Willie Rowe, Former Starlite Lounge employee (Source, NY Daily News)
The legendary Starlite Lounge, which opened in 1959 on Nostrand Ave. in Crown Heights, was the first black-owned gay bar in Brooklyn. It has been closed since July 2010. But now, it may be revived with the help of two documentary filmmakers.
The filmmakers, Sasha Wortzel and Kate Kunath, set out to make a short film about the fight between the bar’s owner and the building’s new owner, who threatened to kick out the bar. However, it quickly grew into months’ worth of footage and plans for a full-length feature film that should be done sometime in 2012.
Instead, they got so wrapped up that they ended up shooting months of footage they’re now working on turning into a feature-length film, expected to be completed some time next year.
“Because there are so few places for this community to go, when Starlite was open, they came from all over,” Kunath told the NY Daily News. “It went from being a neighborhood bar in the 50s and early 60s into being really an institution in the gay black community … There’s a whole culture and community that has been displaced.”
While it’s unclear if and when the Starlite may reopen, there was a very successful reunion party earlier in December that had a turnout in the hundreds. You can also support the owners by pledging money to support the reopening of Starlite via IndieGoGo. In the meantime, the former Starlite just houses another cell phone store, sadly.
Read more on NY Daily News.