Labor of Love (8 page)

Langston Hughes went to rent parties almost every Saturday that he spent in Harlem. “I met ladies' maids and truck drivers, laundry workers and shoe shine boys, seamstresses and porters,” he wrote. Along with writers and intellectuals and some of the best musicians of their day, these workers met and flirted at rent parties, and they took their dates to them.

This Harlem, Hughes wrote, “didn't like to be stared at by white folks.” These parties allowed members of the black working classes “to have a get-together of one's own, where you could do the black-bottom with no stranger behind you trying to do it, too.”

The hosts and guests at rent parties had discovered an important law of going out: Not everyone can rely on getting the same kind of access to public space. The institutions of dating have often excluded many people. In the decades that followed, daters would use semiprivate places to create new social movements.

*   *   *

After World War II, gay daters began gathering in places that they slowly made their own. It started in just a few cities and a few neighborhoods. But the energies that it unleashed would eventually change laws across America.

During the war, the armed forces had been eager to enlist recruits, and many young gays and lesbians who felt isolated in their hometowns saw military service as a chance to escape. In the 1978 documentary
Word Is Out
, the lesbian actress Pat Bond recalled the determination she felt as a teen growing up in Davenport, Iowa, to join the Women's Army Corps. “I was in love with this woman who wasn't in love with me,” Bond said. “So the thing to do was to go into the Women's Army Corps, and go to Paris, where Gertrude Stein had been.”

Bond never made it to France. But in the WAC she did find an environment that welcomed lesbians. Everyone knew it. Girls showed up at recruitment centers wearing short haircuts and corduroy suits; they winked their way through interview questions.

“Have you ever been in love with a woman?”

Wide-eyed.
“What's a woman?”

On paper, the WAC discouraged homosexuality. But in practice, it also discouraged persecution. A training manual assured officers that lesbians “are exactly as you and I, except that they participate in sexual gratification with members of their own sex.” Many WAC officials had no need to be reminded. Pat Bond could tell at once that the officer who enlisted her was gay, even though she wore a skirt, stockings, and high heels.

“She looked like all my old gym teachers,” Bond exclaimed, “but in drag!”

That was during the war, when the army needed people. As the war wrapped up, it started purging hundreds of gay men and women. Five hundred lesbians were expelled from the WAC in Tokyo. Most received a shameful “blue” discharge, which was given for “psychiatric problems,” including “sexual deviance.” Pat Bond returned to the port of San Francisco. Like many other gay men and women, she stayed. Soon others started showing up, drawn by rumors of new kinds of freedom.

Some came from Washington, D.C., where many gays and lesbians had worked in the State Department and developed a thriving nightlife scene. On April 27, 1953, President Eisenhower signed an executive order demanding that all homosexuals working for the government be purged. The justification was that the dark secret of their lifestyle made them susceptible to blackmail by Communist agents. Although it drew far less media attention than the witch hunt being led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, to the people it targeted, the “Lavender Scare” was just as devastating as the Red one. Finding their professional lives ruined, many men and women cast out of the government looked for oases in friendlier cities.

Pat Bond recalled that in the 1950s, on Broadway in San Francisco, there were at least five bars where women could flirt with one another without being expelled or harassed by management. Every night, she hopped among the five, gathering gossip from old friends and scanning the crowd for new faces. She never worked nights and she never stayed in. Otherwise, she said, she “might miss something.”

These were not quite “lesbian bars.” During this era, the police still mixed many different kinds of “vice” together; they treated homosexuality and drag like sex work or drug deals. Drunken GIs who had recently returned from overseas and sailors on shore leave crowded into them. These men stared at and pestered the regular patrons for dances. But the women had the power to say no. In the 1920s, Ellin Mackay had written that one of the joys of going out to a speakeasy was being able to ignore anyone who did not interest you. Being in public offered the same opportunity to women who had no interest in men.

