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Des Moines Forgotten

The PS Lounge and The Blue Goose

11/30/2022

The second Blue Goose owned by Mel Greenway and Marlus Watson. Photo taken in 1983 by JD Larson

I love the history of gay bars. One of my favorite films is “Cruising,” directed by William Friedkin, based on the book by Gerald Walker. Seedy gay bars in the New York City Underground blasted funk, disco and punk rock until the early hours in the morning. The uniform was Wranglers or Levis topped with leather or flannel. Blue-collar dudes worked hard during the day and then headed out on their motorcycles into the night. Sounds almost romantic.

Des Moines isn’t New York City or San Francisco. So, when it comes to our city’s gay bar history, we often hear only about Blazing Saddles, and rightfully so. The Saddle is a beautiful place with a story that couldn’t be 100% told before tomorrow’s sunrise. It opened in 1983 and spent the next four decades becoming the legend that it is today. But there were others before it.

Two bars that not many will remember were The PS Lounge (Peggy’s and Shirley’s), located on Second Avenue, where the fountain for the World Food Prize building is located; and The Blue Goose, which was originally on Court Avenue before it moved to Third Street. This is going back to the 1960s and 1970s (maybe even the 1950s?). Others have come and gone over the years, and, to be honest, nothing has been well documented. My barber, Rick Adkisson, told me in the chair last week that he drove a cab in 1972 and would take people down to The Blue Goose.

“The logo on the place had a goose in a tuxedo with his hand facing straight out,” he said. “It was classic.”

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While doing some Internet sleuthing, I found this great message board discussion on the Des Moines Development Forum:

Hawk61401 wrote on June 4, 2008:

“The PS Lounge was in a building which is now the west parking lot in front of the old library. It had a pool table, dance floor, and it was the place for the young hip crowd. I started going there when I was in my mid-teens. I looked older because I was a big ol’ football player and good Catholic boy from Dowling. The Blue Goose was directly west across the street from the Federal Building. It had been around since the 1960s. Heck, maybe even the ’50s. The Blue Goose attracted the older crowd. Each bar had a jukebox that you fed money to play 45 rpm records. I preferred The Blue Goose because the older guys were more loose with their money. I never had to buy my own beer. And, just in case I did, I had a fake ID made by the best in Des Moines. The jukebox at The Blue Goose had the best selections. If I had enough beer to shake my booty, I dropped a quarter in the jukebox and played ‘Going to a Go-Go’ by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles.”

I fell down a rabbit hole with a now shutdown website on Ames/Iowa State’s LGBTQ history. It was created by Dennis Brumm in 2001 and shut down around 2011. Through the Internet Archive, I was able to pull this story about Dennis’ first account of discovering disco in the early 1970s:

“I first went to a gay bar during the summer of 1972. I began frequenting them regularly in the winter of 1973; generally, I would travel with a group of friends from Ames to what we knew as ‘the bars’ (or more often ‘the bar’) in Des Moines. The PS Lounge was the bar we usually visited, as it had a younger crowd, a pool table, and a dance floor. Most of the music featured sounds we didn’t hear on Iowa AM/FM radio of the day, soul music, not mostly the kind that crossed over to white audiences. It all had a regular good dance beat, which was, of course, why people liked it. Many weekend evenings (Friday and Saturday, for bars in Iowa were closed on Sunday) right before the drinking establishments across the state of Iowa closed at 2 a.m., the staff at the PS would announce an ‘after hours’ party, giving the patrons an address and suggesting they bring beer or whatever to the soirée. Lots of people who had been at the bar then flocked to those parties where dancing and socializing continued into the wee hours of the morning, essentially extending the bar into a private setting.”

There has been a lot of conversation from the recent shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs. Things haven’t always been friendly within our own community, but there has thankfully been nothing as tragic as what has happened there. This is why I see hope in Des Moines and in Iowa. Our community is our family, our neighbors, and the people we work with every day. Even when we feel like we are moving backwards as a whole, Iowans eventually show their common sense. 

Decades ago and today, all we ask is to live our lives peacefully and without judgement. ♦

Kristian Day is a filmmaker and writer based in Des Moines. He also hosts the syndicated Iowa Basement Tapes radio program on 98.9 FM KFMG. Instagram: @kristianday Twitter: @kristianmday

4 Comments

  1. Robin Anker says:

    Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

  2. Gary Moore says:

    My first gay bar was the P&S Lounge (Peggy and Shirley’s) around Thanksgiving of 1968 when home for Thanksgiving break from the University of Dubuque. The P & S Lounge sat about where the fountain is at for the World Food Prize building and people parked across the street in a gravel lot that is now the Civic Center. Some remember differently but I remember the Blue Goose being on Court Ave after Marlys bought it and shortly moved it around the corner where it remained for some time even after Mel Greenway bought it. It had previously been the Pink Poodle. Over the years I have been to all of the gay bars except for my tour of Vietnam in 1971 when the Mailbox was open for a brief time. And then I was absent for a brief stay in SanDiego and Virginia in 84/85, Some of my favorites over the years included The Cove at the corner of 4th and Court, the widely popular City Disco, OP’s, 1200 Grand, and the Menagerie. When the bars finally moved to the East Side some 40 years ago.

    When first starting at the P 6 S it was a key club. You bought your setup. 19-year-olds could drink. If you were old enough to die for your country, you were old enough to have a drink. prior to the enactment of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, the legal age when alcohol could be purchased varied from state to state.

  3. L.T. Sacco says:

    “I love the history of gay bars,” Cityview’s Kristian Day writes. “One of my favorite films is ‘Cruising,’ directed by William Friedkin, based on the book by Gerald Walker. Seedy gay bars in the New York City Underground blasted funk, disco and punk rock until the early hours in the morning. The uniform was Wranglers or Levis topped with leather or flannel. Blue-collar dudes worked hard during the day and then headed out on their motorcycles into the night. Sounds almost romantic.”

    “Cruising” is “one of [your] favorite films”?! I guess it must have been your fondness for “Cruising” (whose filming in Greenwich Village during the summer of 1979 – exactly 10 years after the Stonewall Inn rebellion galvanized the gay rights movement — was disrupted by activists blaring music, whistles and airhorns, and using mirrors on rooftops to reflect strong sunbeams onto Village streets to ruin the filming of exterior scenes) that prevented you from mentioning the most prominent element of Walker’s book and Friedkin’s movie that any responsible journalist would mention when describing the plot: A charming psychopath lures gay men out of leather bars and S&M clubs and into parks and alleyways and abandoned rooms where he trusses them like pigs, slaughters them, and then disposes of their body parts in the Hudson River. “Sounds almost romantic,” right? Virtually another “When Harry Met Sally …”

    As for your beloved “history of gay bars,” here’s a bit of history for you. In his 2013 book “Queer Males in Contemporary Cinema: Becoming Visible,” Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, chairman of the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at Texas Christian University, noted that “a bar prominently displayed in [‘Cruising’] came under attack by a man with a sub-machine gun, killing two patrons and wounding 12 others.” When? Two months after “Cruising” was released.

    Since then, of course, we have had to bear witness to the slaughters of gay people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando and at Club Q in Colorado Springs. Still, Kristian Day blithely assures Cityview readers that we have no need to worry that such events could take place here, because “Iowans eventually show their common sense.”

  4. gregory burley brown says:

    I don’t know exactly when I visited the blue Goose and P&S Lounge, but it must have been around 1970. I had been out of Des Moines, out of Iowa a while. I was not well-socialized in any setting, and bars–especially gay bars–were a bit of a shock. I recall that people in both places were friendlier than expected. I wish I had been better able to enjoy the places and the people then.

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