‘It’s the only thing we have.’ Myrtle Beach gay nightclub fights to outlive pandemic
Walking in, the lights are low, the Top 40 music is loud, and there’s just a faint, sweet smell from years of spilled drinks.
Inside of Pulse Ultra Club — Myrtle Beach’s only gay nightclub — for just a moment, it’s almost like the coronavirus pandemic isn’t going on outside.
But the telltale signs of COVID-19 become clear seconds later. For one, the bar is as full as it will get for the evening at 8 p.m. — not midnight. “Full” for the club these days isn’t even that crowded. It’s not like the Before Times, when Pulse would near its 300-person capacity on weekends.
On Fridays and Saturdays right now, “swamped” for this club is 30-40 people.
For months, Pulse has limped along, barely able to stay open as people avoid going out for fear of catching or spreading the highly contagious coronavirus.
First, the club was completely shut down in March and April, the start of the pandemic. Then it reopened in May, only for South Carolina Law Enforcement Division officers to descend on the bar two months later, saying usage of the dance floor and drag shows, two of the main draws for LGBTQ+ clubs, violated coronavirus restrictions from the Governor’s Office.
Pulse’s owner, Ken Phillips, is months behind on rent but said his landlord has been understanding, deferring payments as long as possible. That grace won’t last forever, he said. He just hopes that kindness — and maybe some luck — will allow him to outlast the pandemic. If he doesn’t, Myrtle Beach will lose one of the last havens for LGBTQ+ people within 100 miles.
“I want to make sure a nightclub, a bar will last many more years,” he said. “I just want to give gay people a safe place to go to party and enjoy it.”
More than a gay bar
For decades, gay bars have served as both places to have a drink and as a source of community activism. The 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City, the birthplace of the LGBTQ+ Pride movement, came out of a late-night police raid of a gay bar in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.
Today, the bars serve as safe spaces for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Queer patrons of Pulse know they will be surrounded by people like themselves and know that, generally, they are safe from homophobic jeers or attacks from the outside world.
The bars also are places to meet new friends, or even something more. Even if it doesn’t work out, no one’s going to bat an eye at a man hitting on a man or a woman flirting with a woman.
So much more than a place to drink, gay bars are, and were, how queer people met and organized. From educating patrons about HIV/AIDS, an epidemic that still plagues queer people today, to finding people to organize in support of same-sex marriage, the bars have been jumping off points for many of the achievements LGBTQ+ people garnered since the 1970s.
Yet, those advancements have, in a way, come at a cost to the gay bars that made them happen.
As queer people became more accepted by society, the need for designated queer spaces waned. Dating apps made it possible to meet others outside of gay bars. The generation of LGBTQ+ activists who sparked the Pride movement and later fought for recognition of the HIV/AIDS epidemic grew older and don’t go out as often. Some of them even got married.
“Just what we’ve fought for is what is causing the gay bars to be done with,” Phillips said.
The decline in gay bars can be seen in Myrtle Beach. In their heyday, the 1990s, at least five LGBTQ+ bars lit up the Grand Strand. While South Carolina is not known for being welcoming to LGBTQ+ people, Myrtle Beach, back then at least, was one of the queer hubs of the East Coast.
Now, Myrtle Beach has two gay bars: Pulse Ultra Club and St. George. The latter, a dive bar close to downtown, has been lucky. It’s been able to maintain a larger proportion of its clientele than Pulse because it doesn’t rely on a vibrant dance floor or drag performances to draw customers.
St. George has a much stronger local following, its employees said. On one Thursday afternoon, it saw as many as 30 customers crowding around its horseshoe-shaped bar for hours, almost too many at times for the bartender to keep track of. And those same people frequent the bar regularly, helping keep it alive.
If either of the bars were to close due to pandemic-induced financial stress, it would be devastating for the region, customers say.
The generation of people who relied on the bars as the only way to organize and meet people may not need them as much anymore. Young queer people, though, definitely do, said Ari Rotramel, a gender and sexuality studies professor at Connecticut College. Only in the last year or two has Rotramel met students who came from accepting families.
LGBTQ+ bars today still serve an important role as safe spaces for the queer community, Rotramel said.
“There’s something about in-person engagement, about knowing that you can walk by a place that’s for you, that you’re welcome,” said Rotramel, who also saw last year the closure of the last gay bar near New London, where Connecticut College is located.
