Frank Ribaudo, the founder of the historic Back Bay LGBTQ+ venue Club Café who anchored Boston’s queer activism and nightlife for decades, died Tuesday at the age of 81 following a two-and-a-half-year battle with brain cancer.
“Frank touched so many lives through Club Café and for just being who he was... so pure of heart,” Joe Posa, Ribaudo’s husband of 25 years, shared on social media.
Ribaudo’s iconic business has been a hub of dancing, activism and the arts for more than four decades, tracing its roots back to a time when Boston’s LGBTQ+ community had few such places.
In 1983, he and his friends were harassed for being gay at Back Bay Racquetball — a popular spot in the South End at the time, according to queer historian Russ López.
“It was a great gym, except they were mean as heck and particularly mean to anything that was gay,” said López, who has authored three books on the LGBTQ+ community in Massachusetts.
That’s when Ribaudo and his friends started a gay-friendly gym called Metropolitan Health Club. The building also housed the restaurant that would become Club Café, which began as a place to gather after workouts.
But its role as a cornerstone of the Boston LGBTQ+ community really began as the AIDS epidemic intensified in the mid-1980s. Ribaudo’s venue became the site of countless dinners, fundraisers and meetings for organizers and people with AIDS.
“In a very dark age, it was a place of light,” López said. “And he was a person of light in a very dark age.”
One of those meetings in the club’s back room — nearly 40 years ago — was the launchpad for the formation of Community Resource Initiative (CRI), a public health nonprofit dedicated to fighting HIV.
“Frank was very instrumental in making sure that he was one of the many voices that said, ‘Yes, we don’t just have room for CRI, we need CRI,’” said Julie Marston, CRI’s executive director. “‘We need someone to come forward and pay attention to the diseases that men were dying of.’”
And the AIDS epidemic wasn’t the last time Club Café was at the center of local LGBTQ+ history. In 2005, just a year after Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage, the state Legislature was voting on a potential constitutional amendment to reverse that decision.
According to López, gay marriage lobbyists knew who to call when they needed support on Beacon Hill.
“They called up folks at Club Café — remember, that was the place to go — and they said, ‘Get your friends over to the State House now,’” López said. “Several hundred people flooded the State House, and that was because of Club Café. Because that was the center of the community.”
Ribaudo’s advocacy continued throughout his life, as he helped create the Harbor to the Bay AIDS Benefit Bike Ride, which raised more than $7 million for HIV/AIDS nonprofits over the course of 20 years.
“He was a dedicated advocate for all things community-based and LGBTQ,” Marston said. “He was a friend to the community in every way you can imagine.”
Toward the end of his life, Ribaudo’s husband says he chose to stop his cancer treatment and spend his last days in hospice care at home.
“I was with him alone in our beautiful home as I spoke and sang to him and I am grateful to have had that moment,” Posa wrote.
Club Café will host a celebration of Ribaudo’s life.
“Because of Frank’s vision and steadfast leadership, Club Café remains a safe and welcoming space for all,” the venue wrote on social media. “Our community—and indeed our world—is a better place because of Frank.”
