🏳️🌈🏺Fieldens, RTP, and ROSMY
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
After last call, when the lights dimmed on Broad St, Fieldens came alive. The after-hours club was part refuge, part cabaret—a place where drag queens, club kids, bartenders, and night shifter caught their breath and celebrated together. Upstairs, a small stage hosted bold performances, and became home to a troupe that would change theatre in the city: the Richmond Triangle Players
When they opened in 1993, with Harvey Fierstein’s Safe Sex, their shows doubled as fundraisers for the Fan Free Clinic. Every laugh and tear on that stage helped chip away at silence as they grew into ever more productions—and eventually their own theater.
Meanwhile, activist Guy Kinman launched the “Someone You Know Is Gay—Maybe Someone You Love” billboard campaign across Richmond. It was gentle but defiant, reminding the city that queerness wasn’t abstract—it was family, neighbors, co-workers, and friends. Those billboards were Richmond’s first public declaration of queer existence in proud daylight.
As adults fought for health and recognition, queer youth weren’t left behind. Around the same time, teachers and volunteers formed ROSMY—the Richmond Organization for Sexual Minority Youth, today known as Side by Side—to give LGBTQ+ teens a safe space to meet, learn, and grow, gathering in supportive churches and basements. For many, it was the first room where they could say “I am” without fear.
By the mid-1990s, the AIDS Memorial Quilt finally came to Richmond, its panels spreading across the floor of the old Coliseum. Local volunteers—many from Fan Free Clinic, ROSMY, and the Triangle Players—helped unfold and refold every stitched name, memorializing lost friends, children, and lovers.
Fieldens was eventually bought out in 2010 after decades of being a place to know we weren’t alone—a last stop for so many.
Those nights at Fieldens, the billboards on our highways, the youth groups and quilts—each stitched Richmond’s LGBTQ story through crisis into community. Things have grown brighter since, but every Pride banner still carries those threads shaping the faces you still see in our community
Next time: a thrift store and a community center, as we slowly win our rights.
