One tavern in Newark was shut down for a month in 1939 after a man “made up with rouge, lipstick, mascara and fingernail polish” asked for a drink in a “very effeminate voice,” records show.
In Paterson, N.J., a saloon owner lost her liquor license in 1955 after investigators spotted 15 male couples dancing and sitting with “heads close together, caressing and giggling.” And in 1956 in Asbury Park, which was then, as it is today, a hub of gay life on the Jersey Shore, a bar was cited for serving men who “rocked and swayed their posteriors in a maidenly fashion.” From the end of Prohibition in 1933 through 1967, when a State Supreme Court ruling finally outlawed the practice, New Jersey, like many other states, wielded its liquor laws like.