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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (May 1, 1986)
A Place For Us: G ay Bars b y Lee Lynch A few weeks ago m y lover said, im petu ously, enthusiastically, "I want to go to a gay b a r!" I felt her urge throb in m y veins, too. It had been a long tim e since I’d sat am ong m y own people and watched ou r rites and T H E AMAZON TRAIL m ysteries unfold in a dim , sm oke-filled room . N ot long after this we traveled to Eugene to hear Gerd Brantenberg read from Egalia s Daughters, and we joined the crowd that afterw ard dispersed, then regrouped, at a bar affectionately called “ The Riv,” right in Eugene’s dow ntow n m all. A new gay bar is always exciting to me, tho ug h so often the same as every other. This one was large, w ith a long bar at one side o f an open space, and an equally large if empty, dance flo o r on its other side. B linking lights outlined the ceiling over the dance floor and seem ed to pulse to the beat o f loud, unintel ligible m usic. There were a few tables across fro m the bar, as well as a pool table, and several dykes in wheelchairs conversed there w ith others on straight-backed bar chairs. We clim bed som e steps to overlook the scene fro m a raised platform w hich held still more tables. It was a bare place, with nothing to deco rate it but the patrons: wom en in baggy west ern casual, m en in crisper togs. There was a sm ell o f cigarette sm oke everywhere. 1 tasted o f it and nothing else fo r hours. O ur voices grew hoarse with it and with the increasingly raucous m usic. My visit led me to th in k o f Bonnie Zim m erm an’s work. She’s a teacher o f lesbian literature and w om en’s studies at the Univer sity o f California. One them e she’s identified in o u r books is the search fo r haven, for what she, along w ith Isabel M iller, calls “A Place For Gs" (the original title o f Patience and Sarah). I can’t th in k o f a truer exam ple o f life m irrored in literature. M ost young people, uncertain o f their identities o r goals, and rejecting arrange m ents the w orld has made fo r them , under take such a search. B ut m ost young people, grow ing older, settle into the very worlds they’ve fled, o r at m ost, stretch them , subtly rearrange them , till they can com fortably nest w ithin — and w ith o u t before the eyes o f the w orld. Gay people — well, we may even relish the th o u g h t o f adapting to the cozy old world o f o u r fam ilies, o f the generations w hich have produced us, but we trip on the very doorstep that we’d enter. The m ost conservative o f us — w ho look rig h t act rig h t move about with the telltale lover — carries he r/his difference w ithin. And that difference som etim e, som e how, w ill always flash inadvertently, when least expected, before the w orst possible au dience. I th in k back to Sherwood Anderson’s story “ Hands." The hands in the piece belong to a gay man, and betray him finally, because in them — their gestures, their energy, their fo rm — he carried and expressed w ithout Just Out, M ay 1986 design, all he was. W here w ould such hands go unrem arked except fo r their beauty? W here would Hall’s Stephen G ordon dance w ithout notice in her severe and m asculine skirted suits? Where w ould M oll Cutpurse drink and brawl, fight over a fem m e with Bee bo Brinker? Where cou ld Patience and Sarah "m e lt" unobtru sively into a com er? There is no place on earth we’d all fit but, drinkers o r not, in a gay bar. And I suspect there is no place on earth one can wander w ithout finding The Riv under a thousand different neon-lit names. My first gay bar was called the Swing Rendezvous. The tradition that shortened the Riv’s real title transform ed m ine to The Swing or The Sw ing-a-long. (And this liberty with given names is certainly a queer tradition.) The bar was in Greenwich Village, sm ack in the m idst o f the thriving folk scene where B ob Dylan and Joan Baez were beginning to attract national attention. Inside The Swing we knew little o f all th a t This insular w orld o f The Swing was m uch sm aller, physically, than The Riv. Up some steps, you'd enter the barroom itself, with a juke box and an old wooden phone booth cram m ed along the opposite wall. I sm oked then, so sm elled only the perfum es of fem m es, the hair tonic and after shave o f butches, the sting o f spilled alcohol, the reek o f beery breaths. It was a lesbian bar, fo r the m ost p a rt and the regulars, the cruisers, the strangers who stum bled in, perched on stools to watch new entries in the gold-flecked m ir ro r behind the bar. A tin y back room was lined . w ith tables, and offered a dance flo o r so tig ht you cou ldn’t be sure w ho your partner was, unless the song was a slow one, and you were doing the “ bum p and grind.” D oing it that is, at least until the waitress with the im pressive nicknam e “ Chopsy” to ld you the bartender wanted you to stop. It was illegal to dance so close, o r was it illegal to dance at all? Different bars seemed to interpret the laws differently. “ D ’youse," Chopsy would ask, "want the place closed down?" Heck, no. It was a place for us. At the Music Box around the com er I was m ore likely to find a hom ogeneous, rather than a hom osexual, mix. An interracial straight couple. Two older gay men. Some very young lesbian couples w ithout I.D.’s darting looks shyly at everyone, like kids at the circus fo r the first tim e. Kids w ho’d been well trained to keep their enthusiasm s under cover. We didn’t dance at the Box at all. The pre sence o f straights inhibited us. This place was ours only in geography and am biguity. O bvi ously they’d take anyone’s m oney in hopes o f catching on with som e free-drinking crowd. We probably would have been safer dancing there, where they were as uncertain o f their fortunes as we were o f ours, and because it w ou ldn’t be as m uch o f a target fo r gay busts as a Swing. But we were young, we were alone in ou r w onderland (as Johnny Mathis assured us on every juke box), and we were students o f The Life. The Life. Another popular song back then was "The Good Life,” sung by Andy W illiam s. It was im m ediately adopted as a sweet-sour anthem by gays. How The Life “ seemed to be the ideal.” How it "le t you hide all the sadness you fe e l. . . " B ut I always m arvelled when I learned that the phrase The Life was not used exclusively by gays, but shared with prosti tutes. And I suspect with as m uch pride by both. The pride o f outlaws claim ing som e th in g o f their own. S om ething d ifficu lt to nam e: “ the love that dare not speak its nam e," in Radclyffe Hall’s words. B oth groups were sexual outlaws: neither w ith a place o f o u r own anywhere but the underside o f society where, hidden by the shade o f night and secrecy, those living in the lig h t could and did v is it whether to vent their rage or take their pleasure, and then steal away. Steal ou r excitem ent our strange con fined freedom , then deny it and, doing so, enforce our denial, too. A lone in ou r W onderland. For twenty years I th o u g h t I, o r the couple I was in, was the only one alone. That there was som e connection between underw orld people that kept me sit tin g at tables fo r two while they pushed a half-dozen together and still overflowed them . A t The Riv last night I watched an isolated couple pretend not to watch the rest o f us, bravely dance on an em pty floor, elbow th e ir way to the bar to order m ore, probably unwanted, drinks. They d o n 't know yet what I so lately learned, that being alone is like being w ithout a place. There is no one, nor is there anyplace, but what we take, o r make, for ourselves. H istory has given us the gay bars. My lov e r’s urge to visit one was a call o f the blood. The Riv. The Sw ing-a-long, The Box. are rich w ith generations o f our lives, and I'll always return, now and then, till there’s another place fo r us where I can be with m y own and get what I need. ! 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