Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Finding Community In The Mitchell Hotel, Alan Virta

Library Faculty Publications and Presentations

"Lesbian and gay people are the only people on Earth who have to find their tribe. We aren't born into it. You have to have a place to go find the tribe. And so you will start with the most obvious place."—Phyllis Burke, in the documentary film The Castro

For gay men and women in Boise, there was no "obvious place" in their own hometown until the summer of 1976, when a group of local businessmen, with the help of friends and family, turned a corner of an old hotel into that place: Boise's first gay bar. The hotel, known …