped organize, was held in Monroe Park in 1977 and the first Richmond Pride Festival was held in 1979.

“The {17th Street} farmers market was one of the sites for several years of Pride events in Richmond,” she said.

Literary cafés, music venues and theaters will also make up a good portion of the sites that attendees will get to see and hear about on the tour.

“When Loews Theatre first opened on Grace Street, they showed a film with one of the few actors who was out at the time,” Marschak said.

The theater, which is now the Carpenter Theatre, was the first to show the silent film starring Billy Haines, a Hopewell native and the first openly gay actor in the 1920s and ’30s.

Photo of Loews courtesy of Carpenter Theatre, Cinema Treasures 

The Hippodrome is also a significant stop on the tour that made an impact during the 1930s and 40s.

“It’s really the only place left in Jackson Ward where the entertainers from Harlem would come down, and quite a few of them included lesbian and gay performers,” Marschak said. ”Women would perform wearing white tuxedos so that was a very cultural thing that was going on which at that time was predominately African American.”

Photo courtesy of Baskervill 

Early bars and restaurants in Richmond that were historically LGBTQ will also be a part of the trip.

“Eaton’s was there on Grace where the police building is now, that was a popular spot for predominantly men, in the’ 60s it was quite popular,” she said. ”At that time, most clubs would wither be gay men or lesbians.”

Over in Carytown, during the 1970s and ’80s, the area was packed with many LGBTQ bars and restaurants.

“At one time, [in] Carytown, there were eight or nine gay bars at a time,” she said. “Mom’s Siam used to be Christopher’s. One of the earliest lesbian bars was Nicki’s, which was across from the Byrd Theatre it was an Italian restaurant in the day, at night when you went there it said ‘Closed,’ you knocked on the door and they looked through the blinds and decided whether or not to let you in.”

The tour will also make stops at the old Broadway Café which was at one time located 938 W. Grace St. and was once Benny Sepul’s, a 1950s-era restaurant with a private back area for gay men and the old Renee’s, an early gay men’s restaurant inside the former Capitol Hotel building on North 8th Street. Renee’s had their ABC license suspended and was closed in 1969.

Check out more on those restaurants here.

Sites and events won’t be the only important mentions of the trip. What makes those events and sites so special is the people that were there to change and impact our history.

“We’ll look at where people lived, we’ll talk about Mary Wingfield Scott who was very active in the preservation of this movement,” she said. “She preserved Linden Row, if you look at the early books about Richmond preservation that had photographs of those things she was the one that put those together.”

“In some cases these will be people that you’ve heard of, but never realized their sexual orientation or gender identity,” she said referencing the founder of VCUarts and Lewis Ginter.

And since they’re coming up on their 40th Anniversary, the Valentine’s History Tour will discuss the importance of the Gay Student Alliance at VCU, and the lawsuit the group brought against the school in the 1974 case Gay Alliance of Students v. Matthews (the board of directors of VCU) when they were first denied space and support.

They won the initial ruling, which was then appealed until 1976 when the Federal Circuit Court ruled in favor of Gay Alliance of Students v. Matthews stating that Gay student groups must be allowed the same access to space and funding as other campus groups.

“That parallels other university activities, the University of Virginia, William and Mary, Virginia Tech so at this time there was organizing efforts across the commonwealth,” said Martin.

Marschak stressed that this tour is important for the community to learn who and what came before them, and that there is something for every member of the community.

“Here in Richmond it’s not necessarily part of the usual narrative,” she said. ”It’s important to know how you fit into the stream of history, this is one aspect of that. It’s good for people who are LGBTQ, its good for people who aren’t, its a way to a have a better knowledge what has come before ,what’s happening now, and what future possibilities are.”

The Valentine’s Lesbian and Gay History Richmond Bus Tour kicks off Sunday, Sept. 24 from 1 to 4 pm. The cost is $25 per person and $20 for Valentine Members and reservations are required you can call (804) 649-0711 ext. 301 to reserve your spot.

And you can Check out a deeper, more detailed look back at Richmond’s LGBTQ history in GayRVA’s article here.