Labor of Love (9 page)

By 1967,
Life
magazine announced that the singles bar had become an “institution.” “All over Manhattan and in a growing number of other cities there are swinging, noisy gin mills which cater exclusively to young single males and females and which function more or less as perpetual college proms.” By the early 1970s, researchers at Stanford University found that between 20 and 25 percent of American couples had met at bars.

In 1971, Stillman sold the T.G.I. Friday's franchise, and it gradually became what it is now: a chain of family-friendly restaurants you might visit in a strip mall or storefront in any one of dozens of countries. If you woke up in a T.G.I. Friday's, you would have a hard time telling whether you were in Tokyo or Tuscaloosa based on the decor. High-backed leather chairs separate diners. Gay bars may have become starting points for social revolutions, but when the counterculture they created was co-opted, it quickly became a chain of the least sexy restaurants on earth.

*   *   *

A similar fate befell disco music. The roots of disco were planted at a permanent rent party in the Bronx called “Love Saves the Day” that the DJ David Mancuso hosted at his apartment, the “Loft,” from 1970 onward.

“I used to go to bars that were open to the public,” Mancuso told the music historian Terry Williamson. “But I preferred rent parties because they were a little more intimate and you would be among your friends.”

At the Loft, Mancuso charged $3 per entry and offered free snacks and dancing. “There was no one checking your sexuality or racial identity at the door. I just knew different people … It wasn't a black party or a gay party. There'd be a mixture of people. Divine used to go. Now how do you categorize her?”

The DJ Nathan Bush was one of Mancuso's guests. As a high schooler, he feared going to gay bars.
What if a friend or relative saw him entering or exiting?
He wanted a space to explore his sexuality and his artistic interests, away from the watchful eyes of his family and neighbors.

“The Loft was a completely different world,” he said. “You met all types of people—artists, musicians, fashion designers, bankers, lawyers, doctors. Male, female, straight, gay, it didn't matter.”

It was at the Loft that Nathan ran into Larry Levan again. Larry had been a friend in middle school. Bush had always suspected that he was gay. He guessed right; the two became romantically involved and went on to found Paradise Garage, a legendary club in the West Village.

As the disco craze seized New York, however, people went out less to mix with people they would not have met otherwise than to affirm their membership in a crowd that they belonged to already. You went out in order to be part of the scene that party photographers captured. Later you could smile and say,
I was there
.

As being seen became its own end, going out became the means to reach it. The most popular discotheques became media phenomena. At Studio 54, a bouncer would usher a group of celebrities and regulars inside, then select from the countless other hopefuls based on their clothing and appearance. All of the popular discos carefully curated their nightly guest lists in order to create the right environment—the kind that would attract more media attention.

The gay actor Richard Brenner recalled popular discos like Arthur and Cheetah. “They weren't gay clubs. They just let in a certain number, a kind of quota, to give the place more of a party atmosphere.”

The entrepreneurs who lifted the disco sound and look from gay African American DJs often ended up excluding the very kinds of people who had pioneered it. Just as T.G.I. Friday's repackaged the gay bar as the singles bar, discos like Buster T. Brown's stole Paradise Garage's music and sold it to the Midwest.

Buster T. Brown's was the only singles bar in Cincinnati in the early 1970s. In 1974, it was sued for racial discrimination. Off the record, some waitresses and patrons admitted to the press that they thought the real issue was sexual insecurity among white men, who felt intimidated by black men who dressed and danced better than they did. On the record, however, they defended the management.

“Oh, we don't really discriminate against blacks,” one waitress told the
Cincinnati
magazine reporter Dan Bischoff. “It's just that when too many start to pack the place in, we just start playing Beach Boys music. That usually makes them move on.” In the absence of laws segregating daters, unofficial techniques can still do it.

*   *   *

It has long since become a cliché to observe that the lines between public and private are disappearing, or that, in an age of ubiquitous mobile digital technologies, privacy does not exist. We take photographs of our food and share them with thousands of people. We tweet a clever joke while our date is in the bathroom. The smartphone has dramatically changed what it means to go out. By making it possible to leave home with the entire Internet in our pockets—with the profiles of everyone we love, or have loved, or might ever love, on hand and able to be contacted in an instant—the smartphone makes it possible never to be fully out or in.

At the same time, many more people who were once “outsiders” to dating can now go out openly. Gay men, bisexuals, and lesbians no longer need to hide from the police. In many parts of many cities, couples who might previously have risked arrest as “degenerate deviants” if they expressed their affection openly, can now do so without fear.

These are triumphs. Yet the spaces we call “out” are still not for everyone. Over the past few years, there have been many signs that trans people are gaining greater acceptance from the general American public. Yet trans daters are constantly threatened with hostility and violence. Trans women often become the targets of the very men who feel attracted to them—scapegoats for the confusion and self-loathing that such attraction can inspire. Many states still have laws on the books that make “trans panic”—a freak-out experienced upon realizing that someone is not the gender you thought—a legitimate legal defense that can be invoked to downgrade a murder charge to manslaughter. The life expectancy of a trans woman of color in the United States is around thirty-five.

Going out is always about being among others. In this way, it creates a relationship between more than two people. And it is always potentially political. What we hope for when we go out is to be surprised. The surprise may be as ordinary as the slight thrill of jealousy you feel when someone else looks at your longtime partner. Or it might be the delight you feel when you yourself draw such a look. At bottom, a dater goes out to be recognized, even if it is as someone she did not know she was yet.

When strangers catch each other's eyes across a room, however briefly, they become a
we
. Whatever form our relationships take, and for however long they last, it is with a desire for
we
that they begin.
We
is the beginning of every story. And so people who go out create new kinds of community. Going out to date is one way to demand that the world recognize the right of everyone to desire.

