There are photographs at the start of every chapter of A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED QUEER WOMEN’S CULTURE, five of them by the great JEB (Joan E. Biren). I also included a few images interspersed with the text to help readers get a (literal) picture of some of the situations I’m describing. I want to share one of those today.
This is the holiday card Elaine Romagnoli, who ran the bar Bonnie & Clyde (and, later, the original Cubby Hole and Crazy Nanny’s), sent out in 1978. It might seem odd for a canny businesswoman to choose such a crappy photo of her place—all that trash, grubby posters covering the bar’s windows, and the scruffy woman boozing outside—but it’s a great example of the camouflage many lesbian bars were obliged to adopt if they wanted to stay in business.
The card was sent with a bit of a wink. The message on the reverse said, “Thank you for not judging us by our cover,” a reference both to the bar’s cover charge (unusual in New York at the time) and the appearance it presented to the world.
In 2011, Romagnoli explained to me that the messy facade was an intentional choice. The main draw of a lesbian bar isn’t the bartender, the booze, or even the pool table, it’s the fact that lesbians can be found there. And lesbians wouldn’t go to a bar if it was full of straight men, staring at them.
This was a big problem. In 1966, New York Unexpurgated, an “amoral guide” to Manhattan, claimed that lesbian bars “keep closing because of an overabundance of male spectators, mostly ineffectual sorts who thrive on watching these girls.”
This problem wasn’t unique to New York or the 1960s. In the book Gay Old Girls, Edith Eyde remembers going to the If Cafe in Los Angeles back in 1947. She called it a “wonderful place” where women could dance together. A paragraph later, though, she reconsiders. “Actually, looking back, it was a dive. The girls were allowed one half of it, and they danced, but there were some fellas and people off the street that would come in and sit on the bar side and look at us gals as we were dancing.”
Bonnie & Clyde was just below Washington Square in Greenwich Village, across the street from an NYU frat. Romagnoli told me, “It became their game, their challenge was to get a guy in there.” She knew that she couldn’t just turn men away—public accommodations laws require establishments to permit entry to all customers as long as they’re sober and of age. Romagnoli tried setting a dress code, requiring male customers to wear a jacket and tie, but of course the NYU guys “knew the law, and they’d show up in a tie, and I had to let them in.”
Her next tactic was to make her bar look unappealing to anyone but those in the know. Hence the grubby exterior. Queer women were much more interested in what was inside the bar than the state of its facade.
When I reached out to photographer Joanne Giganti to get permission to use the image, she told me that it had originally been taken as part of a promotional campaign for Bonnie’s, the women’s restaurant that Romagnoli operated upstairs from the bar. “If you were looking for a place to eat dinner, that entrance was not very inviting, to say the least,” Giganti told me, so Elaine “made the most of it by making a joke … and using it as promo.” Hence the well-groomed server.
Needless to say, you can read more about this and other queer women’s spaces in A Place of Our Own, out in the US on May 28 and already available for pre-order.
RECOMMENDATIONS: My favorite part of the first three seasons of For All Mankind was the goofy alternative history—and not only because it gave America a lesbian president. The recently concluded fourth season took a turn away from that—though there was a scene that came straight out of The Americans—and toward a more classic space show like The Expanse, but I still kind of loved it. (Also, WHY and HOW is Coral Peña, who plays Aleida Rosales, not an international megastar? She’s been the standout actor since her first appearance.)
LISTEN TO ME: On Working, I had a really fun and feisty conversation with actor Jason Isaacs about his (bonkers!) preparation to play Cary Grant in the Brit Box/ITV series Archie. I also loved last week’s Working Overtime, in which Isaac Butler suggested how exercises designed to help actors build “sense memory” can be used in all kinds of creative endeavors.
READ ME: For T Magazine, I wrote about how aliens are having a moment. As they put it so well in the subhead, “pop culture now flirts with extraterrestrials as much as it fears them.”
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