Urban Bars
As I wrote last month, I had a full month's worth of columns cued up for June, which I took down in deference to the Orlando shooting, its victims, and its survivors. In place of those columns, I posted my thoughts about the shooting and larger issues of inclusion for all Americans, including we whose colors are not just red, white and blue but the entire rainbow. Yesterday, Americans celebrated our country -- its founding, our democracy, our republic. We are also coming up on the one month anniversary of the horrific tragedy in Orlando. In this sobering, somber year, July Fourth was a day of patriotism not just celebratory but reflective, of stars and stripes born from revolution, of the call for corrective action and the demand for justice.
Along with what else it means, moving forward means honoring daily living. Attending to the sacred details of everyday living is, in its way, as transgressive against disruption as more overt revolutions. If it is about anything, Urban Home Blog is about that, and so Urban Home Blog resumes after last month's hiatus. Below is the first column of what is, effectively, a new year, and so it has a celebratory aspect. But it is also deferential to last month's tragedy, in that it is a revised version of a column I had originally cued up for June. In that earlier version, I had gotten cute about linking Pride Weekend with Brunch. Brunch is important, but more important is every person's inarguable right to exist, every American's inalienable right to have the same freedoms and rights as every other American, and for all of us to be safe in our environment even if it means creating safe environments for ourselves. For many of us, that environment includes poolside chaise, brunch table, and bar stool, and it is in the spirit of celebration and camaraderie - not to mention freedom of expression -- that I publish this column.
My first gay bar was an underground venue illegally housed in a basement in the East Village. It was known among those in the know as the No Name or the Blue Lamp, in reference to the blue light bulb caged onto the side of the stoop that, when lit, meant the space was open for business. I entered the vestibule below the blue lamp where an entrance table had been set up with a cash box, a flashlight to check id, and a hand stamp once id had been confirmed. Upon handing over an entrance fee I often had to scramble to cover, I was pointed through panes of black velvet where as part of the pat down the bouncer confirmed me as male, then waved me into the rooms of emancipation beyond the curtains.
In operating illicitly, the Blue Lamp spoke to the speakeasies of the Prohibition era, to Harlem buffet flats, to gay tea rooms. It wasn't strictly necessary to operate a gay bar as a speakeasy in New York City in the late eighties. There had always been a known lgbt community in the city, and by the eighties, it was out. The West Village, where Stonewall began, was as well known a gayborhood as the Castro, and there were still cheap railroad flats to be had on the waterfront from the Christopher Street Piers all the way up to Hell's Kitchen.
The Blue Lamp operated underground to provide a generation of angry, activist young gay men who identified as "queer" over "gay" a place to congregate for beer, for political discourse, and, yes, for sex. The Blue Lamp operated underground in deference to the plush secrecy of the Mattachine era, whose own lamp had been signaling for decades at the West Village's Fedora, whose Stonewall had become the literal and figurative symbol for the spark of gay lib, whose generation founded the Big Red Firehouse, the Hetrick-Martin Institute, the LGBT Services Center, and GMHC. ACT UP and Queer Nation grew out of those powerful decades of struggle, and gave we who were young an identity of our own that was, make no mistake about it, the gift of our foregoers who were, in very real ways, mothers and fathers to young dykes and fags and intersexed who had been kicked out of or just plain left birth families and familiar homes.
I can honestly say I came into my own at The Blue Lamp. There, the last vestiges of the small town boy who grew up on the dusty roads of the Oklahoma-Arkansas border, who made it to college in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania finally evolved into the young man he was supposed to be. My life until then, unfortunately, had failed to provide me even the rudiments of a healthy gay identity. I learned that not only was it okay to be attracted to other men but how to inhabit the attraction, to shed guilt and apology and shame as the stigma that they are, to respect and accept both sexes and all genders unconditionally but to be willing to fight for my own sex and gender when that was called for. Bar culture got me there. I found that, whether pinball and beer or martinis and jazz, a gay bar was a community center. In gay bars I accessed the community, was welcomed into it, learned how to survive, and thrived.