“Go away, I'm a lesbian! Get out of my life!” Pat Bond would shout when one of these men approached her. She felt both gleeful and enraged. The protection that being in the bar offered was not foolproof. Sometimes the men got angry when they realized that she was not pretending. Sometimes they waited outside to beat up dykes. Sometimes the cops raided the place. When they did, the women they abused and insulted had little recourse.

Even in the best-case scenario, having to repeat
I'm a lesbian! Get out of my life!
again and again got tiring. But bit by bit, as women who wanted to date women continued to do so, and to tell off gawkers, they started to create something new: publicly recognized lesbian spaces.

*   *   *

The uncertainties involved in going out are a big part of its allure. The fun of flirting is that you are never sure what it means. The people we meet out
,
we approach because something attracts us. It might be his hair, or her glasses, or simply a beautiful face, the gender of which we cannot pin down. Often it is something intangible that we glimpse in the moment of our encounter. A gesture. A laugh. A way of ordering a drink. Something gives us a sense that we want to know more.

In many ways, this wanting to know is the most exciting part of going out. It has an edge of risk. Not only do we not know whether the other person is interested in us. We cannot really know how interested
we
are until we have flirted. Our own level of interest is one of the things we are trying to gauge by flirting. Smiling back at a stranger across the room, you know little about her apart from the fact that you like her smile. This not knowing is an appealing change from the obligatory feel of many setups, Internet dates, or workplace intrigues, the rote feel of the questions you ask and the answers you get.

Some risks, however, are not exciting to run at all. Almost everyone who goes out who is not a straight, white, and gender conforming man will at some point fear that a flirtation has put him or her in danger. To worry all the time weighs on you, oppressing you even if you never actually meet with violence.

“Men do not text one another that they got home safe,” one friend points out.

“If a guy wants to know what it feels like,” another jokes, “he should try watching
Fatal Attraction
. For the rest of his life, he should watch it before every time he goes out.”

*   *   *

This was why José Sarria wanted to make the Black Cat Café a gay bar. Owner Sol Stouman hired Sarria as a waiter in the early 1950s. By that time, the Black Cat was already famous as a destination for Beats and Bohemians. The Armed Forces Disciplinary Control Board had added it to a list of establishments that military personnel were forbidden to enter, and Allen Ginsberg declared it “the best gay bar in America.”

But at that time it was not quite “gay” yet.

“It was very subtle,” Sarria recalled. “Not like it was in later years.”

In the 1950s, the Black Cat was a “wide-open” bar that allowed
any
kind of dress and behavior. Famous gay men like Truman Capote visited, but so did the Hollywood actors Bette Davis and Gene Kelly.

“Everybody” went there, Ginsberg wrote. There were “all sorts and kinds of people”: “heterosexual and homosexual.” There were “gay screaming queens,” “longshoremen” and even “heterosexual gray flannel suit types.” “All the poets went.”

Jack Kerouac set part of his seminal Beat novel
On the Road
in the Black Cat. The scenes where it appears make clear that the mix Ginsberg loved could be a liability as well as a source of excitement. The protagonist, Sal Paradise, admits to getting his kicks by threatening men who flirt with him.

“Several times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a bar john I took out the gun and said, ‘Eh? Eh? What's that you say?' He bolted.” The boast then turns into bewilderment: “I've never understood why I did that; I knew queers all over the country.”

Sal apologizes for his bad behavior. Like many homophobes before and after, he insists,
I have gay friends!
Like many homophobes, and like Jack Kerouac, he is also clearly sexually interested in men. It would not take an especially skilled psychoanalyst to point out the symbolism.
I just had to show him my penis—I mean, gun!
He goes to the Black Cat hoping to get picked up and then snarls at the first person to approach him.

Sarria quickly worked his way up the Black Cat hierarchy. He started greeting guests, singing arias, and eventually performing as the club's general emcee. By 1960, he was doing four drag shows a night. In the spotlight, he improvised clever ways to disarm anyone who he feared might make queer patrons feel threatened. Around the turn of the millennium, Sarria boasted to historians of the Black Cat: “I
made
it gay. It didn't get gay until I got there.” How do you make a bar gay? By creating an atmosphere where everyone who enters is assumed to be gay. During his show, Sarria addressed himself to a gay audience, regardless of exactly who was present.

