GLR September-October 2023

posite, because she ’ s been taken in, accepted, befriended. That little lesson — that we go to gay bars to be taken in — is what lies beneath Burton ’ s tour of the last lesbian bars in the U.S. She concludes, in Atlanta, that even if we don ’ t need gay spaces (because they ’ ve been made obsolete by assimilation or the Internet or whatever), we still want them. Of course, this has to do with age: when young, we go to bars to get laid; when old, simply to be with other LGBT people. For proof, just walk byAnnie ’ s on 17th Street in D.C. at any hour of the day or evening and glance in the window. By the time Burton reaches My Sister ’ s Room in Atlanta, she has grown so discouraged by her insecurity as a shy femme that she ’ s changed the stylish outfits she ’ s been wearing to a faded black sweatshirt dress, with shoes that make her feet look like baked potatoes, an outfit that reads clearly as “ queer, ” only to find when she walks into the mostly black bar that she has en tered High Femme paradise. You can ’ t predict what you ’ ll find, though people are friendlier the further south you go, she dis covers. And once she gets to Phoenix, she ’ s going back to the city in which both of her parents used to live. In the Acknowledgments, Burton thanks her editor for in sisting that she make the book “ my own story. ” The editor was right. The best parts of Moby Dyke are not the descriptions of bars whose only difference becomes, at a certain point, the splen dor of their patios, but rather Burton ’ s reflections when she re turns to places she has been before. She used to put on seminars for educators in Columbus, Ohio; she once lived in Seattle; she grew up in Wisconsin; and, in Phoenix, she stayed with her par ents after they retired. It ’ s on returning to Arizona that we learn about her relationship with her mother and father, at whom she used to shout “ I hateyou! ” when growing up. MobyDyke is not just the slice of Americana that all road trips provide, nor just a portrait of the splintering of sexual identity in the homosexual community; it ’ s also glimpses of a writer ’ s past. Indeed, the sheer specificity of those memories produces its best prose, par ticularly when the author returns to the state in which she was raised. It ’ s totally endearing when Davin bursts out: “ I love the Midwest! ” But it ’ s Burton who tells us why: You never know what ’ s going to resonate with you, really. I spent my teenage years formulating and refining plans to get the hell out of Wisconsin and never come back. And now that I was back, decades later, it was almost a relief to be there. I ’ d missed it. I really love fancy bullshit in all forms — cocktails featuring edible flowers; entrees I can ’ t pronounce at restau rants you have to book months in advance; confrontationally minimalist shops that sell ambitiously priced bars of soap, and, like, specially blessed brass incense burners — but Idon ’ t come from anything fancy. I come from a place where the hottest restaurant in town was once the newly built Noodles & Com pany. A place where the sight of a dripping deer hanging upside down on a hook doesn ’ t make anybody flinch. I ’ m from a place where three people sitting on lawn chairs inside a garage in February is a party. And it turns out what makes my homo sexual heartbeat faster is sticky floors, queers in hunting sweat shirts, gay bears in wool hats saying “ Ope ” as they inch past you on their way to the bar, and a dart game that pauses for anyone who needs to pee — twenty, thirty, fifty times in a night. That ’ swhen MobyDyke is at its best: when it wears its heart on its sleeve, even while covered in the most sarcastic of thorns. September – October 2023

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