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Editor's Note: This story has been updated to provide additional attribution and context around the history of Tryangles. In the days leading up to Christmas, Mike Flatt and his staff would wrap hundreds of presents for the customers at Tryangles. That meant at Christmastime, everyone walked out of the bar with armfuls of gifts, and on Thanksgiving, people packed into the bar for a full turkey dinner.

When the bar opened in the early 90s, fewer families embraced gay men and their partners. So Flatt gay the halls and threw the best celebration he could. That means that while there are more inclusive and safe spaces around the city for the LGBTQ community it creates a sort louisville loss for places like Tryangles that traditionally cater to a specifically gay crowd.

Flatt saw the downtick in customers over the years as his Thanksgiving table thinned out and his clientele grew more comfortable in mainstream bars. Today gay men have so many other places they can go, Flatt told me when I met him on a Southern Indiana porch in late June, about a month after Tryangles shut its doors for good at S.

Preston St. They can walk gay into any bar on Bardstown Road or in downtown Indiana. When the bar closed in May, it was the longest consistently operating gay bar in Louisville and an institution for the LGBTQ community. So in tribute, I spent some time after the closure chatting with the people who were instrumental in Tryangles' heyday.

Flatt was candid with me when we met. He's never been a drinker and the whole "owning a bar" thing started as a fluke. The previous owner needed cash fast, and Flatt had a wad of it in his pocket because he used to purchase antique paintings. He was right, and about seven years later, that success expanded to a second bar with Tryangles.

The focal point was a saddle adorned with a mosaic of tiny mirrors to make it look like a disco ball. Tryangles was supposed to open April 1,he remembered, but that was pushed back. He spent nearly three decades protecting his family. Darrell Robinson, a retired drag queen known as Cissy Blake, told me that he always felt like a bar of that family.

Walking into Tryangles was bar walking into that bar from the sitcom "Cheers. He had his own stool and he spent most afternoons at Tryangles during happy hour. For indiana brief period, louisville ran karaoke for the bar, which filled Tryangles with endless show tunes and Elvis Presley songs. Robinson, who was one of the first publicly HIV-positive people in Louisville, remembers having young gay men come up to him at the bar, pull him aside and confide their own status to him.

During his own journey, he dropped down to pounds and his outlook got so dark his family put a marker down on his grave plot.

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In so many cases, Tryangles had been his family, particularly as his own family started passing. He wanted to be that for other people, too. The warmness that you felt when you walked into the bar was really what set it apart from its competitors, Robinson told me.