Bear Necessities – Sale of the eagleBOLTbar Brings Things Full Circle

Last summer, ownership got to be a bit much for Edward Hopkins, who had, 25 years earlier, turned a small inheritance into a Downtown Minneapolis East neighborhood institution.  For “health and retirement reasons,” Mister Hopkins had decided it was time to sell the eagleBOLTbar.

In the 1990s, if you had been a Twin Cities bear—that is, a macho-with-a-little-machismo-added gay male who had no idea where the ottoman went or even what an ottoman was—you might have felt more like a lone wolf than a member of the ursine species.  Oh, you might have found other Tom of Finland types hanging along the margins of a handful of lovely gay bars, along with the “twinks” and the “jocks” and the circuit boys and the show queens and the drag queens, but if you were a bear in the 1990s, it might have felt like you didn’t have a place where you truly belonged, a place that belonged to you.

That changed on September 8, 1998, when the Minneapolis Eagle hatched into existence.  Its bird theme notwithstanding, it became known as “the bear bar”…although a closer inspection revealed every kind of person was welcomed there.  In fact, it was far from being a musty, slave-haunted dungeon. It didn’t take long for a sense of community to coagulate around the bar’s many interactions with its patrons.  The bears belonged to this place…and the place belonged to them.

In 2002, Edward Hopkins bought the Eagle’s dilapidated neighbor, rebuilding and reopening it as a video bar called The Bolt.  This space was intended to attract a younger, more cosmopolitan crowd, one who definitely knew what an ottoman was but couldn’t be bothered to care where it went.  A dress code was attempted, but that experiment proved more trouble than it was worth, so the two establishments were simply combined to form the eagleBOLTbar, which, if it weren’t the name of a Minneapolis gay bar, might serve as the handle for a badass cinematic super-hero.  

A wide breadth of bar-sponsored events proved that the eagleBOLTbar was more than just a hangout for the average bear.  Showtune Sunday, movie nights, bingo, brunch specials, even trivia contests fostered a sense of community rare outside of bars that are the setting for a TV sitcom. 

Longtime customers were understandably skittish when news of the attempted sale surfaced last summer, but, almost karmically, an as-yet-unnamed “longtime patron” has leaped into the breach, buying the eagleBOLTbar for $1.8 million.  It’s as if someone fostered by the sense of community has stepped up to foster it in return. 

This development will no doubt come as a relief to patrons who worried that new ownership might change the place completely, but no—for the foreseeable future, anyway, Bears will continue to be welcome at this den…just so long as they don’t intend to hibernate.  

eagleBOLTbar
515 Washington Ave. S.
Minneapolis, MN  
(612) 338-4214
www.eagleboltbar.com