Younger patrons are often insensitive, albeit unintentionally, to older ones, yet even that is forgiven. For the older, having survived worlds the younger have no idea existed, can't help but look upon that callousness as a trait, however maddening, that foregoers fought for future generations to have. And so gay bars are also history classes - in fact, some, such as The Stonewall, are actual archives. Gay bars were among the first expressions of individuated identity and the struggles for it, even unto having to operate, often at risk, under a constrictive and often crushing body of law and its enforcement. Even so, the community sustained, and via bar culture asserted its identity both through fighting for its right to exist and by creating shelter for those so existing. Gay bars took on the shades of color within the broad bands of the rainbow flag: bars for women and women only, clubs for transgendered or young people, hangouts oriented to leather or cigars or cowboys or sports or show tunes. Even gathering places beyond the bouncer, such as lbgtq* bookstores, owe much of their construct of community to gay bars.
The Blue Lamp was my first gay bar, but it was not the only one. There were Wonderbar, Boy Bar, and The Pyramid in the East Village; The Carrie Nation and The Excalibur in Park Slope; The Rawhide, Champs, Splash, and g in Chelsea; The Riviera, Boots and Saddle, The Mineshaft, The Duplex, The Cubby Hole, Pieces, Uncle Charlie's, and The Monster in the West Village. John, who was born on Stonewall weekend, had an epic birthday party at the drag bar Lips - at the Pride March the next day, the queens hollered down to us from atop a float blasting disco. ReBar in Chelsea was so gay that it was the site of the launch party for Absolutely Fabulous when it first aired on American tv; I spent that summer as a Patsy In Residence. I spent a different, lovely summer dancing Friday nights away at The Nectarine in Ann Arbor. And there were many bars that, while not gay bars per se, were safe spaces for friends, family, and acquaintances from across the alt spectrum, geek to goth, cyber to punk. These included Max Fish, Sugar Reef, Den of Thieves, King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut, The Holiday, The Mercury, Tavern on Jane, The Stone Crow, Kettle of Fish, Lucy's, and the mighty Beauty Bar.
As I stepped more confidently into adulthood, I became a writer who covered GLBT nightlife. This itself was an evolution from the time I spent working in drag both at deep village gay bars like The Cock and The Comeback and at seedy Times Square venues like The Show Palace and The Gaiety. There was an era when I spent the day selling cosmetics dressed as Stevie Nicks and with no more pause than refreshing my makeup and adjusting my cheater spent the evening introducing porn actors at The Show Palace before changing into different leather and lace to dance all night at Jackie 60. I would recover in the air-conditioned discomfort of the Odessa and record it in notebooks I still have, sending the best bits to a localized gay press that was as vital in those days as the club and bar scene was.
A friend who had been instrumental in supporting me as a drag artist got a gig at a city guide, and through her I started covering arts and nightlife. It was a gorgeous, heady time, in an era when localized press provided the voice for many village artists eking out livings at day jobs and sometimes provided the job. I sold makeup and eventually became an administrative assistant; for many others it was cutting hair or working at Tower Records or waiting tables. We all went to shows or staged them, met for drinks or dancing out in the world or in our own homes, and wrote and recorded it all as both a dimension of the art of being a New Yorker in a way that was an art form at that time, that has turned out to be a testament of those times gone by. Raise your hand if, aside from the holy trifecta of the Village Voice, CitySearch and Time Out, you remember and if you can still read Gay City News, The Blade, OutWeek, QW, Next, and HX. And raise your glass if you ever saw the Pontanis dance at Marion's, got cruised by a skinhead at King Tut's, took your folks to The Campbell Apartment or the Rainbow Room since they were paying, got beerdrunk in the bowling alley in Port Authority on a Saturday afternoon, know how to score a seat in the pub at Keen's, or knew how to get the password to get into the Tenth Street Lounge on a crowded Saturday night.
