An iconic New Hope LGBTQ+ bar is now a parking lot, but the town’s queer history won’t be lost

“The first time I saw Mother,” recalled Michael Gardner, known as drag queen Miss Pumpkin, in a recent interview, “here was this older man with a big white bouffant, holding court at the Raven Bar with a Coors Light and a shot of Peach Schnapps in a snifter.”

“Mother” was Joseph (Josie) Cavallucci, a Philadelphia native who embraced her true self after moving to New Hope, Pa., in the 1950s. Over the decades, Cavallucci became a beloved local celebrity renowned for her big, bold fashion. She attended Catholic mass on Sundays in full drag and “nobody would bat an eye,” said Philly filmmaker Kristal Sotomayor, who interviewed Miss Pumpkin and others about Cavallucci for their short documentary Don’t Cry For Me All You Drag Queens. It’s one of a series of five short films produced by New York-based studio TRAVERSE32 with the goal of preserving New Hope’s LGBTQ+ history.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Mother Cavallucci was part of a large, openly gay community in New Hope, which provided a welcoming refuge. “There was such a deep sense of community around protecting Mother and respecting her and what she gave back to the community,” said Sotomayor. “I grew up in Butler, a very staunchly conservative area in Pennsylvania, and I could never imagine that there was a small town, sort of rural, and accepting of queer folks. I am nonbinary and it’s scary to be your authentic self in places where people might be against that.”

The Raven Bar was Mother Cavallucci’s palace, where for years she regularly threw queer weddings as fundraisers to support New Hope’s LGBTQ+ community. She was almost always the bride; and each year she picked a cute young man to be her husband and everyone dressed up to celebrate.

For nearly half a century, the bar was a slice of queer paradise in the small town that was a regular destination for LGBTQ+ parties attracting people from all over the world — until it shuttered in 2019 and was paved over for a parking lot.

In its final decade, the Raven became a haven for trans women.

“Welcome to trans heaven. Welcome to trans city. Welcome to New Hope,” said sports journalist Karleigh Webb at the start of the short documentary Trans Heaven, Pennsylvania, another film in TRAVERSE32′s Creative Hope Initiative series. It centers on the annual Raven parties — later called the Mid-Atlantic Transperience Weekend — for trans women founded by Northeast Philadelphia native Jennifer Bryant.

“It had a piano bar, it had a huge dance floor, it had a swimming pool outside — that’s a big reason these events took off. It was just perfect,” said Bryant in the film. “I wanted to kind of create [a place] where people felt like a celebrity, and we were. We were rock stars.”

The parties rolled out red carpets and photographers. At first only about a dozen folks came, but at its peak some 200 trans women and self-identified cross dressers attended yearly.

“We talked to almost 100 women who attended these events … a lot of them are still in the closet or they live private lives, [so] we had to do our due diligence not to out anyone,” said director Hansen Bursic, a Pittsburgh native and Temple alum. “Every single person that I talked to said that they had a life-changing experience at these parties.”

“In many ways, those weekends brought me into being,” Webb, who is trans, told Bursic.

For TRAVERSE32 cofounder Brendan Gaul, a gay man who grew up in Richboro, Pa., hearing about New Hope’s accepting reputation, these films are a way of keeping the town’s LGBTQ+ history alive amid its ongoing changes. The Raven’s closure was part of a wave of suburban gay bars that shuttered in the past 15 years around the region.

“There is a feeling that New Hope is being somewhat gentrified, and with gentrification also comes homogeny. [I thought,] how do we infuse creativity back into the culture and give that queer culture that is there a little bit of a boost?”

Bursic believes that while New Hope continues to change, “that soul of new hope will never go away,” he said. “That energy and that desire for being an anomaly in Pennsylvania, as such an overwhelmingly supportive place to be queer — I hope that never changes.”

‘Don’t Cry For Me All You Drag Queens’ and ‘Trans Heaven, Pennsylvania’ will screen at New York City’s NewFest as part of its “Queer Lives Across Time & America” program on Oct. 19.