Today, Toledo boasts five - soon to be six - LGBT-friendly bars. At the time it closed in 1997, The Scenic Bar, at the corner of Erie and Monroe Streets, was the oldest gay bar in Ohio. Then and nowĪ lot has changed with LGBT issues in the 31 years since Cornett visited his first gay bar- even more has changed since Toledo’s first known gay bar, The Scenic, was opened in the 1920s. The young gay man accepted the request and found the atmosphere inside the bar reassuring and welcoming. An hour later, Cornett was still sitting there, so the guard asked him to come with him into the bar. “I’m just waiting on friends,” a timid Cornett replied. I didn’t know anyone who was gay.”Ī security guard circling the lot noticed Rick sitting in the lot and asked him what he was doing. “For weeks and weeks at night, I’d drive over there and just sit in the parking lot and observe. “I was scared to death the first time I walked in,” he recalled of The Open Closet on Secor Road. The 21-year-old man couldn’t bring himself to get out of his car in the Secor Road parking lot.Ĭornett, a gay man born and raised in West Toledo, did not know any other gay people in 1985 but he had a strong desire to change that. The first time Rick Cornett went to a gay bar, he didn’t actually walk through the doors.
