In 1990 a coalition of gay and lesbian groups formed the Alliance of Lesbian and Gay Organizations (ALGO). Today, the Drop-In Center carries on this important work in our community. Out of these efforts emerged important organizations such as Blue Ridge AIDS Support Services (BRASS) and the Roanoke AIDS Project. Gay activist groups such as the Blue Ridge Lambda Alliance (BRLA) and the Roanoke Valley Chapter of the Virginia Gay Alliance (VGA) organized the earliest AIDS advocacy and care work. By the end of the 1980s, dozens of cases were recorded in the Roanoke Valley. The first local death from AIDS was reported in 1983. In the 1980s, the AIDS crisis hit Roanokers hard.The neighborhood continues to have a disproportionately high LGBTQ+ population. Many gay and lesbian homeowners restored old buildings in the neighborhood and contributed to its late-twentieth century renaissance. Old Southwest became, by the late 1960s, a so-called “gay ghetto” or what today we may call a gayborhood. Their group, First Friday, met once a month in people’s homes-frequently in the Old Southwest neighborhood where many gay men and lesbians lived. Lesbians in Roanoke formed their own organization in 1980. In late 1978 The Park, which today is the only nightclub that remains from that era, opened to rave reviews. These establishments were advertised in locally published gay newsletters such as the Big Lick Gayzette and the Virginia Gayzette. A gay nightclub scene flourished in downtown Roanoke in the late 1970s with as many as five different venues known for their gay clientele. Trans sex workers, on the other hand, including many Black trans people, held significant ground around the City Market building at that same time. A group of primarily white trans women attempted in the late 1970s to organize the region’s first chapter of Tri-Ess, a pioneering national trans organization. Transgender Roanokers also became increasingly visible in the 1970s. Both organizations advocated against the harassment of gay men by bar owners and by the police department.
They were followed in 1977 by the Free Alliance for Individual Rights (FAIR). The first gay liberation organization in the city, the Gay Alliance of the Roanoke Valley (GARV), was founded in 1971. A visible community formed here in the 1960s, anchored by the region’s first known gay bar, the Trade Winds, which opened on Franklin Road in 1953, and at Elmwood Park which by the 1960s had become a well-known gay cruising locale.Newspaper reports and police records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal a history of Roanokers who engaged in non-normative gender presentations and sexual activities. LGBTQ+ people have been part of our community ever since Roanoke’s founding in the 1880s. Roanoke is a welcoming and compassionate city that embraces the diversity of our residents.