Though many gay people had moved to the suburbs, few gay bars existed outside Detroit until the mid-1990s, due to trenchant suburban anti-gay discrimination. Retzloff said several factors played into the rapid growth of the gay bar scene in Detroit in the '70s and '80s, even as Detroit's population declined.

By the mid-1980s, there were about four dozen gay bars in Detroit, compared to about a dozen 20 years earlier.