In Lucas Hilderbrand’s The Bars Are Ours; Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After, the pictures, a collection of bar flyers, ads, photographs, gay press headlines, and various ephemera culled from fifteen years of research, are worth as much as—if not more than—the text. “Lick your way through the summer,” beckons a tempting 1981 ad for Detroit’s the Outlaw, featuring a photo of a mustachioed clone leaning in to lick an erect popsicle held by the disembodied fist of another man. The sassy pose of Michelangelo’s idyllic youth David is transformed by sculptor Mike Caffee into a leather daddy with the addition of a Brando-esque biker cap and jacket, boots, and Levi’s for San Francisco’s Folsom Street leather bar Fe-Be’s. A gathering of Mother Camp female impersonators from Kansas City’s Jewel Box Lounge strikes beauty queen poses on a photographic postcard fan just begging to be waved. My favorite image, though, has to be an advertisement for Houston’s storied Mary’s in which a young Ronald Reagan in a boxy suit embraces a chimpanzee behind a highly embellished text that reads: “We met at Mary’s!” What a lovely interspecies couple!
While Mary’s 1981 ad is not the first time a gay bar used bestiality as promotion (another for San Francisco’s the Lion Pub sits in the book’s preface, presenting the maned King of the Jungle mounting a man with the slogan, “Animals love maneaters.” That they do! But who is the animal and who is the maneater here?), their hilariously romantic take on Bedtime for Bonzo, just in time for Reagan’s inauguration, represents, for me, everything a gay bar can and should be. Politically subversive, yes. But more than that, Mary’s ad indicates a community forged not only through the shared experience of rejection and oppression by dominant society as represented by Reagan but also a shared sense of camp humor wielded as a weapon for survival. The other examples I list too reveal more than gleeful nightlife aesthetics. They reflect the best gay bars have to offer—sex, play, self-fashioning, gender fuckery, safe spaces (for some)—as well as some its worst too. It’s hard not to notice just how blindingly white most of these images are.
And here lies gay bars’ inherent contradictions that restrict less nuanced and frankly more tempting blanket adulation and adoration of these spaces. As Hilderbrand writes in The Bars Are Ours’ introduction:
“Gay bars promise conversational wit, lurid gossip, felicitous music, virtuosic drag queens, nubile eye candy, indefatigable dancing, flirtatious physical touch, and maybe romantic love. This fantasy does, just often enough, come true via the alchemy of laughter, endorphins, pheromones, and alcohol and drugs. Live it to Patrick Hernandez’s ‘Born to Be Alive,’ Crystal Waters’s ‘100% Pure Love,’ and the Magnetic Fields’ ‘You and Me and the Moon.’ Yet bars also present exclusion, embarrassment, unrequited overtures, spilled drinks, headaches, and regret. Drown it in Anita O’Day’s ‘The Ballad of the Sad Young Man,’ Book of Love’s ‘Boy,’ and Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.’”
Hilderbrand not only acknowledges all of these aspects of gay bars, as well as provides a short corresponding reading playlist, but delves into them in ambitious historical detail. Now, it’s important to remember that The Bars Are Ours is an academic book, published late last year by Duke University Press. What this means is the book doesn’t explore a linear narrative story of gay bars across America since 1960 (a date chosen “because by this time gay bars were established as the cores sites for queer public life”). That kind of expansive national history might be a Sisyphean task anyway, much needed but, with too many gaps in the archives and too much information only held in the memories of those—bar owners, bartenders, bar patrons—already passed on, likely impossible (just look at how fraught and confused the history of Stonewall is). Instead, Hilderbrand breaks the book up into eight vaguely chronological thematic chapters that each use a gay bar enclave in a singular city as a case study, flanked by shorter, sometimes lighter, “interludes.” Some interludes present bars he hit on his own “three-month research road trip” such as Mable Peabody’s Beauty Parlor and Chainsaw Repair in Denton, Texas, which “was located in a 1960s-style strip mall…the front windows featured murals of Divine in Pink Flamingos and Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Others dive into surprising finds buried in archives like the Gay Switchboard in Philadelphia, which “functioned as a medium for callers who didn’t know where to find gay bars.”
Each larger chapter in The Bars Are Ours could stand on its own as an independent essay. For instance, the first chapter discusses the development of leather culture, aesthetics, and idealized gay masculinity—and its disruption—through Chicago’s gay-owned leather bar, the Gold Coast. It’s not all macho men, though. The hypermasculine mask slips occasionally as in my favorite tidbit from this chapter on the passing down of camp cinema knowledge in the form of the Gold Coast’s movie screenings:
“As one patron recalled, ‘I had never heard of All About Eve until one movie Sunday when I went there—all these leather guys I had found so intimidating knew it line for line. The veneer cracked. I found out they were nice, they were fun, they knew movies, and they knew opera…What I discovered was a wonderful brotherhood.'”
Fucking beautiful.
Like most academic texts, these chapters are only as strong as their central thesis. Some of the most engaging chapters feature clear incisive historically-based arguments on, for instance, gentrification partially driven by upwardly-mobile white gay men counter the working-class denizens in bars like the Other Side and Jacque’s in Boston’s Bay Village and institutionalized racism in gay bars, as well as efforts to fight for integration or form Black gay spaces, in Atlanta with its “unique status as both the Black and gay mecca of the South.” In contrast, some chapters like the move from gay to queer through Gen X parties in San Francisco seem not to have as much at stake and therefore, begin to drag. Sadly, one of the weakest chapters—and one of the biggest missed opportunities—is on New York City. This chapter, entitled “Welcome to the Pleasuredome: Legends of Sex and Dancing in New York,” is, as Hilderbrand articulates, “something of a greatest-hits compilation,” focusing on just the famous spaces—the Continental Baths, the Mineshaft, the Anvil, Paradise Garage, and the Saint—without really much new to say about any of them. In fact, this chapter felt more perfunctory than the rest, hinted at in snarky descriptions of “the city’s outsized influence or what might be called the city’s pompous self-aggrandizement.”
