Vallejo’s Townhouse Cocktail Lounge proud to be Solano County’s only gay bar

VALLEJO — For years, the Townhouse Cocktail Lounge in downtown Vallejo has gradually transitioned from a military and blue collar bar to a 100% out-of-the-closet gay bar. The sign has changed from a soft green to bright purple, and rainbow flags fly inside and out.

Owners Jeff Linn and Andrew Pembroke will celebrate the second anniversary of the Townhouse reopening on July 3. The couple took over the bar in 2020, but it was closed for a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When they bought it, they decided the Townhouse would be unabashedly gay.

Linn said the previous owner, Mark Reed, liked to say that the bar was gay-owned but open to everybody. “We made the very conscious decision that we would be an LGBTQ+ positive bar and we wanted to make that abundantly clear,” he said.

The Townhouse will wrap up Pride month this Friday with live industrial and EBM (electronic body music) by Diesel Dudes, Snowbeast and DJ Zero Effs to benefit the Solano Pride Center.

Linn and Pembroke have carried over most of the live music, open mic, karaoke and drag show events Reed established, but they’re making changes and testing new ways to better suit their clientele.

The Saturday drag shows — that Reed says are the longest running in the area — are now happening weekly, with Ava LaShay hosting first and third Saturdays, and Holotta Tymes hosting on the second and fourth. The shows don’t begin until after karaoke, at around 11 p.m. and run well past midnight. Drag queens and an occasional go-go boy lip sync, gyrate and dance into the audience. Enthusiastic patrons whoop and cheer and thrust cash into the performer’s hands and cleavage.

Pembroke and Linn said that a lot of the gay bars in San Francisco and Oakland closed during the pandemic. “That was one of the reasons we expanded the drag shows too. We wanted to sort of re-emphasize, with our events, what the space means,” Linn said. “Holotta had been doing the show for 17 years with Mark. She was very excited that we declared it a queer space and a gay-friendly space.”  

But the Friday night live music events that showcased a different artist each week have ceased for now. The shifting musical genres seemed to confuse the bar’s patrons. “People didn't know what to expect,” Linn said.“It's a lesson of ‘less is more.’”

Linn said that having fewer, but more targeted, live performances allows them to focus more on promotion and seems to work a little better.

“Friday night is kind of like people's ‘just chill’ night. They're done with their week, they want a beer, they listen to the jukebox and play pool,” Linn said.

Pembroke agreed. “It's difficult to hold their attention span for a full band.”

The Townhouse has had good results with recently-added live music shows on Sundays. “Oh my gosh. They've gone crazy. The last one we did was sort of alternative, industrial EBM,” Linn said. “Nobody does it live in the Bay Area unless it's like a festival, and people flocked in on Sunday. It was amazing.”

When he first attempted hosting live music, Reed said he thought he could book a band and people would just show up to watch them. “It really didn’t work at all,” Reed said.

When he shifted his focus things fell into place. “Rather than having music for an audience, my whole thing was to have music for other musicians.”

“I started open mic on Wednesday, I started Monday night music,” Reed said. “You get musicians hanging out with each other and creating relationships. That's when it really started to work out.”

Reed says he’s become good friends with Erin Bakke and Don Bassey, the core of the Townhouse Ramblers, who serenade the bar with Americana tunes on Monday nights. Bassey was the Empress Theatre general manager and musical director for many years and draws solid musical guests like country blues guitarist Don Fox. The Ramblers cover artists like Tom Waits, John Prine, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. They usually wrap up the evening with a Townes Van Zandt tune – “Townes at the Townhouse!” Reed sits in sometimes when he’s in town.

Wednesday open mic, hosted by Rich Adams, runs the gamut from grizzled guitar veterans playing well-worn folk tunes and 1960’s ballads, to cameos by Reed, The Tubes founder Bill Spooner, and rising local talent like Michael Guy Bowman. Poetry is welcome at the microphone, too.

Bar guests can sing karaoke on Thursdays and Saturdays. “When we first got the place, I was like, ‘Do we have to keep doing karaoke?’” Linn said. But now he sings three songs a night and says he fully embraces it. “Yes, it’s fun. People love it.”

Linn and Pembroke purchased the bar from Reed at the beginning of 2020. The ink had barely dried on the paperwork when COVID-19 struck, forcing them to close for a year. The couple used the time to completely revamp the space.