Wearing a sign that said
I'M A BOY
, he poked fun at the legal pretext that was often used to arrest cross-dressers: “female impersonation with intent to deceive.” (Having to wear such signs had also often been a form of punishment for people arrested for “masquerading in attire not proper to his or her sex.”) Sarria told dirty jokes, spilled gossip about prominent members of the gay community, and sang snippets of opera, altering the lyrics to make them raunchy. Sometimes Sarria made his act overtly political. He would read aloud from the newspaper and interpret recent events. If he caught sight of someone he suspected was slumming, he would storm over to the table, high heels clicking, while everyone stared. Years later, he remembered taking one tourist and his cardigan-wearing wife by storm.

“Oh
you
!” he exclaimed. “So you're
bisexual
, are you? I didn't know I was merely another woman!”

The man bristled; the wife blushed. But after a moment, they had to acknowledge that Sarria was right. Everyone in the bar was gay, and gay was good. Straight people could come if they wanted, but they would have to accept that they were the outsiders. They could learn what that felt like.

*   *   *

At the Black Cat and countless other “homophile” bars, daters went out and claimed new kinds of public spaces. By going out, people who had long been made to feel like outcasts found or created new communities. And as they became confident that these places were
theirs
, and felt the strength of their numbers, they fought back against authorities who had long tried to control them. The new movement made “coming out” a powerful rallying cry.

Many of the most famous scenes of the gay liberation movement took place spontaneously, in the places where people went to socialize. Popular histories often date the beginning of the movement to the riots that erupted at the Stonewall Inn in New York's West Village during the early hours of June 28, 1969. When plainclothes police officers raided the bar, a group of trans women and butch lesbians refused to go to the bathroom to have their sex inspected. Other customers began to refuse to line up to have their IDs checked. Soon the crowds in the bar and the streets were in open revolt.

Other historians offer other starting points for the swell of LGBT activism in the 1970s. The clash between a group of queens and street hustlers and the Los Angeles Police Department at Cooper Do-nuts in May 1959. The riot that a group of trans women started at Compton's cafeteria in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco in August 1966. Small protests that erupted spontaneously could draw the attention of a broader public.

Going out gave energy and visibility to LGBT causes. But where some saw going out as the chance to start a revolution, others saw it in terms of commercial opportunity.

In the early 1960s, a young entrepreneur named Alan Stillman moved to New York. He was full of high hopes but found it was a struggle to meet single women. Yet he knew that the city was full of them. Secretaries and typists squeezed into shared apartments on the Upper East Side. Hundreds of flight attendants gravitated toward the “girl ghetto” just above the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, because it was a quick trip to the airport. Yet the same women who flew all over the world could not go to many local bars without a man. The Oak Room at the Plaza did not admit women until 3:00 p.m. McSorley's Old Ale House banned them entirely until 1970. Signs posted around the bar read:
GOOD ALE, RAW ONIONS, AND NO LADIES
. Countless other places allowed women only if they were “escorted.” Meaning, by a man. That meant, in effect, that single women could not go out to
meet
men. Being on a date with one already was the one way you could get in.

Stillman wanted to change that. Walking through the West Village one night, he had a eureka moment: He would make a gay bar, but for straight people. It was a brilliant idea. Soon after, he opened the first T.G.I. Friday's on the Upper East Side, First Avenue and Sixty-third Street. With it, the “singles bar” was born. Simply by providing a place for singles to mix, Stillman started a craze. He had to install velvet ropes outside the front door in order to wrangle the crowds of young men and women who showed up every night of the week. Across the street, another singles joint, called Maxwell's Plum, soon opened. Two more quickly followed. By the summer of 1965, the police had to come every Friday and close down the block from 8:00 p.m. until midnight, because there were so many patrons going back and forth between the bars that cars could not get through.