Before his death, though, he created a trust that owned the bar and named Tony Bobrow the new president of the trust.Ĭurrent Hidden Door President Harvey Meissner said the bar’s been closed just a day and a half since it first opened in 1979: It closed a half day for Roberts’ funeral, then it was closed for one full day because its TABC license expired after someone filled out the renewal, left for vacation and forgot to mail it in.īobrow refused to open without his liquor license and closed the bar for a day until the renewal was in place.īefore Bobrow died in February 2018, he had arranged for a different trust to manage the bar after his death. Roberts died 1988, when he was still in his 50s. The Hidden Door was so successful from the time it opened that within a couple of years, Roberts opened a second location in Corpus Christi, which is also still going strong although under the ownership of two customers who purchased the bar about 12 years ago. The Hidden Door has been giving back to the LGBT community ever since. And that first big donation was just the beginning As a result, he was the one who donated the initial $10,000 used to create the Howie Daire Center, an adult daycare center for people living with AIDS now operated by AIN. Roberts saw the importance, from the beginning, of supporting the LGBT community. By the time Roberts bought the bar, more people knew the Hollywood leading man was gay. When the bar was originally named, Hudson’s sexual orientation was hush-hush. The original owners, a couple of Braniff pilots, told Roberts the bar’s name came from a line in a Doris Day-Rock Hudson film in which Hudson tells Day he’s going to stop in at the Hidden Door, the bar in the hotel where they’re staying.
The bar already had been around at least a decade when Roberts bought it. Roberts kept the name and turned it into a gay bar. When Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was introduced to then-Hidden Door President Tony Bobrow, Jones told him he “got a lot of pussy there.” But Jones’ experiences at the Hidden Door happened before Jim Roberts bought the bar in 1979, when it was still a straight bar frequented by airline employees coming over from Love Field.