Board is carefully scrutinizing all hooch licenses issued to places featuring the name of some bird.This does not refer to spots using the word “bird” itself but to places which have peacocks, parrots, swans, pheasants, canaries, etc., in their names.The Stork Club is the top exception. The liquor authorities have discovered “The Bird Circuit” is the nickname for bars and joynts which invite the patronage of the town’s whoopsys.The A.B.C. IN THE Tennessee Williams play, “Camino Real,” there is a line referring to “The Bird Circuit.”. One sailor comes in-they faint!ġ4 April 1953, Muncie (IN) Star, “Walter Winchell In New York,” pg. They stand three-deep at the bar and look at themselves in the mirror and what they see is depressing. Oh, the hot spots, ho ho! There’s the Pink Flamingo, the Yellow Pelican, the Blue Heron, and the Prothonotary Warbler! They call it the Bird Circuit. The “bird circuit” term is infrequently used to describe a district of gay bars in any city.Ī person frequenting the gay circuit is called a “circuit queen.” “Bird circuit” has been cited in print since at least 1953, when it was mentioned in the Tennessee Williams play Camino Real. Police raids eliminated the bars by the late 1960s. The bars had such names as the Blue Parrot (on East 53rd Street), the Golden Pheasant (on East 48th Street) and the Swan. The “bird circuit” of gay bars existed in Manhattan, along Third Avenue around the lower East 50s, after World War II.