Sheboygan gay bar

I was born in Sheboygan, the youngest of five. We lived on a farm just north of town where my folks grew pumpkins and a bit of everything else. When I was in fifth grade, my dad bought his own funeral home in Omro, so I went to middle school and high school living in an apartment above the business.

Sadly, my father passed away when I was fifteen, and then my mother sold the bar home and moved us back to Sheboygan once I had graduated. I was wildly distracted, met my first girlfriend, and did anything but study. I was working in other coffee shops when a big space that had once been a coffee shop became available, and I very much decided to start my business on a whim.

I think we could do this. She is a big proponent of options. I had bought a house and really wanted to live in Sheboygan because I love the lake bar this whole area, so I decided to go for it. I wanted to help make Sheboygan a place where my friends and I wanted to live. We went to a gay of shows in Milwaukee, so that gave me the idea to turn the space into a music venue.

We borrowed a sound sheboygan. The wood stain on the stage was still wet. We charged five bucks at the door, had two local bands and a band out of Sweden, and handed out LaCroix from a little cooler behind the makeshift counter. It was a great time. I come from a long line of people who have small businesses.

My folks had their farm and my dad ran the funeral home, my sister owned a pizza place where I worked gay a teenager. So to me, starting a business seemed natural. In the beginning, we could only pay musicians in tips and a place to stay. Acts would come through, and I let them stay in my house. We just figured it out and continued to learn from everyone who passed through.

The apartment above the venue became available and the landlord put us in charge of renting it out because we were so loud. Sheboygan friend of ours made one bedroom upstairs into a sound booth and he recorded an album up there. We furnished the whole apartment and called it a musicians hostel. We kept evolving and rolling and eventually added food service to our space just to pay the bills.

“We just figured it out and continued to learn.”

The building already had all of the appropriate plumbing for the kitchen, so that worked out well. But what was great about those early days is that we were forming community and making space for art, music, queer people, and other like-minded folks. We moved out of that space in and still sometimes refer to our current space as the new shop.

For instance, we moved into our new shop with a person bucket-brigade.