Jacques' Cabaret, Boston

About Jacques' Cabaret

Boston's oldest continuously operating gay bar, in Bay Village on Broadway. Nightclub owner Henry Vara opened it in 1938 as Jacques Restaurant; by the mid-1940s it had become a gay bar, and from the late 1960s into the early '70s it served as the city's only lesbian bar before settling into the drag identity it's kept ever since. It was a stop on Boston's first gay pride march in 1971. Today it stages drag nightly in an intimate, no-frills room that draws regulars and visitors in equal measure. The lineage runs deep enough that RuPaul's Drag Race star Katya got her start here, hosting a monthly burlesque night. This isn't a polished megaclub; it's a small, worn, beloved survivor of a Boston nightlife era almost none of its peers outlived. For a traveler it's the city's living drag history: go for a show, not for the decor, and you're sitting in the same room queer Boston has been coming to for the better part of a century.