GLR September-October 2023

ESSAY

Splendor on the Patio A NDREW H OLLERAN

K RISTA BURTON was a self-described “ les bian joke machine ” with a blog called Effing Dykes when an editor at Simon & Schuster called to ask if she would like to write a book for them. The editor had just read an article in The New York Times about the dwindling number of lesbian bars in the U.S. — only a couple dozen re main — and Burton had been writing essays on lesbian subjects for the Gray Lady. She leapt at the chance. She was 39, living in a small town in Minnesota, married to a trans man named Davin, working for a company that set up seminars for authors of books about education, and weary of the first year of the pandemic iso lation. When, during a FaceTime conversation with friends a year into the lockdown, the question “ What did they miss most about life before Covid? ” arose, Burton instantly replied: “ being in a packed, sweaty dyke bar, surrounded on all sides by queers so close they ’ re touching me, and then to feel someone with a drink in one hand try to inch past me. You know — when the bar ’ s so crowded that your arms are up and held tight to your body, with all your elbows tucked in, and you can feel people jostling you from all sides! ” And that ’ s what she set out to find (once the vaccine had been introduced). follow as they sound. For instance, she confesses to being shy, and, as she points out more than once, gay people in bars are very good at looking at other gay people, but not at engaging them in conversation. And not only was she shy, she wasn ’ t a big drinker. Raised in a Mormon household in the Midwest, she writes: “ I al most never take shots when I go out, because I cannot handle them. It takes exactly 1.5 normal drinks for me to become the kind of person who says shit like, ‘ You have the most invisible pores, your skin is unreal ’ to people I don ’ t know. ” Of course, once in the bars she finds herself being asked to drink shots on the slightest pretext. The owner of Manhattan ’ s Cubbyhole recalls a woman who became so distraught after an argument that she went into the bathroom and ripped the toilet from the cement, flooding the bar. “ Maybe it was the grief from the breakup giving her extra strength. The wildest thing was, she came back the very next night like nothing happened. ” The combination of alcohol and Andrew Holleran ’ s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). There were four rules she made for her project: one, that she only visit self-identified lesbian bars, or bars that had historically been lesbian; two, that she visit them at least twice; three, that she try to contact the bar owners and interview them; and four, that she must approach and speak to at least two strangers in every bar. These rules weren ’ t as simple to

human relationships has always been volatile — not to mention the fact that lesbian bars were associated with violence when I moved to New York in the early 1970s; I didn ’ t know about the woman who ripped the toilet right out of the cement, but I imag ined fights around the pool table with broken beer bottles. There ’ s another reason for why the generally sober Burton has to summon all her nerve to enter these places: she ’ s a “ high femme, ” a lesbian who presents herself as so feminine that she ’ s afraid the other patrons will think she ’ s straight. So the minute she gets to the bar, she pulls out a little notebook and writes, which leads people to ask what she ’ s doing, which lets her into conversations and interviews. Her obsessive journey begins at the Wild Side West in San Francisco and ends at Frankie ’ s in Oklahoma City, with eighteen bars in between. Along the way, we learn that lesbian bars ’ inte riors are always painted a particular shade of red —“ specifically Pantone #8a0000, if you need a reference ” ; that all lesbian bars have twinkling lights and some have patios; that lesbian breakups occur mostly in the spring and fall, when the newly divorced come back to the bar to try again; that a woman can claim a table as her own and allow only the people she wants to sit there; that bars shrunk in number? ” It ’ sBurton ’ s voice. At one point she observes that gay male bars have not suf fered the collapse that lesbian bars have, but we do not learn why. Nor does she go into the extent to which online hookups have altered lesbian life. What intrigues Burton is to what extent the sheer need for customers, or the desire of most owners to supply a place that anyone can call home, has diluted the les bianism of these spaces irretrievably. Burton seems to long for the good ole days but understands the problem: “ Queers want dedicated spaces where they can go, and have everyone around them be queer. That ’ s because that shit is fun. And it ’ s sucha re lief, not to mention so much safer, for us all to be able to be to gether. But most of us also want each and every version of queerness to be welcomed in those spaces, and who gets to de cidewho ’ s queer and who ’ s not? ” That, in fact, is the underly ing subject of this book: the tension between inclusivity and exclusivity. It ’ s one reason Burton is so sensitive about the way she ’ s treated in each bar she visits. She has reason to be sensitive. For one thing, she explores several of the bars with her trans-man husband, and she ’ s never in every lesbian bar there is always a tall skinny white man lurking around for no dis cernible reason. And then there ’ s the fact that most proprietors think that “ assimilation ” ex plains the disappearance of women ’ s bars. After a while, even Burton grows bored with this explanation, though it soon becomes ap parent that the real value of MobyDyke isnot the answer to the question “ Why have lesbian

What does this endless splintering of sexual iden ti ty mean? Could it be the reason for the dwindling number of lesbian bars?

September – October 2023

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