One thing I’ve been pondering as I work on the bar chapter of my book (yes, still!), is why bars get so much more attention than coffeeshops, restaurants, and so on. (I for one am CRAZY for so ons.)
On one level, the answer is obvious: sex. Booze, dim lights, music, and dancing set a mood that just isn’t accessible when there are napkins on the table and it’s bright enough to read a menu. I enjoyed many a tasty veggie burger at Food for Thought, D.C.’s de facto dyke restaurant, in the 1980s, but I never experienced the kind of transcendence that is pretty much guaranteed by a decent DJ and a pleasantly packed dance floor. Food and clothing might come first on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but it’s the stuff higher up the pyramid that gets people excited and keeps them coming back.
OK, but still, some of those restaurants and coffeeshops sound supercool. Why are there no annual celebrations of the Fedora and Aldo’s, Greenwich Village restaurants that, according to a Ph.D. dissertation I read, “were not exclusively gay restaurants but welcomed women wearing slacks, and lesbians felt comfortable there.” One woman remembered “You could hold hands, sit close, and enjoy being treated like any other couple.”
Similarly, I’m pretty sure there’s no plaque commemorating Pam Pam’s, a diner that was a popular post-bar destination. That same dissertation quoted Carolyn Kovac describing Pam Pam’s as “an absolute scene. Every gay person … wound up there at some point. It was like a bar that served coffee.”
Some lesbian/feminist restaurants developed quite a reputation: Mother Courage in Manhattan, Bloodroot in Bridgeport, Connecticut (still in business), the Bay Area’s Brick Hut, and Chicago’s Mama Peaches, for instance. But a help-wanted ad in the July 1977 issue of For a Change indicates part of the problem. Working at Mama Peaches wasn’t just a job—it involved collective decision-making, and applicants needed “to be willing to give and take criticism and become emotionally supportive of each other as women workers and financially … supportive of this alternative business.” (Less than a year later, the same publication ran another listing: “Mama Peaches, a vegetarian restaurant for women and their friends is selling. We are interested in keeping it in the hands of women.”)
Before I get too snarky, though, I have to quote from “Chicago Whispers,” Sukie de la Croix’s column in Outlines, which rounded up memories of queer Chicago’s past. (He published a book of the same name, which is full of great info.) In 1998, one woman said of Mama Peaches: “I just remember going in there and thinking I was being held in somebody’s arms.”
Mama Peaches was women-only one night per week, as was Philippine Garden, a feminist restaurant in Manhattan that encouraged visitors to “surround yourself with women” on Sundays! Given how many lesbian bars were reported to New York City’s Division of Human Rights by men who felt they’d been unfairly excluded—the Duchess was closed down for just that—this overt discrimination suggests that restaurants were never policed as closely as bars.
Restaurants may be less exciting than bars, but that paid off in another way: There are very few photos of the interiors of lesbian bars—it wasn’t considered acceptable to photograph people in queer clubs until the days of phone cameras—but we have quite a few images of lesbian and feminist restaurants. Most famously, Berkeley’s Brick Hut Café was on the cover of Mary Watkins’ album Something Moving. The album even included a song about the café called “Brick Hut,” with lyrics by poet Pat Parker.
And just to prove that there is never more than two degrees of separation between lesbians, there’s a link between the Brick Hut and D.C.’s Food for Thought: Tiik Pollet, who was in the band Be Be K’Roche, worked in both.
RECOMMENDATIONS: I never thought I’d say this—the podcasts Seth Stevenson and I did about the last few seasons of Downton Abbey were mock-fests—but I absolutely loved Downton Abbey: A New Era, which opens in the States on May 20. I think I finally understand what those Marvel-heads mean by “fan service.” (Here’s my review of the first movie, which wasn’t half as good as this one.)
LISTEN TO ME: I really enjoyed Hannah Kirshner’s book Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town, and we had a really fun conversation on Working. Then Isaac Butler, Karen Han, and I answered some listener emails and voicemails on Working Overtime—about creativity in the classroom and figuring out when it’s time to abandon a creative project.
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