November 4, 2016: Ciao! was a pioneering gay male travel magazine in business for most of the 1970s. Exemplifying the open and uninhibited style of the gay liberation era, Ciao! profiled cities all over the world. In 1974, they published a piece on St. Louis. Ciao!'s article on the Gateway City offers a revealing looking at St. Louis's gay scene as it was more than forty years ago. The article features rare images of several St. Louis LGBT destinations.
These include the only known surviving photograph of Club 115, a gay bar that in various guises had been open since at least the early 1950s. Read Ian Darnell's blog post about Ciao! from the Project's partnership with the St. Louis LGBTQ Mapping Project in partnership with Washington University and the Missouri History Museum. Ciao!