Now I live a short distance from Boystown in West Hollywood. Bars and clubs are the firmament of this gayborhood, as the geographic and cultural spine of the Boystown is the stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard from La Cienega to Doheny. In between are Fubar, the Gold Coast, Hamburger Mary's, La Boheme, Blazing Saddles, Trunks, Rage, Eleven, Fiesta Cantina, The Bayou, The Gold Coast, and the one and only Micky's. And of course the sugar daddy of them all is The Abbey. The Abbey was the first place to welcome John and me to Gay LA, both for nighttime drinks and dancing and for quiet afternoon hanging out. It has been a favorite spot for years now, truly a place that feels as comfortable as our own home. We stop by regularly, along with de rigueur visits on Halloween, during the winter holidays, and on birthdays. The Abbey has been crowned the greatest gay bar in the nation, a designation it has achieved not just from the bar program and the pub menu, from midweek drag shows and Sunday Funday go go dancers, but from the deeper understanding that a gay bar is a community center, and from a true mission to be just exactly that.
In the aftermath of the horrors of the Orlando shootings, everything from op-eds to memes has flooded the internet, to reiterate the crucial fact that often a gay bar is not just a place to get blotto. It's a community center, an oasis, a safe space for being gay in a world still more hostile to than accepting of us. In bars, we gather amongst ourselves, we bond, we laugh, we celebrate. Sometimes we fight, and sometimes we indulge in substances or services beyond music and drink. But through all of that, we are building families; we are creating and sustaining community. Gay bars host Thanksgiving for people who can't or don't want to be return to their places of orig;n, sponsor food, clothing, toy and even medicine drives; collect and donate funds for community social programs from soccer teams to detox. Discreetly, bar owners sometimes give those in need the dignity of day-jobbing with dirty glasses and brooms in exchange for a meal from the grill and some floor space and a blanket after last call. To this day, I feel safer in a gay bar than just about anywhere in the outside world. Gay bars matter to our community not just beyond the countless expressions of lgbtq* ways of being, but through them. Through gathering, we sustain; in taking care of each other, we thrive; and in banding together, we survive.
Along with what else it means, moving forward means honoring daily living. Attending to the sacred details of everyday living is, in its way, as transgressive against disruption as more overt revolutions. If it is about anything, Urban Home Blog is about that, and so Urban Home Blog resumes after last month's hiatus. Below is the first column of what is, effectively, a new year, and so it has a celebratory aspect. But it is also deferential to last month's tragedy, in that it is a revised version of a column I had originally cued up for June. In that earlier version, I had gotten cute about linking Pride Weekend with Brunch. Brunch is important, but more important is every person's inarguable right to exist, every American's inalienable right to have the same freedoms and rights as every other American, and for all of us to be safe in our environment even if it means creating safe environments for ourselves. For many of us, that environment includes poolside chaise, brunch table, and bar stool, and it is in the spirit of celebration and camaraderie - not to mention freedom of expression -- that I publish this column.
My first gay bar was an underground venue illegally housed in a basement in the East Village. It was known among those in the know as the No Name or the Blue Lamp, in reference to the blue light bulb caged onto the side of the stoop that, when lit, meant the space was open for business. I entered the vestibule below the blue lamp where an entrance table had been set up with a cash box, a flashlight to check id, and a hand stamp once id had been confirmed. Upon handing over an entrance fee I often had to scramble to cover, I was pointed through panes of black velvet where as part of the pat down the bouncer confirmed me as male, then waved me into the rooms of emancipation beyond the curtains.
In operating illicitly, the Blue Lamp spoke to the speakeasies of the Prohibition era, to Harlem buffet flats, to gay tea rooms. It wasn't strictly necessary to operate a gay bar as a speakeasy in New York City in the late eighties. There had always been a known lgbt community in the city, and by the eighties, it was out. The West Village, where Stonewall began, was as well known a gayborhood as the Castro, and there were still cheap railroad flats to be had on the waterfront from the Christopher Street Piers all the way up to Hell's Kitchen.
