I’m now working on the bar chapter of my book—which, for the record, has thus far involved a lot of reading and zero bar-hopping. I had a head start on this section, since I wrote a big Slate series on gay bars back in 2011. (The navigation is broken—thanks, Flash!—but you’ll find links to all the sections here, and if you’re superkeen, you can buy a Kindle version for a bargainiforous $2.99.)
The more I read, the more I’ve been thinking about a fun slide show (also broken!) that ran alongside that series. Called “Is This a Gay Bar?” it was a riff on gay-bar naming conventions.
In it, I rounded up a few tropes like names that refer to long tunnel-like things (Mineshaft, Pipeline); to hard, pointy things (The Spike, The Stud); to male birds (The Cock, Cockpit, The Cock Ring, yeah for real); to men named Richard (Dick’s Bar, Moby Dick, Swinging Richard’s); to hard, pounding things (Jackhammer), to things that get pounded (The Anvil); and what could be summarized as double-entendres (White Swallow, Three-Legged Cowboy, Backdoor).
You may notice a certain dudeliness to those funny names. In one way, that’s understandable—after all, there have always been many more bars catering to men than to women—but it still makes me feel a bit bad. Do lesbian bar-owners have less creativity than gay men?
It’s not that there were no lesbian naming conventions. Take, for instance, women’s names. If a bar moniker referenced an “old-fashioned” women’s name like Peg, Maud, Rose, or Amelia, that probably indicated a lesbian bar. Then again, if the name were Mary, Nellie, or Sissy, that would almost certainly indicate a men’s bar!
Meanwhile, names that suggest secrecy or sanctuary—On the Q.T, Don’t Tell Mama, Sneakers, Entre Nous, No Se Lo Digas a Nadie, The Lost and Found, X’s Hideaway—can go either way.
But the more I read, the more I realized that those “fun” names—the cute and clever coinages that are remembered and make their way into slide shows—were outliers. The vast majority of gay-bar names were as boring as the vast majority of straight-bar names. Reading Nan Alamilla Boyd’s Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965, I came across snoozers like Keno’s, Chili’s, the Cross Roads, Cal’s, Dolan’s Super Club, the 57 Club, On the Hill, the Black Cat, the Spur Club, the Frontier Village, the Albatross, the 181 Club, the Beige Room, etc. (That last one is almost offensively boring, even more so if it’s trying to suggest “the bedroom.”)
It reminds me of how some early women’s bookstores took their names from antiquity, mythology, or pagan celebrations as a sort of camouflage—after all, who could worry about being seen going into Isis, Antigone, or Lammas? They just seemed cultured and a bit mysterious. (Interestingly enough, there was also a women’s-name thing going on in the classic era of feminist bookstores, which included Djuna Books, Emma’s, LIlith Womyn’s Bookstore, and Sojourner Bookstore. Djuna Barnes—a bit of a pill—hated her name being attached to a feminist bookstore. Apparently, she liked to call them up to complain.)
Similarly, only bars catering to an extreme or very confident crowd—or located in a gayborhood where no dissimulation was required—could risk an obviously, or even cleverly, gay name. In most places, it was much more practical to use a name that reminded patrons who owned or ran the place, or what color the walls were painted. It could also signal a bar’s lineage: In San Francisco, it wasn’t lack of imagination that led the owner of Mona’s to name subsequent operations Mona’s 440 and Mona’s Candlelight. It was just good branding.
Of course, bookstores and bars aren’t the only queer-adjacent spaces with veiled names. After Bar Mattachine opened in LA back in 2015, I was thinking how cool it would be to have a sister Bar Bilitis. But the fact is that the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis were also pretty mealy-mouthed monikers. No shade on the pioneers who risked job-loss, incarceration, involuntary commitment, and so much more when they launched the U.S. fight for LGBT rights, but every time I read the etymologies of their names (a medieval masque group, a 19th-century French poem), I think, “Pretentious? Moi?“
RECOMMENDATIONS: I am almost finished with Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Rumaan Alam did a fantastic interview with author Heather L. Clark for Working back in January, but I admit I was daunted by the book’s size. My inability to read big books is surely my biggest flaw (other than my perfectionism, of course!), but audiobooks have solved that weird glitch. This year I’ve listened to two Caros, multiple Halberstams, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries, and several other literally weighty tomes. Red Comet is as good as everyone says. Incredibly detailed without ever getting bogged down, revelatory, and terribly sad. Ted Hughes comes out of it better than I expected—though the fates of Assia Wevill and Nicholas Hughes hit me like a ton of bricks—after all, I knew how things were going to end up for Plath. Clark mentions how Plath’s accent completely transformed very soon after she moved to Britain, but I was still surprised when I heard it for myself—especially given how hard it was for her to adjust to Britain, which she found freezing cold, unhygienic, and with terrible food. (All those claims are very much supported by the text!) Hers is an immigration story!
LISTEN TO ME: On The Waves, I talked to Seth Stevenson, about the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, from which he has been filing amazing dispatches; and for a very special holiday episode, Hanna Rosin, Noreen Malone, and I reunited for one week only. (I’m really looking forward to next Thursday’s reunion episode, featuring Christina Cauterucci, Marcia Chatelain, and Nichole Perkins.) For Working, I talked with New-York Historical Society curator Debra Schmidt Bach about putting together the museum’s Robert Caro exhibition, “Turn Every Page.”
Happy holidays! Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is https://buttondown.email/WhereAre. The archives are here. When my book is ready to be preordered, this is where I will tell you about that, but that won’t happen until 2024. Reply to this email to share any thoughts or ideas.
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