Gabriel Neitz, a longtime Pulse patron who also performs in drag there, said he’s gone to sports bars and other places without a specific “queer-friendly” designation in recent months.
“But you don’t feel 100% safe there,” he said. “You always have that worry in your head that, like, anything can happen, anybody could dislike you for being gay or make a comment to you or feel uncomfortable.”
Havens for LGBTQ+ people, even during a pandemic
Bars in some states never reopened after the pandemic began, or if they did, they had to close back down after a few weeks of heightened COVID-19 spread.
Bars and restaurants in South Carolina only shut down to indoor use for eight weeks.
Unlike restaurants, Pulse couldn’t sell takeout meals. Its food menu consists of the bare minimum required to meet state law.
Closing not only killed revenue for the business, it also shut off an important source of income for the drag performers who performed there on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Before the pandemic, performers were paid both by the bar and with tips from customers who saw the show, Neitz said. Now, they only work for tips, as Phillips tries to cut costs to save the nightclub. Knowing how much work the drag queens do, though, Phillips said he hates not being able to pay them.
Drag shows resumed in the fall, the performances having been allowed to return when McMaster allowed concert venues to reopen in August.
For Neitz, who performs under the name Nytes Deville, losing that income didn’t break his budget. He still has a day job. But, more than the loss of the money, not going to the bar also stripped away an important connection to the local LGBTQ+ community.
“There’s nowhere else to go for gays. So you just stay home,” he said. “I’m a homebody, so staying at home is fine. But you do lose that connection to the LGBT community because most of those people that are at the bar, I only see them at the bar.”
Pulse reopened in May at reduced capacity.
COVID-fatigued people flooded to Myrtle Beach thanks to the area’s lax restrictions, restoring desperately needed revenue to businesses across the Grand Strand, including Pulse. Quickly, though, the region was labeled a “hotspot” for coronavirus, and tourists disappeared again.
Some businesses recovered that business in the fall. Last year saw one of the busiest Octobers for Myrtle Beach ever.
Pulse though, never fully bounced back. People go to clubs to dance late into the night. The dance floor has been shut down since that visit from SLED — it’s now covered in four-seat tables. Gov. Henry McMaster’s “last-call order” ensures there will be no late-night dancing, as well, as alcohol sales and consumption are now cut off at 11 p.m. statewide.
Last call for Pulse is 10:30 p.m., with drink sales ending at 10:45 p.m. Customers must be out by 11 p.m.
The last-call order is financially deadly for Pulse. Many of his customers, Phillips said, work in the service industry. Many don’t get off work until 10 or 11 p.m., so Pulse is closed by the time they get off.
“My business is sales and service industry (workers),” he said. “My money is from 11 o’clock to 2 a.m. That’s my money. And like it is now, I don’t even make the bills, and I’m hanging on by a thread.”
With the pandemic raging, it’s easy to wonder why people would even go to Pulse, a nightclub without a patio and whose allowance of smoking indoors reminds patrons of the lack of air circulation.
But many patrons, even when reminded of the risks, said it’s not really an option to not go. Either they stay home, work (if possible), and never see other queer people; or, they go out and risk getting sick, but maintain their social and emotional health.
They live in a catch-22.
“As an openly gay male, (gay bars) are really all we have left,” said Nicklas Barham, who lives in Charleston and visited Pulse one Friday in January. “We can go to — but we don’t feel welcome in — the stereotypical straight bars. So I try to give back ... to support (gay clubs), keep them open.”
Gay bars are where Barham said he feels safe. Going out helps his mental health and helps keep the bar running, yet “with every benefit that comes along with it, there’s always going to be a downfall,” he acknowledged — risking exposure to COVID-19.
COVID-19 risks
Pulse reaches its busiest time most weekends by 9 p.m., when the drag show starts.
Customers have to wear a mask when walking in, and club employees who interact with customers always have them on. The drag performers do not.
Even for customers, the masks usually don’t stay on long. Some patrons have already contracted and recovered from COVID-19. Others say they feel like avoiding the virus is futile in a place like this.
“There’s always that risk, like when it first started and they all did like the mask mandates and stuff, it kind of hit me harder than most because, like, I love to see people smile,” Barham said.
