By Sarah Calise • Photos Provided by Sarah Calise/Nashville Queer History
In late September, Music City PrEP Clinic opened a new multi-use facility in East Nashville which includes the Rod Bragg Rainbow Room — a large conference room meant as a safe event space and community center for the area’s LGBTQ+ population. According to historical records, this will be Nashville’s fifth building to serve as an LGBTQ+ community center dating back to the 1970s. Music City PrEP Clinic is filling a void left by OutCentral’s closing in 2018.
Another organization called Inclusion Tennessee sprung up following a 2019 community needs assessment focused on the queer and trans population of Middle Tennessee. They are now working with the Civic Design Center to build an LGBTQ+ community center that will surely become a multi-million dollar project but plans to cover several identified needs, including young and older adult programming, mental and physical health services, cafe and lounge space, event space, exhibit space, and more. Hopefully, with buy-in and financial support from the entire region, this next community center will be the one that lasts.
Today, 1504 Compton Avenue is an empty grass lot owned by Belmont University, but in the 1970s there was a two-story building called Compton House and it was Nashville’s first LGBTQ+ community center. The Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), a gay-affirming congregation that started in Los Angeles, arrived in Nashville in 1972 and, by the mid-1970s, established Compton House as a gay community center. Atlanta’s gay newspaper, The Barb, briefly talked about “Compton House, the Gay Community Services Center of Nashville” in its October 1, 1977 issue. The Barb reported that Compton House was home for the newly-formed Tennessee Gay Coalition for Human Rights, sponsored by MCC-Nashville and Reverend Tom Bigelow, and that the center added a Gay Health Clinic after realizing many of MCC-Nashville’s congregation worked in area hospitals or were registered nurses. Compton House was open seven days a week from 12 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. to serve the gay population’s variety of health, job, housing, and social needs.
Much of Nashville’s 1970s queer activism and community-building centered around the MCC congregation, but there was also the Rap House. The Oasis Center, an organization dedicated to empowering and uplifting Nashville’s youth, traces its origins to the Rap House founded in 1969. Although at its core the Rap House was “a simple community center for runaway teens and youth struggling with addictions,” it quickly became a safe haven for adult groups as well. A group of gays met at the Rap House and produced a monthly newsletter called “The Closet Door.” So far, I have only found one copy of “The Closet Door,” and it lives in the special collections of the New York Public Library. I traveled there last Thanksgiving to touch the publication for myself and to take photographs.
The seven-page issue, marked as “number two,” appears to have been published sometime in November 1972, and it covers local ordinances, poetry and prose, upcoming gatherings and events, letters, and a list of local services, including the Metropolitan Community Church. The final page includes a section called, “Why We’re Here and What We’re Doing,” which revealed that the gay rap group formed after a couple traveled to New York and the west coast and got inspired by the gay activism in those regions. Gay men and women began meeting at different homes and apartments, but the inconsistency of places and times led them to schedule regular meetings every Thursday night at seven at the Rap House. Calling themselves the “Gay Rap Group,” they started the monthly publication to extend their reach and gain a more accurate temperature of which issues were affecting Nashville’s gay community. Other discussed plans included hosting dances and film screenings, getting a phone line, and developing classes like karate, yoga and “other things that make a strong mind and body.”
From currently available historical records, it is difficult to determine when the Rap House stopped serving the Gay Rap Group and when MCC-Nashville’s Compton House ceased operation. By the 1990s, Nashville’s LGBTQ+ community experienced another major uptick in activism in light of the AIDS epidemic and the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987; the need for a new community center came to fruition at 703 Berry Road. A modest brick house sitting atop a high slope served as the Nashville Center for Gay and Lesbian Services opened in February 1991. Penny Campbell, a major figure in the city’s gay and lesbian activism, served as one of the Center’s board members and also volunteered along with a handful of others to keep the organization afloat. The Center consisted of a meeting space for all sorts of social gatherings and therapy groups, a crisis hotline, a small library of books and magazines, and a place for leaflets and fliers for upcoming events. It was a space for information, support and friendship.
Around early 2002, the Center at 703 Berry Road closed, moved to 961 Woodland Street, and rebranded as the Rainbow Community Center. The need for a larger space and parking prompted the move to East Nashville, which also provided a more welcoming neighborhood, according to the new center’s executive director Joyce Arnold. Although Nashville’s historic gay sites spread across the city, the east side of town is often considered the more LGBTQ-friendly section of Music City to this day. The Rainbow Community Center offered many of the same services as the 703 Berry Road location, but unfortunately closed its operation by May 2004. An article in the Tennessean cited financial woes.
The next and last LGBTQ+ community center, OutCentral, suffered a similar fate. OutCentral opened along Church Street in 2008, nestled in the gay district of bars and dance clubs, restaurants, coffee shops, book and clothing stores. However, a few years into OutCentral’s operation, the once thriving “gayborhood” was on the wane and the center’s gay neighbors started to disappear, like OutLoud Lesbian and Gay Bookstore, which shut its doors in early 2011. Some of OutCentral’s business records are preserved at the Albert Gore Research Center at Middle Tennessee State University. Perusing the records reveals a risky business model of renting out office spaces within the OutCentral building to other local nonprofits in order to cover the center’s overall rent. Other funds came through public donations and a few fundraising events, like the Gay 5k. Combined with the lack of parking and increasingly busy highway traffic, the financial strategy was not enough. OutCentral closed in 2018, and Nashville was once again left without an LGBTQ+ community center.
The recent pandemic has dealt out a lot of hard lessons and reminders. For instance, the digital age and social media have not replaced the need for in-person relationships and gathering spaces. In most of the oral histories I have conducted in the last year or two, queer and trans folk keep coming back to the need for a community center in Nashville to serve the entire Middle Tennessee region. Many newcomers—who come in droves these days—are always shocked to discover we do not have one. “We did,” I say. We had many. Maybe the next one will last. And there will be a next one. Nashville always perseveres.
About Sarah Calise
Sarah Calise (she/they) is a public historian and archivist dedicated to connecting people with their past and preserving important records through digital, written, and verbal storytelling. She currently cares for political and regional collections at MTSU’s Albert Gore Research Center. In 2021, she founded the organization and digital portal called Nashville Queer History, whose mission is to research and share the LGBTQ+ history of Middle Tennessee in hopes of inspiring local activism, education, and inclusion. Her forthcoming book with Vanderbilt University Press, Y’all Come Out Now Y’Hear, will explore stories from Nashville’s queer past from the 1920s to the modern day.
