Don't say that you've seen the movies or music or whatever, ’cause we get a lot of them in here.”īy refusing to become a scene, Church remains a paradoxical place: a bustling nightlife hotspot that can also prompt moments of genuine self-reflection.
“One of my policies with all staff is that you can't treat celebrities any different than anybody else,” says Henry. But even as the bar’s profile has risen, attracting celebrities who live in the Hollywood of the South while shooting movies and shows, Henry wants the bar to keep functioning as a great equalizer, a down-home kind of place where Lady Gaga is just another customer. It would become precious as it got more popular, sacrificing personality to make its theme more pronounced. In less skilled hands, a bar like Church would lean too hard into irony. The result is a bar that feels every bit as bizarre and beautiful as Henry’s heart. “I wanted to create a bar where people come every day and feel comfortable and become an institution - but I didn’t want to have to make a poster every day about Titty Night, you know what I mean?” When Henry resurrected his 2001 art gallery (also called Sister Louisa’s) as a bar in 2010, he didn’t decide against making it a gay establishment, so much as he didn’t have energy for “the insane amount of marketing” that branding would require. He later puts his own sense of humor on display: “I'm not gay, but I like to have sex with guys a couple of times a week to make sure I don't like it or whatever.” Today, when describing his approach to his sexual orientation, Henry shifts seamlessly from the earnest to the irreverent: “To me, love didn’t really have so much to do with genitals than it does with when you connect with the heart, with someone’s brain and humor,” he says. For Henry, the kitschy religious iconography that covers the walls of Church isn’t meant to be in-your-face transgressive - rather, it comes from a place of endearment. He got married to a woman and got divorced, went to a Presbyterian seminary and then left because he didn’t feel like he could perform literal Christian belief.
In the 1980s, he got a bachelor’s degree from a Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism program, but his life would take several left turns before he could put that education to full use.
Like the bar he created, Henry defies labels. Now I was among LGBTQ+ family at a bar ripped straight out of a Magnetic Fields song. I had spent much of my closeted childhood singing his music alone in my room “Luckiest Guy,” a bouncy little tune about unrequited love in the big city, was a particular favorite. My love for the place spilled over when I wandered upstairs to the karaoke room and saw that the song list included “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side” by the Magnetic Fields, a band helmed by the prodigious gay songwriter Stephin Merritt. “I want people to come in and think,” Henry says, “because then they grapple with who they are, and then they grapple with themselves and become more authentic.”