The bar setting doesn’t make wearing a mask easy, either. “It’s louder than hell in there, and with the mask, you can barely hear anybody,” he added.
Some visitors, though, like Barham, generally stick close to the group they came with, reducing some of the risk of spreading or contracting the virus.
Government restrictions require customers to wear a mask at all times inside the business except when they are seated at a table. Enforcement of those rules by police or code officers has been near nonexistent, however. Officials often say they prefer to focus on educating South Carolinians about why masks are important rather than ticketing them.
Those policies leave it up to businesses to remind customers to keep their masks on — and kick them out if they refuse to comply. Phillips won’t do the latter, though, because it would risk scaring off the few customers he has in the first place.
“Do I stand around b----ing at customers all night? Not for the 20 I got. I’m not going to,” he said. “I’m not going to hound you to keep your mask on the entire time you’re here and cause you not to want to come back.”
The trauma and stress LGBTQ+ people have gone through from years of oppression and persecution could also be affecting the decision to wear a mask, Rotramel, the gender and sexuality professor, said.
“When we are experiencing a world that often makes us unsafe in a real way — how much does the trauma of that influence their choices?” Rotramel said. “If we’re going to use alcohol or if we’re going to smoke or if we’re going to not wear a mask because we’re like, ‘F--- it.’ I think there’s an exhaustion there right now.”
For Barham, “It’s still scary, but it’s almost like you watch the same scary movie, very scary movie over and over and over. And it’s just not scary anymore.”
‘It’s the only thing we have.’
Keeping Pulse open with few, if any customers, is a challenge every day for Phillips, the owner. But while, yes, the business represents his livelihood, he said the reason he still fights to keep the doors open is much broader.
When he came out as gay in the 1990s at age 27, Phillips was breaking ground. Many people didn’t come out publicly back then until their 30s or 40s, if at all.
“I want to have a safe place to come to that is exclusively for them, you know,” he said. “It doesn’t matter who else comes, but I want you to feel safe in your environment. That’s me. Because there were times I didn’t feel safe.”
Mayor Brenda Bethune has known Phillips for decades. While she isn’t a queer person, she said her connection to Phillips and Pulse is still personal, still emotional.
The bar helped fundraise during her campaign for mayor, and she said her years of going to the club showed her how important it is to keeping the Myrtle Beach LGBTQ+ community together.
Bethune said it’s been hard to watch small businesses struggle during the pandemic, but with Pulse, she points out that the pain goes much deeper. Not only does the business suffer financially, but so do its employees and the drag performers who work there every week.
“They’re hurting in all of this, too. And not just monetarily, but that is their art form,” she said. “That is their way of expressing who they are, and they are losing that avenue to be able to do so.”
While it’s a thought she would rather avoid, if Pulse did have to close, Bethune says “it would be such a huge loss” for Myrtle Beach.
“It’s a safe place, and people need that safe haven to go, to meet others, to be out in public together,” she said. “Our gay community needs that. And unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of options here locally. So it would be a huge loss to the community as a whole for Pulse to close down.”
The loss of Pulse wouldn’t just cut through the soul of the local LGBTQ+ community. It would potentially make Myrtle Beach, maybe even South Carolina, seem less welcoming to LGBTQ+ tourists who want to visit.
“I wouldn’t say people are traveling here just to come to Pulse there. They weigh that in when they’re picking where they’re going to go on vacation,” Neitz said. But, “LGBT people would probably be less likely to come here if Pulse was no longer here.”
One Friday night Pulse customer, from Florence, said he isn’t out of the closet. He fears judgment from the people he works with and requested that his name be withheld from publishing. If bars like Pulse didn’t exist nearby, he said he wouldn’t be able to go out for a drink with his boyfriend. The pair would be confined to pretending they are “just friends” at other bars, he said, or not going out at all.
And for people like Neitz, the drag performer, Pulse is “the heartbeat of our gay community here.”
Without gay bars in Myrtle Beach, the LGBTQ+ community would grow more isolated.
“There would be nowhere for us to go, to see people like us, to meet up with people who are visiting,” Neitz said. “People just moving here — they would have no way to make friends or meet other people that are like them aside from online apps. And those are only good for one thing — dating.”
Pulse, he said, is “the only thing we have.”
This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘It’s the only thing we have.’ Myrtle Beach gay nightclub fights to outlive pandemic."