The Blue Lamp operated underground to provide a generation of angry, activist young gay men who identified as "queer" over "gay" a place to congregate for beer, for political discourse, and, yes, for sex. The Blue Lamp operated underground in deference to the plush secrecy of the Mattachine era, whose own lamp had been signaling for decades at the West Village's Fedora, whose Stonewall had become the literal and figurative symbol for the spark of gay lib, whose generation founded the Big Red Firehouse, the Hetrick-Martin Institute, the LGBT Services Center, and GMHC. ACT UP and Queer Nation grew out of those powerful decades of struggle, and gave we who were young an identity of our own that was, make no mistake about it, the gift of our foregoers who were, in very real ways, mothers and fathers to young dykes and fags and intersexed who had been kicked out of or just plain left birth families and familiar homes.
I can honestly say I came into my own at The Blue Lamp. There, the last vestiges of the small town boy who grew up on the dusty roads of the Oklahoma-Arkansas border, who made it to college in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania finally evolved into the young man he was supposed to be. My life until then, unfortunately, had failed to provide me even the rudiments of a healthy gay identity. I learned that not only was it okay to be attracted to other men but how to inhabit the attraction, to shed guilt and apology and shame as the stigma that they are, to respect and accept both sexes and all genders unconditionally but to be willing to fight for my own sex and gender when that was called for. Bar culture got me there. I found that, whether pinball and beer or martinis and jazz, a gay bar was a community center. In gay bars I accessed the community, was welcomed into it, learned how to survive, and thrived.
Younger patrons are often insensitive, albeit unintentionally, to older ones, yet even that is forgiven. For the older, having survived worlds the younger have no idea existed, can't help but look upon that callousness as a trait, however maddening, that foregoers fought for future generations to have. And so gay bars are also history classes - in fact, some, such as The Stonewall, are actual archives. Gay bars were among the first expressions of individuated identity and the struggles for it, even unto having to operate, often at risk, under a constrictive and often crushing body of law and its enforcement. Even so, the community sustained, and via bar culture asserted its identity both through fighting for its right to exist and by creating shelter for those so existing. Gay bars took on the shades of color within the broad bands of the rainbow flag: bars for women and women only, clubs for transgendered or young people, hangouts oriented to leather or cigars or cowboys or sports or show tunes. Even gathering places beyond the bouncer, such as lbgtq* bookstores, owe much of their construct of community to gay bars.
The Blue Lamp was my first gay bar, but it was not the only one. There were Wonderbar, Boy Bar, and The Pyramid in the East Village; The Carrie Nation and The Excalibur in Park Slope; The Rawhide, Champs, Splash, and g in Chelsea; The Riviera, Boots and Saddle, The Mineshaft, The Duplex, The Cubby Hole, Pieces, Uncle Charlie's, and The Monster in the West Village. John, who was born on Stonewall weekend, had an epic birthday party at the drag bar Lips - at the Pride March the next day, the queens hollered down to us from atop a float blasting disco. ReBar in Chelsea was so gay that it was the site of the launch party for Absolutely Fabulous when it first aired on American tv; I spent that summer as a Patsy In Residence. I spent a different, lovely summer dancing Friday nights away at The Nectarine in Ann Arbor. And there were many bars that, while not gay bars per se, were safe spaces for friends, family, and acquaintances from across the alt spectrum, geek to goth, cyber to punk. These included Max Fish, Sugar Reef, Den of Thieves, King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut, The Holiday, The Mercury, Tavern on Jane, The Stone Crow, Kettle of Fish, Lucy's, and the mighty Beauty Bar.
