For decades, the blinds of this semisubterranean Laguna Beach bar were closed tight.
Back then, the dingy saloon was underground in more ways than one.
People whom employers might still refuse to hire because of their love interests flirted openly as they knocked back martinis. Couples whom hotels might turn away for wanting to share a room danced and kissed without anxiety.
To step down the stairwell into the bar, patrons of that era say, was to find sanctuary from streets where, even in the 1980s — even in this then-funky liberal enclave — gay bashing often took a literal turn.