And while we’re on the subject of not-so-subtle personal judgments, Hilderbrand has an occasional yet irritating habit of interjecting subjective interpretations of, admittedly, unquestionably tasteless jokes made by or within bars. Take his otherwise riotous chapter on Mary’s, a bar, Hilderbrand notes, that “exemplifies everything a gay bar can be, good and bad…” Mary’s was not exactly known for political correctness, including several parties that (probably quite rightfully) garnered national outrage. One was notably for “an ad for a ‘wet—-‘ costume contest…for a Cinco de Mayo party. The event also promised ‘1 Year Free Swimming & Englich [sic] Lesson [sic] from Maria’ and ‘Green Cards Will Be Made.’” First off, yikes. Secondly, the “—-” in “wet—-” is published in the book. Can’t we all be adults here? It’s that kind of “bad word!” infantilization of readers that is just oh-so-academia at the moment (and it made me think much harder about the word as I was trying to decipher it). Thirdly, the party was conceived of by the bar’s Latino manager Adrian Luera, otherwise known as Maria, who apparently “came up with the promotion as a ‘humorous jab’ at the various racists who had called him the slur his entire life.” Now, it’s perfectly fine to debate whether this satirical reclamation was successful given it offended a whole lot of people and sparked protests but I didn’t need this declarative addition:
“The bar’s problematic humor tarnishes its legacy. I do not absolve Mary’s of these parties’ harm, which indexed the uncomfortable truth that Mary’s could be a sanctuary for white queers who felt like social outcasts and also be aggressively hostile or malignantly indifferent to people of color.”
Was anyone asking for your absolution?
Yet, this disruptive finger-wagging is a minor hitch that says much more about the trend of unnecessarily anxious personal moralizing and relitigating offenses done in the past that has run through academic circles for more than a decade now than the quality of the book itself (Granted, I much prefer Mary’s response to the controversy: “Mary’s advertised a Boycott Party with ‘free drinks all day & all night to all boycotters’ and doubled down by obstinately billing itself ‘your local racist bar’.” I know, I’m problematic).
The Bars Are Ours is, ultimately, an essential addition to the growing but still woefully incomplete published histories of gay bars. For as much attention as gay nightlife has received as integral to survival, activism, community, safety, and just pure fun and escapism, particularly after the violent rupture of the shootings at Pulse (which unsurprisingly concludes The Bars Are Ours) and more recently, Club Q, there is still a shocking lack of books solely focused on gay nightlife history. Even those famous NYC spaces that Hilderbrand highlights don’t have their own books. Yes, there have been more and more books on gay bars in recent years. Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out and Greggor Mattson’s Who Needs Gay Bars?: Bar-hopping through America’s Endangered LGBTQ+ Places immediately come to mind. Yet, these are more personal and sociological accounts. While Hilderbrand doesn’t hesitate to place himself in the narrative when warranted such as in some of the interludes and the final chapter on Los Angeles’ Latinx gay bars, he doesn’t allow The Bars Are Ours to become a memoir. It’s perhaps because of this that the book doesn’t give in to some familiarly exhausting gay bar writing trappings, namely whining about and eulogizing the death of the gay bar. This is a typical refrain for coverage of gay bars and clubs that often has much more to do with the end of a writer’s participation in nightlife than the eradication of nightlife altogether. “The gay bar as an institution carries on,” Hilderbrand asserts, “as contradictorily as ever.”
The precious worth, though, of The Bars Are Ours comes from Hilderbrand’s dedication to being a “rigorous queen” in his research, digging up delicious tidbits and remembrances from gay bars’ elusive histories that even those of us obsessed with gay bars never heard, read, or knew before. How can you resist being overwhelmed with awe at this memory from a bartender at the Pit, also owned by the Gold Coast’s Chuck Renslow?:
“Renslow came downstairs [as] I had my arm up somebody’s ass and somebody [else] was giving me head. He said, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ and I said, ‘I can still work this bar.’ I was reaching in and pulling beers and still serving. He was not amused.”
A talented multitasker! Give that man a raise! Or how about this account of Atlanta’s “most enduring Black LGBTQ+ brick-and-mortar venue,” the Marquette?:
“A review published in the local Black gay press compared the clientele to talk-show guests who ‘spend most of their time cursing and fighting each other for no apparent reason’…”
Count me in! Or how about this particularly…um…evocative sensory description of Mary’s?:
“Inside the bar, Farmer could not abide underwear and declared it ‘illegal’ on the premises. He offered patrons the option of stripping it off themselves or having it cut off: ‘Most liked to have it cut off.’ The briefs were then flung to the rafters, where they accumulated until they became a health or fire hazard. A trapeze swing hung over the bar so that men literally could swing nude from the rafters; this was removed after someone fell off. A motorcycle chained to the ceiling above the pool table (apocryphally alleged to be Janis Joplin’s) was a more enduring fixture. The staff mopped every night, yet a ripe stench permeated the venue, so much so that at least one ad posed the question ‘What’s that smell?'”
Enticing! Granted, my fixations may come off as less serious than others but if reveling in sleaze is wrong, I don’t want to be right! Beyond just astonishment at the often trashy world-making within these bars, though, these passages offer motivation. What Hilderbrand achieves is hopefully only the beginning. The Bars Are Ours is an inspirationally sprawling overview that should work to point other writers, other researchers, and other nightlife enthusiasts in the right direction to, then, like Mary’s patrons, follow their noses. As evidenced by the plural use of histories and cultures in the book’s title, there are many more histories of gay bars that can—and should—be told.