Top Quotes: “Gay Bar: Why We Went Out” — Jeremy Atherton Lin
“In 1985, Vauxhall’s liberal local council decreed a ten-minute maximum for police officers in public lavatories.
The Sun headline: ‘Lefties to “Clock” Cops in the Loo!’
The new law attempted to put an end to the decades-long tradition of assigning so-called pretty police to London toilets with the intention of ensnaring insatiable homos. With the change in law, attendants became responsible for reporting any cop who prolonged their visit.”
“At the law’s passage, one of its proponents, the Earl of Arran, spoke: “I ask one thing and I ask it earnestly. I ask those who have, as it were, been in bondage and for whom the prison doors are now open to show their thanks by comporting themselves quietly and with dignity. This is no occasion for jubilation; certainly not for celebration. Any form of ostentatious behaviour; now or in the future, any form of public flaunting, would be utterly distasteful and would, I believe, make the sponsors of the Bill regret that they have done what they have done. Homosexuals must continue to remember that while there may be nothing bad in being a homosexual, there is certainly nothing good!”
“The first occurrence of the term gay bar in print is thought to be in the 1947 diary of the comedian Kenneth Williams, who wrote from Singapore:
‘Went round to the gay bar which wasn’t in the least gay...’
His usage is timeless in the way it expresses ironic disappointment. Three years later, what’s considered to be the first recorded use of gay as a self-description for a homosexual man, in Sir! magazine, was even fuller of despair: “I have yet to meet a happy homosexual. They have a way of describing themselves as gay but the term is a misnomer. Those who are habitues of the bars frequented by others of the kind, are about the saddest people I’ve ever seen.” With queer etymologies, usage is often ironic or counterintuitive from the start. One of the earliest published occurrences of coming out in the sense of revealing sexual orientation appeared in an article on gay London life published in The Observer in 1971: “I enjoy my double life,” said a delicate youth wearing a gold chain belt in a Chelsea pub. “I don’t want to come out.””
“Khan published his vision for a twenty-four-hour London shortly after becoming mayor in 2016. He created the esoteric-sounding role of night czar and appointed Amy Lamé, a gregarious fixture of the RVT scene. (She’s been at it for decades; the last time I saw her hosting, she wore Birkenstocks but still bellowed to the crowd Snog a stranger! from the stage.) Together, the pair hailed the ‘nighttime economy’ as a means of revenue and place-making.”
“The line I’ve read that best distinguishes a gay bar may be from the journalist June Thomas. She wrote, ‘There’s more literature in gay bars’ — meaning the magazines, health pamphlets, guides, maps and flyers that pile up on the peripheries.”
“British men are prone to making conversation there, a comment about the night, the state of the toilets, sports. This puts me in an awkward position. When I open my mouth, as a friend says of himself, my handbag falls out. It’s less, these days, a fear of being bashed, more a matter of not wanting to embarrass my neighbor. I don’t want to watch him adjust to my gayness, to act like it’s cool — as if gay is not a lot to do with enjoyment of penis. Then I am ashamed that I am ashamed that he is ashamed that I am ashamed. I shake myself, and leave with dripping hands as I don’t want to stand under the dryer any longer than necessary. I scurry away. Scurrying is also a telltale trait — the way so many gays always appear like they’re about to miss a train.”
“It’s been said the nation’s first gay pride parade was a motorcade in Los Angeles; held in 1966, it comprised thirteen or so cars heading down Cahuenga Boulevard to Sunset Boulevard to protest the exclusion of gays from the armed forces. (Nobody got hurt, so it didn’t make the news.) That New Year’s Eve, a bunch of queens pressed into the Black Cat in Silver Lake. Three Christmas trees were still up. A trio of black women known as the Rhythm Queens led a rowdy rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ As balloons fell and midnight smooches began, a dozen plainclothes vice officers sprang into action, tearing down the decorations and wielding truncheons. Sixteen were arrested. Cops chased two men across the street to another bar, New Faces, where the owner was knocked down and two bartenders beaten unconscious. One was hospitalized with a ruptured spleen, and upon recovery charged with felony assault. A jury voted to convict all six men accused of lewd contact (kissing other men for ten seconds). A protest was organized in early February. Men and women marched with simple placards. The word gay did not appear. ‘Blue Fascism Must Go!,’ read one sign. ‘Abolish arbitrary arrests. No more abuse of our rights and dignity:” Among the hundreds there were young people of color and Sunset Strip youth, not necessarily queer but joining in solidarity against persecution at the hands of the LAPD. The protest continued over several days. Three thousand flyers were printed. As the street was scarce of passersby, they were handed mostly to motorists.”