“We stripped out all the soft surfaces while we also redid the floor. It’s much easier to clean now,” Linn said. “There was years and years and years and of beer and whatnot accumulated underneath that floor. The number one comment when we opened was ‘It smells so good in here.’”

Another disruption imposed on the new bar owners had a positive outcome. Their beer supplier started shipping only by the pallet, and the Townhouse doesn’t have that much storage space. “We don’t go through a pallet of Budweiser or Corona in a month,” Pembroke said.

"What used to be a lot of imports and national brands is now pretty much local. It's been great,” Linn said. “It feels better, supporting the small guy.”

‘A bar for everybody’

Linn worked as a bartender during college, then moved into a graphic design career. “I had no intention of actually even being a bartender again,” Linn said. But when he was laid off from Old Navy in 2016 Reed offered him a job at the bar.

Reed said he was ready to retire after running the Townhouse for close to 20 years, and was happy to sell the business to Linn. “It was just a really good fit” Reed said. “He’s got the energy to take this to the next level. I think he’s doing that.”

Linn said that the strong Vallejo community made his decision to buy the bar a lot easier. He said that not having BART may be a factor. “Vallejo is sort of unique in the Bay Area. We rely upon ourselves, and the community is a lot stronger,” Linn said. “I have made friends and gotten acquainted with more people in Vallejo than I did in 27 years in San Leandro. I actually feel like I can be a part of this community even though I've only been here a few years.”

Reed said his concept of promoting the bar as a place for everybody was inspired by his visits to Key West. Even though it’s a well-known gay mecca, only three out of about 350 bars on the little island identified as gay bars. “Because every bar was for everybody. The tourists were there, the bikers were there, and the cruise ship passengers were there,” Reed said. “Everybody just went to the same places and everybody was comfortable. That’s what I tried to make the Townhouse.”

Linn said that the Townhouse is now the only gay bar in Solano County. “There's some that are listed as gay friendly, but we are the only one that’s listed ‘gay bar.’”

“We still need gay spaces even though it's 2023,” Pembroke said.

Donna Finney has tended bar at the Townhouse for nearly 25 years. She said there were three or four gay bars in Vallejo when she first came to town. The first owners she worked for, Dan and Joe, were gay but didn’t publicize the Townhouse as gay.

“Then Mark would publicize in Bay Area Reporter that it was a gay bar, but when it came down to Vallejo, he made it for everyone,” Finney said.

“I thought this should be a gay bar. It should be targeted for the gay community because everybody needs a place of their own to go where they can be themselves,” Finney said. “When Jeff and Andy took over, I was so hoping they would go all the way making it a gay bar, and I was so proud of them to do that because that's a big step.”

Linn said only a small fraction of customers have resisted the rebranding of the Townhouse as a gay bar. “We've had to correct a few people. They would come in and say, ‘Well, this is a bar for everybody.’ We're like, ‘Yes, but primarily, we're a queer-friendly space,’” Linn said. “We want to make that abundantly clear, that if you are not queer-friendly, and you cause problems, you are not going to be here.”

“For the most part, it's been embraced,” Linn said, noting that there’s more acceptance in the Bay Area than elsewhere in the country. But, occasionally, passersby shout slurs from their car windows, and the flags have been torn down a couple of times, forcing Linn to mount them higher.

A question Bassey sometimes hears is, “What are you doing playing in a gay bar?”

“It comes from people that aren't exposed to the world as much as maybe they should be,” Bassey said. “Somebody who doesn't go to gay bars or doesn't understand that lifestyle at all would think it was weird, and it’s not. It’s people going to a bar, sitting down at a stool and ordering a beer and talking to their friends.”

“I’ve played in a thousand bars. This is just one of them. It happens to be our favorite pub where everybody hangs,” Bassey said. “The people there want to hear music and get away from their troubles for a couple of hours. Or if you're playing music, that's what you're doing, playing, to get away from your troubles and go have a good time with your friends.”

Bassey said that the nature of social media and the news is to tell people to fear what they don’t understand. “It's all based on fear. ‘Be afraid of what we're speculating on right now, because we don't know.’”

“There are a lot of haters out there too,” Finney said. “I love Jeff and Andy. I think it's wonderful that they're not backing down.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct Don Bassey's title at the Empress Theatre.