As I stepped more confidently into adulthood, I became a writer who covered GLBT nightlife. This itself was an evolution from the time I spent working in drag both at deep village gay bars like The Cock and The Comeback and at seedy Times Square venues like The Show Palace and The Gaiety. There was an era when I spent the day selling cosmetics dressed as Stevie Nicks and with no more pause than refreshing my makeup and adjusting my cheater spent the evening introducing porn actors at The Show Palace before changing into different leather and lace to dance all night at Jackie 60. I would recover in the air-conditioned discomfort of the Odessa and record it in notebooks I still have, sending the best bits to a localized gay press that was as vital in those days as the club and bar scene was.
A friend who had been instrumental in supporting me as a drag artist got a gig at a city guide, and through her I started covering arts and nightlife. It was a gorgeous, heady time, in an era when localized press provided the voice for many village artists eking out livings at day jobs and sometimes provided the job. I sold makeup and eventually became an administrative assistant; for many others it was cutting hair or working at Tower Records or waiting tables. We all went to shows or staged them, met for drinks or dancing out in the world or in our own homes, and wrote and recorded it all as both a dimension of the art of being a New Yorker in a way that was an art form at that time, that has turned out to be a testament of those times gone by. Raise your hand if, aside from the holy trifecta of the Village Voice, CitySearch and Time Out, you remember and if you can still read Gay City News, The Blade, OutWeek, QW, Next, and HX. And raise your glass if you ever saw the Pontanis dance at Marion's, got cruised by a skinhead at King Tut's, took your folks to The Campbell Apartment or the Rainbow Room since they were paying, got beerdrunk in the bowling alley in Port Authority on a Saturday afternoon, know how to score a seat in the pub at Keen's, or knew how to get the password to get into the Tenth Street Lounge on a crowded Saturday night.
Now I live a short distance from Boystown in West Hollywood. Bars and clubs are the firmament of this gayborhood, as the geographic and cultural spine of the Boystown is the stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard from La Cienega to Doheny. In between are Fubar, the Gold Coast, Hamburger Mary's, La Boheme, Blazing Saddles, Trunks, Rage, Eleven, Fiesta Cantina, The Bayou, The Gold Coast, and the one and only Micky's. And of course the sugar daddy of them all is The Abbey. The Abbey was the first place to welcome John and me to Gay LA, both for nighttime drinks and dancing and for quiet afternoon hanging out. It has been a favorite spot for years now, truly a place that feels as comfortable as our own home. We stop by regularly, along with de rigueur visits on Halloween, during the winter holidays, and on birthdays. The Abbey has been crowned the greatest gay bar in the nation, a designation it has achieved not just from the bar program and the pub menu, from midweek drag shows and Sunday Funday go go dancers, but from the deeper understanding that a gay bar is a community center, and from a true mission to be just exactly that.
In the aftermath of the horrors of the Orlando shootings, everything from op-eds to memes has flooded the internet, to reiterate the crucial fact that often a gay bar is not just a place to get blotto. It's a community center, an oasis, a safe space for being gay in a world still more hostile to than accepting of us. In bars, we gather amongst ourselves, we bond, we laugh, we celebrate. Sometimes we fight, and sometimes we indulge in substances or services beyond music and drink. But through all of that, we are building families; we are creating and sustaining community. Gay bars host Thanksgiving for people who can't or don't want to be return to their places of orig;n, sponsor food, clothing, toy and even medicine drives; collect and donate funds for community social programs from soccer teams to detox. Discreetly, bar owners sometimes give those in need the dignity of day-jobbing with dirty glasses and brooms in exchange for a meal from the grill and some floor space and a blanket after last call. To this day, I feel safer in a gay bar than just about anywhere in the outside world. Gay bars matter to our community not just beyond the countless expressions of lgbtq* ways of being, but through them. Through gathering, we sustain; in taking care of each other, we thrive; and in banding together, we survive.
This post reminds me of the kind of vibe you'll find at Celestial – an unforgettable night coming up at Walter Studios in Phoenix!
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ReplyDeleteSouth Florida nightlife