The closing of the Cheshire Motor Inn on Cheshire Bridge Road hit me with a grief I didn’t fully anticipate. It felt like losing a relative no one ever talked about, but everyone secretly loved, one who held family history in the wrinkles of its sheets and the creak of its floorboards.
As an Atlanta native, I grew up with Cheshire Bridge Road as a living, breathing entity, a stretch of the city that embodied the raw, unfiltered sensuality and liberation that gay men carved out for themselves long before apps, curated nightlife, and rainbow marketing campaigns claimed to stand in for queer community. But the Cheshire Motor Inn was something else entirely. It was a sexual commons, a makeshift temple of longing, a sanctuary where desire could unfold without apology.
Cheshire Bridge Road in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s was notorious and beloved in equal measure. It was Atlanta’s great erotic artery, a place where the boundaries between nightlife, underground culture, and queer self-determination collapsed into one brightly lit, neon-humming ecosystem. Every disco, leather bar, strip club, adult bookstore, every drag bar, every massage parlor, every parked car holding two (or more) men negotiating possibility under the glow of a streetlamp – together they formed a kind of erotic democracy.
Cheshire Bridge was where you learned to recognize and accept desire in the brief flick of an eye, where the coded rituals of cruising were passed down with the precision of “oral” history. As one longtime local put it in the press, Cheshire Bridge was a place where “you can get the best Italian food in the city. You can get [oral sex]. You can buy a dildo. It’s all right there.” It was an ecosystem that existed outside respectability politics, unapologetic and deeply queer.
Within that landscape, the Cheshire Motor Inn became legendary. Built in the late 1950s, the motel was unremarkable in architecture yet extraordinary in cultural function. It was a waystation, a pickup point, a sexual playground, a refuge for men who needed an hour, a night, or a weekend to be fully themselves.
Reviewers online unintentionally preserve what queer oral history often loses: men mentioning the “classic ‘50s look,” the friendly if bemused accepting staff, the rooms that smelled of urine, time and secrets, and in more candid cruising forums, the glow of possibility—“lots of cruising here,” “stairwells are active after midnight,” “Room 115 was friendly,” “met a beautiful married guy here once who changed my life,” “weekend nights are good if you know how to read the signs.” Even the reviews that griped about dilapidation, police presence, or slow nights reveal the deeper truth: this wasn’t just a motel – it was a vessel of intimacy, a queer social network long before such things had digital interfaces.
For me, Cheshire Motor Inn was woven into the fabric of my coming-of-age as a gay man growing up in the conservative oppressive heat of Georgia. It was a place where I had several memorable encounters, moments that helped me understand my own body and desire(s) not as something to fear or conceal but as something alive, tender, electric, and human.
I remember the scuffed carpet, the smell of air-conditioning fighting Atlanta’s summer heat, the roaches, muffled laughter (and screams) from another room, the dirt, the phone that didn’t work, the way the metal railing outside the upstairs rooms vibrated slightly if someone walked by. These sensory fragments form a personal archive: the nervous excitement of waiting for a knock; the shock of instant attraction; the tenderness that sometimes followed; the silence afterward that felt neither lonely nor sad but deeply human.
That personal history inspired me in 2023 to host the Cheshire Motor Inn Biennale in Room 153 – a one-room fearless festival of memory, performance, and reckoning. It was my way of reclaiming and honoring the motel while it still stood, paying homage to the generations of queer men who had passed through those doors. I filled the space with art, stories, and rituals. It became a temporary queer reliquary, an altar to the courage, risk, pleasure, and defiance that had perfumed that room and others for decades. Motel management (wisely) shut it down. But it didn’t stop it from happening. The Cheshire Motor Inn Biennale in Room 153 continued online – inviting everyone virtually into that space, to feel its history and its ghosts. It was a pure reminder that queer sanctuaries don’t need official recognition to matter deeply.
The loss of Cheshire Motor Inn echoes the heartbreak many of us felt when the Parliament House in Orlando closed – a queer palace of drag, decadence, resilience, and weekend-long romance. The Parliament House wasn’t just a hotel or a bar; much like Cheshire, it was a mythical cultural anchor, a place where generations of gay men learned how to belong to themselves and to each other. These fabled venues were not mere businesses; they were queer universities, erotic cathedrals, social laboratories where shame dissolved and identity was forged. Losing them is not the same as losing any other bar or motel. It is losing a location on the emotional map of queer history.
What disturbs me most is that these closures are not isolated events but part of a larger pattern. In a time when queer visibility is paradoxically at a cultural high and political low – when rainbow capitalism thrives even as extremist rhetoric, anti-LGBTQIA legislation, and creeping fascist ideologies spread – the disappearance of queer spaces is deeply symbolic. It signals both an external and internal erosion: the external pressure of gentrification, over-policing, and moral sanitation, and the internal pressure of a culture increasingly encouraged to tidy itself up, to align with heteronormative relatability rather than daring, erotic self-invention.
Neighborhoods across the country are being “cleaned up,” which often means sanitized of the messy, vibrant, sexually liberated queer culture that actually saved lives. Under the guise of progress, developers flatten the architecture of our history. Places like Cheshire Motor Inn – unglamorous, uncurated, and imperfect is especially vulnerable. Yet they were essential: they gave us privacy when we needed it, visibility when we craved it, danger when it was thrilling, comfort when it was scarce and deserved.
So, when I think about the Cheshire Motor Inn now, I feel both sorrow and gratitude. Sorrow for the physical loss, for the soon to be bulldozed rooms and extinguished neon. But gratitude for what it gave us – for the men who found each other there, for the lives changed by a single night, for the bodies that learned how to want without shame, for the art and memory and laughter that soaked into the drywall and carpet (among other things). These things cannot be torn down. They live on in us.
And this is why we must record them. Celebrate them. Write them into our cultural memory. Because what Cheshire Bridge Road represented cannot be replicated by curated pop-up queer events or corporate Pride floats. It was dirtier, truer, riskier, freer. It was ours.
As the country again flirts with authoritarianism, as queer people are told – subtly or overtly – to behave, assimilate, and quiet down, the erasure of our erotic and communal landmarks is a warning. These places mattered. They shaped us. And their disappearance marks not just the loss of architecture, but the loss of a world where queer freedom felt insurgent and alive. We must be proud.
Farewell, Cheshire Motor Inn. Farewell to your flickering neon sign, your uneven stairwells, your rooms full of stories. You gave shelter to our desires when few places would. And in return, we carry you forward – not as a ruin, but as a forever heartfelt pulse.
You will not be erased. We will not be erased.
Editor’s Note: Located behind The Colonnade restaurant, Cheshire Motor Inn closed in October after more than 70 years in business. The future of the property, owned by development firm Selig Enterprises, is unknown at this time.