House of Tilden put a roof over the heads of queer patrons and performers in Pittsburgh during the peak disco era. Despite its historical significance, what now resides on the East Liberty site, which once served as a beacon of the city’s underground LGBTQ scene, is uncertain.
Harrison Apple has, since 2012, worked to commemorate the House of Tilden’s ( H.O.T. for short) legacy, part of their work as co-director of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project. Despite an intimate knowledge of the subject, they admit the question of where, exactly, H.O.T. used to be is “honestly difficult to answer.”
“The plot of land that it occupies is completely redesigned,” they tell Pittsburgh City Paper in an email interview, explaining how H.O.T. and surrounding businesses encompassed “a small set of streets within the corner of what is now Shady and Penn Avenue, and briefly shared a parking lot with the now demolished East Liberty Giant Eagle.”
“It was redesigned to accommodate the expansion of the East Busway (huge fan right, personally), and with the House of Tilden, so went Shakespeare [Street], some homes, and businesses,” they say.
Apple continues their efforts to recognize what they consider the “crown jewel of Pittsburgh after-hours” clubs with Calendar Girls in the House of Tilden, an archival exhibition at Kelly Strayhorn Theatre. Opening Fri., Sept. 26, the show is described as illustrating the “vibrant nightlife at H.O.T.” from 1970 to 1981, and its role in supporting local “queer, trans, and performers of color” at the time.
For one weekend, KST offers an opportunity to engage with the queer experience on multiple levels, as Calendar Girls’ debut coincides with Becoming Daddy AF by David Roussève/REALITY, a dance-theater piece described as a “moving portrait of a queer African American man aware of his aging, which consequently leads to this powerful meditation on life’s purpose.” In a press release, KST states that, paired with Roussève’s “deeply personal premiere,” the opening of Calendar Girls, at least for one weekend, “offers audiences another perspective on queering and queering history in East Liberty,” the ever-changing neighborhood where the venue resides, and where H.O.T. once operated.
Apple — who has previously contributed artistic works to shows like When the Lights Come On: Queer Nightlife as Emergent Space at Brew House Arts — says KST programming director Ben Pryor approached them to produce a show that would “effectively place the theater into this wide framework of queer history.” They focused on H.O.T. to acknowledge the need to “preserve the work of KST because of what it and it alone can do for the quality of life in Pittsburgh.”
As the name suggests, Calendar Girls unfolds as a retro girlie calendar, with each month featuring a different H.O.T. regular or staff member — March is DJ Brian White, June is go-go dancer “Stella,” October is coat checker and “poppers authority” Liz Toth, and so on.
Apple delves into the many colorful characters that passed through H.O.T., a “former high-end gambling club with fine crystal chandeliers and mahogany lions carved on the stair banisters.” They point out how H.O.T. founder Robert “Lucky” Johns, a member of Pittsburgh’s self-described “gay mafia,” took over the club, and “changed the landscape for a social set that met in hostile locations more susceptible to police harassment and wild whims of owners seeking to make money off a desperate audience,”
“Lucky was no saint, but [H.O.T.] offered more freedom of movement,” Apple explains, adding that the club opened at a time of increasing awareness around LGBTQ rights, citing how, in 1975, Pa. governor Milton Jerrold Shapp issued a proclamation prohibiting discrimination toward LGBTQ state employees.
“The performer scene was wider, wilder, it was mainstream level entertainment, but I like to believe that the shows at the Tilden had something special,” Apple continues. “It’s one thing to be a headliner at a club for people slumming it. It’s another to perform for a place of your own.”
While Calendar Girls offers a broad, objective view of Pittsburgh’s queer history, 65-year-old Roussève takes a deeply personal approach, addressing his own mortality with a performance that blends “the ancestral genealogy with his journey living with HIV and the profound loss of his husband of 26 years.”
In an interview provided by KST, Roussève — who, in 2019, produced Halfway to Dawn, a piece inspired by the venue’s partial namesake, jazz icon Billy Strayhorn — says Becoming Daddy AF allowed him to confront the pros and cons of aging; his life as a performer, and what lies ahead as his body changes; and how he fits into a bigger picture as a member of the Black LGBTQ community and a survivor of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that wiped out many of his friends and contemporaries.
“Why am I here? What [does] my genealogy tell me about my personal history and about the expansive history of African American and queer people?” he posits. “And so, as I ask myself those questions, I’m hoping that I’m leaving room for the audience to leave, not with any answers that I provide, but with a platform to ask themselves those questions about their own lives. Because I think everybody’s meaning of life might be very different. And so the core question is, what gives our lives purpose?”
For Becoming Daddy AF, Roussève incorporates kinetic movements from his 40-plus-year career with “intimate, non-linear queer storytelling” to “ruminate on profound moments of love and grief and serve as a life archive.”
“We bring ourselves out of the mundane of the everyday. And that’s what dance is meant to do: investigate those deeper, metaphoric, poetic meanings, and text tells the actual, literal narrative story,” Roussève states.
While Roussève wants audience members to leave with important questions, Apple offers something more tangible in posters they made for Calendar Girls.
“I hand-printed hundreds, and I want them on every bedroom, kitchen, and studio wall in the city,” they say.
Opening Reception: Pittsburgh Queer History Project presents Calendar Girls in the House of Tilden. 5:30-7:30 p.m. Fri., Sept. 26. Continues through Jan. 10, 2026. Kelly Strayhorn Theater. 5941 Penn Ave., East Liberty. Pay What Moves You. kelly-strayhorn.org
David Roussève/REALITY presents Becoming Daddy AF. 7:30-9:10 p.m. Fri., Sept. 26-Sat., Sept. 27. Kelly Strayhorn Theater. 5941 Penn Ave., East Liberty. Pay What Moves You $10-25. kelly-strayhorn.org
This article appears in Sept. 24-30 2025.