In the last newsletter, I wrote about the camouflage that some big-city lesbian bars were obliged to adopt in order to avoid unwanted attention while still attracting enough desired attention (i.e., patronage from lesbian customers) to say open. Today, I want to share a poem by Chocolate Waters that Big Mama Rag published in December 1979. It beautifully encapsulates the problems that were more common outside of compact, public-transportation-friendly New York City: the out-of-the-way, often sketchy, locations lesbian bars found themselves in.
(I'm using the whole poem because Chocolate Waters gave me permission to run it in Slate in 2011, and the book it's from, Charting New Waters, is out of print. You can still support Chocolate by buying her newer books, though.)
That last stanza is a killer. I don’t want to agree, but I know I’ve spent evenings stewing about the crumminess of dyke bars while also feeling frustrated that I couldn’t just go somewhere else, because there were no other clubs in town where it felt safe to dance/flirt/make out with women.
In her book The Audacity of a Kiss, Leslie Cohen talks about Sahara, the Upper East Side bar she opened with three business partners in 1976. Cohen had a background in art history and had worked at Artforum and in galleries. She wanted to challenge the “we don’t deserve anything better” attitude expressed in Chocolate Waters’ conclusion.
Cohen—to be sure, an interested party—described Sahara’s opening night, like this:
The expressions on the faces of the women when they entered the club for the first time and were handed a rose were priceless. Gasps erupted from their mouths because what they were expecting was more of what they were used to, which was very little; instead, they were overwhelmed by the elegance they encountered. Depleted, minimal expectations had created a collective low self-esteem that Sahara was determined to correct.
But back to locations. A month after “The Trouble With Women’s Bars in This Town” appeared in Big Mama Rag, Mac McCann, who had run bars in St. Louis for a decade, sent an angry letter to the paper, pointing out several of the problems that operators of lesbian bars faced. “Bars don’t grow on quiet cozy corners,” she wrote. “To open a bar, isolated from the Pepsi Colas, the Joes Electric Shops of the world, would cost a fortune.”
I get into McCann’s travails a little bit in the lesbian-bar chapter of A PLACE OF OUR OWN, but here I’ll just mention that McCann’s time as a bar operator came to an end when her place Mor or Les was fire-bombed and destroyed in September 1979. In its story on the attack (headlined, “Blast, Fire Destroy Women’s Bar on Grand"), the St. Louis Post-Dispatch contained this devastating gem of a paragraph:
Women customers who gathered outside after hearing reports of the bar’s demise, talked quietly among themselves, although one angry woman yelled to several persons waiting for a bus across the street, “Are you happy now?” A man yelled back, “Yeah.”
RECOMMENDATIONS: My recommendation to myself is to learn the Gay Gordons so we can join the Scottish country dancing at our next Burns Supper. For the rest of you? Next week’s Working features an interview with Adam Sisman, a wonderful biographer whose most recent book, The Secret Life of John le Carré, reveals many of the secrets le Carré pushed Sisman to keep while he and his second wife were still alive. Of late, I’ve really been enjoying books that lift the curtain on the practice of writing biography. In addition to Sisman’s slim volume, I loved Deirdre Bair’s Parisian Lives (GOD, Samuel Beckett’s friends were annoying) and Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own.
LISTEN TO ME: On Working, I talked to the fantastic illustrator/children’s book author Mika Song about finding inspiration in everyday life. On Working Overtime, Isaac Butler and I discussed ways of breaking out of creative habits that have outlived their usefulness.
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