Banksy-style mural mysteriously appears on gay bar & people love it

The director of a gay bar in the U.K. has vowed to preserve a Banksy-style mural that he believes is a tribute to the LGBTQ+ community.

The image of Judy Garland as Dorothy from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz appeared overnight on a pair of double doors outside the Sidewalk bar in Birmingham’s lively Gay Village district earlier this week.

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“We don’t know where it’s come from. It wasn’t there when the manager locked up last night,” Sidewalk director Phil Oldershaw told BirminghamLive Wednesday. “It’s still a mystery.”

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Oldershaw told BBC Radio WM that he got a message about the mural Wednesday morning and rushed over to see it. “There was this great big piece of art there, beautifully sitting on our bin room doors,” he said.

The image depicts Dorothy in her iconic blue gingham dress reaching for a pair of real, three-dimensional ruby slippers that had been slung over a nearby powerline.

Oldershaw said he arrived to find a group of construction workers taking photos. “They were all pointing saying ‘that’s a Banksy mate!’”

One art historian and critic said that the piece has “all the hallmarks” of Banksy’s work. “We can see the artwork interacting with the shoes on the telephone wire, which is very clever,” Ruth Millington told BirminghamLive. “It’s also interesting to note that Banksy has used Dorothy in his art before, he likes putting her in interesting places. Banksy does site-specific artworks which carry meaning too. Here we’ve got Dorothy in the Gay Village, and her red shoes definitely carry associations with gay and queer culture where she’s become a bit of an icon.”

However, a spokesperson for the elusive artist confirmed Thursday that Banksy was not behind the mural.

But Oldershaw says he’s asked the bar’s maintenance team to protect the image with acrylic sheeting regardless. “I’m going to protect it whether it’s Banksy or not,” he vowed.

In a video posted to Facebook, Oldershaw called on the community to help the bar establish where the mural came from. So far, the artist has not revealed themself.

Oldershaw told the BBC that he believes the mural is a tribute to the LGBTQ+ community. “If you relay it back to the 50s and 60s onwards,” he explained, “The Wizard of Oz was a huge film with Judy Garland and Dorothy became a gay icon.”

While he’s unsure if younger LGBTQ+ folks are aware that “friend of Dorothy” was once code for gay men, Oldershaw says, “us old-school gays related to the phrase.”

“I think it’s an honor to the gay community saying ‘look we recognize you, we appreciate you and here’s this piece of art,’” he added.

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