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Music and the night air
99
“Memories o f a Lifetime”
November 29 - December 6
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C ru ise in clu d es:
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1001 SW Baseline
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223-5907 ext. 170
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Speak to Your Brothers is a
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917 SW Washington
Portland, Oregon • OR R eg . #221
To
the
E ditor :
It was at a New Years Eve dance that 1 first
noticed Barb and Octavia. They stood out like
the quintessential butch and femme on the
dance floor: Barb a stoic stone figure, Octavia a
clinging cellophane wrap, both in possession of
the dance floor and oblivious to the people
around them. Their murders last week left me
gasping and blank, unable to align my thoughts
to just what had happened.
My partner and I attended Octavia’s funeral.
Afterwards we rushed off to the Portland
Lesbian Choir concert, where Sylvan sang, and
1 sat in the audience energetically supporting
each song. I bathed in the beauty of sweet-
woman-lightness at the concert, while inwardly
I grappled with the contrast of flying rage and
pain that murder carries with it.
I have sometimes sneered that the choir was
trying to be goody-two-shoes, when I knew it
had its share of problems. But the impact of the
murders has raised a new awareness for me. I
focus with a deepened sense of how the choir
serves as a beacon for expressions of love and
unity within our community. My thoughts do
not deny the dark side of lesbians lives, so often
filled with unresolved issues of acceptability, but
acknowledge the effort within the lesbian com­
munity to lift ourselves beyond the pain of
exclusion.
Last night 1 looked at the clock and won­
dered how many of us were aware that a one-
week anniversary was rapidly approaching. 1 was
sure Octavia’s mother was aware. Perhaps Barb’s
sister. I felt a pang at this waste of lives because
obscured, reactive rage cut like the sharp edge of
broken glass through night air.
It is music that realigns my thoughts, music
created by artists who use our community voic­
es like the sharp edge of broken glass to cut
through the night air, thick with hellish tenden­
cies:
Although the guns do loudly sound
It is for peace we're yearning
And to each other firmly bound
By ties of love and learning.
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear that music ringing
It sounds an echo in my sold
How can I keep from singing?
P amela H iebert
Via e-mail
Where everybody knows
your name...
To
the
E ditor :
In his editorial [“Let there be light,” Just Out,
March 6, 1998], Christopher Cuttone wonders
“what motivates a person to compete for parking
downtown and pay $4 to enter a dark, dirty,
crowded bar (which shall remain nameless) that
overcharges for weak drinks V
1 have an answer for him: It’s gay! Lots of bars
in Portland are packed every night, but precious
few of them are gay. A bar, to a gay male, is way
more than just a place to have a drink. You
could equate it to a church in a black communi­
ty. It’s a social institution that has implications
for the average gay male way beyond the fact
that it sells alcohol. For roughly the past 10 years
I didn’t drink at all, and I frequented that name­
less bar regularly; I still do.
In the early to mid-’90s two things con­
verged that diluted the gay energy in gay bars on
Stark Street: the politically correct practice of
inclusivity and the growing trendiness of
straight people slumming at gay bars. Gay and
straight people being together may be a nifty
ideal, but there’s nothing rare about it. I work
with straight people; the building I live in—
with me being the only exception— is inhabited
by straight people; I’m around straight people
when I get on a bus, go shopping, do my laundry,
go the bank, etc. I value a place where I can go
and just be with folks like me.
It isn’t because I have a desire to discriminate
against anyone, it’s because sometimes I just
need to be somewhere where I can feel at home,
where I feel culturally secure, where I’m fully
accepted as part of a larger whole. I live in a
world that is dominated by a powerfully manip­
ulative cultural energy that is not my own. A
guy could get lost, for crying out loud.
It amuses me that straight people never seem
to realize that when they get together and slum
at gay bars those bars are no longer gay, and they
end up right where they started— at another
straight bar. That nameless bar does not apolo­
gize for being gay, rather it actively protects its
gayness and revels in the joy of it.
The gay community has seen the two most
prominent gay dance bars in Portland effective­
ly defect, in favor of a beefier bottom line. The
end result has been the dilution of the cultural
energy that once made those bars different, the
energy that made them a safe and supportive
environment for gay people.
I like the atmosphere of a dance bar, it’s ener­
getic, exciting and usually a lot of fun. Lots of
noise, lots of people (men, in my case), lots of
activity. I like a gay energy too, it’s flashy, exot­
ic, unusual, sometimes trashy, very active and
very creative. I feel right at home there. I think
of it as a sort of fuel stop, culturally speaking.
There are other bars in Portland that serve
important subgroups of our community, female
impersonators, leather folks, bears, Spanish­
speaking folks, lesbians, etc. I’m very happy
about that. I’m sure those establishments are as
critically important to the people they serve as
mine is to me. I’m not any of those things, so
there’s little for me there along the lines of feel­
ing culturally included. And let’s face it, that’s
an important reason why we go out in the first
place.
I hope this answers Christopher’s question,
and I hope he finds a “home” here in Portland.
There are certainly enough choices, and
Christopher deserves an establishment that
looks and feels just right to him. Maybe what he
wants isn’t a bar at all; that would make his
choices here in Portland almost endless. A s an
aside, $4 is the prevailing cover charge to get
into any dance bar in Portland, gay or straight,
and $3 is the going rate for well drinks (and
everybody knows that if you want stronger
drinks, tip the person who makes them!).
G regory F ranklyn
Portland
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