Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin

Author:Jeremy Atherton Lin [Lin, Jeremy Atherton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Lgbtq, history, Modern, 20th Century, World
ISBN: 9780316458740
Google: 1mjqDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2021-02-09T00:23:18.659527+00:00

The Neighbors

San Francisco

I was not thinking about the world. I was not thinking about history. I was thinking about my body’s small, precise, limited, hungry movement forward into a future that seemed at every instant on the verge of being shut down.

—Wayne Koestenbaum, 2003

We used to gaze at the fog romantically. Then Famous and I moved up the hills into that fog, only to find it cold and wet. We lived on a dead-end street in the musty basement of a crumbling clapboard house that clung to the edge of a cliff over several lanes of freeway. It didn’t only feel like the limit of the city; everyone who visited immediately called it the End of the World. We salvaged chairs from the sidewalk, splurged on houseplants, threw spaghetti on the kitchen wall to test its readiness and basically became lesbians.

The only queer bar in the neighborhood, the Wild Side West, was a lesbian bar in denial. After it was described as a ‘super cool dyke bar’ in Betty & Pansy’s Severe Queer Review, a caustic guide to San Francisco, the owners scoffed and corrected them: the Wild Side West was a neighborhood bar. Future editions of Severe Queer Review read: ‘This is a neighborhood bar in Bernal Heights (an area populated by lesbian homeowners). When you come through the door, do not be dismayed to see half a dozen middle-aged women with salt-and-pepper brush cuts smoking cigars and playing cards—they are just neighbors. The interior of the bar is a delight and says much about the history of the neighborhood. The two female owners (apparently good friends and roommates) opened this establishment over forty years ago. If you are a “neighbor,” you might like it.’

The Wild Side West was named for the 1962 movie Walk on the Wild Side, starring Barbara Stanwyck as a New Orleans madam and woman’s woman. The bar was founded in the East Bay, hence the qualifier in the name. It resettled in San Francisco as a frontier-style saloon with a massive antique cash register, fireplace, piano. People said Janis Joplin once made love on the pool table. In the bricolage back garden, at the bottom of a rickety staircase, swing chairs sheltered beneath the trees, glass bottles were buried upside down in the soil and broken toilet bowls served as flowerpots. Later I’d hear those toilets had been dumped on the doorstep (or hurled through the window) in objection to the two women opening for business. Their repurposing was as pragmatic as it was allegorical. Ultimately, the owners’ disavowal of the lesbian descriptive spoke to a pioneer mentality—live and let live, just don’t slap a label on it.

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