“Clearly, the Black Cat protests did not make the impact Stonewall did two and a half years later. The scholars Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage have proposed that this is partly due to geography. New York’s Greenwich Village was dense and gossipy.”
“He still wore a faint smile as he searched the floor of the front room for his missing brown boot. Where’s it gone, he whispered, as if charmed by its waywardness. I could tell by the way he wasn’t mad at the object that he was very patient — lucky me.”
“It must be a gay rite of passage to be intimidated, even repulsed by other gays: In 1951, Donald Webster Cory wrote, “One wanders into the bar in the hope of finding the convivial spirit that comes from being with one’s own.”
“I’d imagined that homos moved to the city out of rebellion. I hadn’t considered entitlement as a motivating factor. I was white, male, and middle class, and I had gone to Harvard, one gay man confided to Frances Fitz-Gerald in 1978. I thought I could do anything I wanted, so I resented having to conceal something as basic as sex….The solution was to move here. These newly empowered gay men were territorial creatures. In the Castro, they were in their own way colonialist, displacing Irish Catholic families, who had already begun trickling into the suburbs following industrial decline. Now those Irish factory workers, longshoremen, stevedores and cops were replaced by middle-class gay men wearing variations on those uniforms as fetish. The old families began to refer to them as the invaders.”
“When the couple MaryEllen Cunha and Peggy Forster — the girls — took over in 1972 and renamed it Twin Peaks, they opened up its facade: it is considered to be the first gay bar in town, some say the nation, to be fronted in large plate glass. The girls insisted this was not a political stance; the windows were uncovered simply because they wanted to look out. But the bar was also unabashedly gay. They later turned the light-up arrows on the facade into rainbows by dipping each individual bulb in paint.”
“In one of his famed moves, Milk got behind labor leader Allan Baird’s boycott of six beer distributors who refused to sign a union contract. Baird already had the support of Middle Eastern and Chinese grocers. Milk’s rallying of the gay bars tipped the scales: five of the six beer firms agreed to the pact. Milk and Scott Smith then launched a gay bar boycott of the only holdout – Coors – effectively demonstrating their demographic’s spending power. Between 1977 and 1984, according to Milk’s protégé Cleve Jones, Coors saw its share of the giant California market drop from forty to fourteen percent. Meanwhile, Allan Baird ensured that gays were getting union jobs driving for each of the other beer distributors. It was Baird who gifted Milk the battered red and white bullhorn that would go on to rouse fed-up gays and survive the wrath of police batons until it earned its place as a protest icon.”
“The 1957 obscenity trial over Howl and Other Poems made the book a best seller. Through the next year, national newspapers and magazines furiously tsk-tsked and cast scorn upon the permissive city, incidentally enticing more curious gays to visit. One reason San Francisco became so gay is down to the bad press.”
“They both grinned constantly-a sharp turnaround after years of gays holding their lips tightly like they’d just received bad news.”
“To get into a bathroom was such an ordeal people adopted the strategy of ducking into the sketchy dive bar next door until eventually it gave in and became a gay bar, too.”
“We weren’t sure where to start: the bars on 18th Street off Castro (the Mix, Midnight Sun, Men’s Room, Moby Dick) each seemed the same as the next. We settled on Moby Dick. We liked it in the afternoons, when sunlight streamed through the windows over the pinball machines. A massive fish tank offered phallic coral as a conversation starter. The bar’s whale logo, easily mistaken for a splashy cock and balls, was another talking point. Suspended from the ceiling in the center of the bar were back-to-back monitors playing a loop of music videos — anonymous Europop deemed appropriate for any gay bar anywhere. The videos involved trench coats and sports cars and trysts in hotel rooms lit in ice blue. Often, the singer would rotate toward the camera in a slick white Eero Aarnio ball chair.
We did not go to Moby Dick to cruise. The dimly lit bathroom did have mirrors over the troughs, but they were mounted too low for fruitful glancing. On a windowsill were small blank cards on which to write a message for another customer. This I learned when a man handed me one with a vehement proposal on it.”
“Moby Dick was established in 1977 by Victor Swedosh using money inherited from his family’s panty hose fortune. The bar was wood and brass, the clientele collegiate types. Moby Dick was also briefly — for some four years from 1980 — the primary disco label in San Francisco. This was headquartered at 573 Castro Street— where Harvey Milk once lived above his camera shop.”
“In Antonioni’s 1966 film Blew-Up, one sighting of a male couple in a London neighborhood prompts a tip to buy quick: ‘The area’s already crawling with queers and their poodles.”
“I’ve read that another local guest house briefly called itself the Viagra (We will keep you up all night!) until a horrified mother went to the press, the council intervened and the proprietor facetiously switched the name to Niagra (‘We will keep you wet all night!’).”