 

CHAPTER 4.
SCHOOL

As gay bars inspired the first straight singles bar, the success of the first dating app for “gay, bi, and curious” men launched an arms race to develop an equivalent for straight people. Released in 2009, Grindr uses geolocation technology to show members other members in their vicinity; it indicates precisely how far away they are and lets them initiate multiple simultaneous chats. In 2012, Tinder launched and quickly became the most successful of the products promising straight daters a similar experience.

If every dating app re-creates some earlier, predigital dating experience, Grindr lets users relive the thrills of the speakeasy. Like an “invert” of yore, you scan a crowded bar for hints. Could
he
have the waxed and sculpted torso that appears headless on the profile you're eyeing? Or is
that
stuffed shirt hiding it? Even if your phone avers that he is only ten feet away, the idea of walking up to the wrong stranger and asking “Sw33tbun?” might make you nervous.

A night out on Tinder, however, feels less like cruising than like college. And Tinder facilitates a mode of interaction that has mostly replaced formal dating on college campuses: hooking up.

*   *   *

Those who say that romance is dead often point to college “hookup culture” as the culprit that killed it. Like the language of “treating” and “charity” that the first daters developed, the term blends an exchange of goods and services with an act of intimacy. Linguists have found that among African Americans, “hook up” still usually means something like “give” or “arrange.”
Can you hook me up with a light? So and so got us the hookup on these backstage passes.
But in the 1990s, white suburban kids started using it to refer to sexual encounters.

As is the case with much slang, the power of the expression lies in its ambiguity. For a teen to say that she
hooked up
with a boy from her class might mean anything from that they had cuddled while watching a movie, to that they had had sex in the bathroom at a house party. I remember using “hook up” mostly as a term of discretion.
Yeah, we hooked up
was a gentle way to reproach the friend who kept fishing for details about your weekend.

To speak of hookups made us feel grown-up, like we had finally outgrown the Truth or Dare? years when we kissed and told everything. But this vagueness gave prying grown-ups the pretext they needed to imagine the worst.

In 2000, the celebrated chronicler of mores Tom Wolfe used
Hooking Up
as the title of a book of essays whose subtitle was
What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium
. For Wolfe, hooking up was the perfect metaphor for an America that had turned into a “lurid carnival” without rules or fixed commitments. He was on trend.

We who were actually American girls then may remember watching a fifth grader appear on the morning news to answer Diane Sawyer's questions about the “sex bracelets” she had been caught selling in her school playground or Oprah warning parents that high schoolers nationwide were throwing “rainbow parties,” thus called because the girls who congregated at them applied different shades of lipstick, then fellated boys who tried to collect rings of all the colors you know where. I remember wondering whether Oprah knew how blow jobs worked. My mother grossed me out by implying that she did.

“The idea that girls your age get on their knees for just anyone!” she exclaimed. “I always thought that was something to save for when you're, like, eight months pregnant and feel sorry for your husband.” Thank God I was leaving soon for college. Not that parental fretting ended there.

By the time my roommates and I moved into our freshman-year dorm room, a parade of badly behaving undergrads had crossed American screens before us, showing us what to expect. On television, there was
Girls Gone Wild
, where hordes of drunken sorority members lunged at cameras, crying, “We want to go wild!” They kissed one another and lined up to bare their breasts in exchange for
Girls Gone Wild
trucker hats. MTV's
Spring Break
showed a live stream of hard-bodied and bikini-clad students grinding on one another in Cancún.

In movie theaters, the first
American Pie
movie followed the capers of a group of high school friends all desperate to lose their virginity all the way to becoming a huge box office hit. In the sequels, you could watch the gang go to college and return to misbehave at summer beach houses and reunions. Around the same time, a group of actors who some Hollywood reporter dubbed the “Frat Pack” were getting famous by making gross-out college comedies like
Van Wilder
and
Old School
. For anyone with an Internet connection, there was a seemingly infinite variety of both amateur and professional pornography purporting to show “real college sluts.”

Surveys in magazines like
Cosmopolitan
suggested that the first generation to arrive at school educated by online pornography had studied up on anal sex, multiple penetration, girl-on-girl action, and were eager to put their theories into practice. I remember a lesbian friend complaining how difficult it was to get her desires taken seriously when so many straight girls were kissing girls just to earn hoots from male onlookers. If you wanted to prove you “really” liked girls, she said, you had to put in a semester sleeping with all the other lesbians on campus.

It was like a teen sex bubble. Plug “hook up” into Google Ngram Viewer—an engine that searches the millions of printed sources available on Google's database, and then generates a graph showing how frequently a word or phrase appears. You'll see that the phrase lurches up around the time of the first tech boom. The hookup rose as unstoppably as real estate and stock market values. It shared the ebullience of an economy that seemed to be disproving the fundamental laws of capitalism.

For a while it looked like kids, at least the kinds of upper-middle-class white kids who showed up on television, really could keep getting
more
.

*   *   *

The average Americans who went to school in the 1990s or early 2000s had around fifteen years between when their bodies hit sexual maturity and when they settled down—if they settled down. As of 2010, the median age of first marriage was over twenty-seven for women, and over twenty-nine for men, and more and more people had no plans of marrying at all.

The spread of high school and college education in the early twentieth century created the ambiguous stage between childhood and work and marriage, where more and more millennials seem to be staying—or stalling, depending on who you ask. By 1910, high school attendance was almost universal in cities, and by 1930, college enrollment was triple what it had been in 1900. Both institutions extended the phase that psychologists call “emerging adulthood.”