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Apprenticeship

heard about gay bars in the city

shortly after I first came out.

They were definite destinations
on my baby dyke itinerary, but it
was the Hayloft that really
intrigued me and my small set of
underaged cohorts. The “Loft,” as
we so urbanely referred to it, was
out in the suburbs and completely
inaccessible to us. Not only were
we too young to go to bars, we
were too young to drive.

In my desire for gay
authenticity, the unattainable Loft
was replaced by the city bars. The
Swing Rendezvous — or the Swing
Lounge — or the Swing '— as it.was
variously known — was my first tri-
umph. It was a dive saved from the
reckless depths of sailors’ bars only

, by the lack of sailors in uniform

and its distance from the wharves.
The bar itself was up front with the

 

like a pro. Of course, after the fes-
tivities, I had to get back on the.
subway, take two trains to the end
of the line in Queens, then walk the
two miles to my parents’ apart-
ment, a majorly sobering trek. Why
my mother never asked the reason I
smelled like an ashtray fill_ed with
whiskey, I’ll never know. Once in

It was dark and smoky, and
the uneven wooden floors,
where we did the outlawed
bump and grind, were sticky
with spilled drinks and who
knew what else.

juke box, the tables and tiny dance
floor in back. It was dark and
smoky, and the uneven wooden
floors, where we did the ‘outlawed’
bump and grind, were sticky with
spilled drinks and who knew what
else. Yet, even now, when I hear
the first beats of certain rock’n’.roll
songs, I feel a tremor of nervous
excitement in my gut and the exhil-
aration that went with rny right foot
pushing out to dance in that room
where the music became like water
to a high diver.

It was my first bar. My
ID was borrowed from an 18-year-
old who was such a regular at the
Swing she wasn’t carded anymore.
I was in! I slipped the ID back to
her once I’d passed the bouncer
and tried not to worry about a raid.
Liquor held the same romantic
appeal as the bar, so I lapped it up

my bed, I was jubilant — a real les-
bian who went to gay bars!

After my first bar, I was
so sophisticated that I didn’t bother
with fake ID. I tried to mimic the
rocking walk, the tough, sibilant
way of talking out of the side of
my mouth that seemed to convince
bartenders and waitresses — mostly
straight —— thatil, at 17, was a vetted
butch barfly. I was starved for iden-
tity, for validation by my own peo-
ple, and the bars gave me that even
though, once inside, I was too
young to mix with anyone but the

girl I was with. At the same‘ time, I A

was beginning to learn that the bars
were a rip: boring, expensive, scary
places that drew preying men as
much as they drew lesbians. Still, I
ached to enter more gay bars —
Googie’s and the Music Box, Pam
Pam's and the Sea Colony — the

  out in then1ountains,

castles in my lavender sky.

Then I moved to
Connecticut, where you had to be
21 to get into a bar. I lost all mem-
ory of disillusionment and yearned
for gay people and places with a
constant intensity that made me
feel like I was on fire. In the city,
I’d at least observed my people
from inside. It wasn’t long before I
heard about a place down by the
railroad station, but it came with
warnings. It was supposed to be a
tough, dangerous dump that drew
from the seamier side of town. I
had soiromanticized the Greenwich
Village bars that I never figured out
until I went to this forbidden water-
ing hole several years later, that
what was considered tough in
Connecticut paled against what I‘d
already survived.

I was usually in enough
troubl? in college without chancing
a visit to such a purported den of
iniquity. I had a new destination

bar: the Cedar Brook, or the Brook, .

as the in-crowd called it. Again, it
was way out ‘in the ’burbs,.in ,afflu-
ent Westport, Connecticut, across
the Post Road, irony of all ironies,
from the State Police barracks. It’s
celebrated as the second oldest gay
bar in the country now, but then it
was just a rickety old roadhouse
that regularly soaked up as much of
the flooding brook as it did spilled
beer. ,

By this time, I had doc-
itored a copy of my birth certificate.
One Saturday night, a bunch of us

took over a booth at the Brook,
where we worked up the courage to
get onto the empty dance floor. The
trouble was, we had a curfew back
at school, and an hour’s drive. It
was much too early for anyone but
the serious, allmale drinkers at the
bar and us silly kids, pining to
belong. By the time the gay girls
started arriving, it was time for us
to leave.

What did that matter? I’d
spent a couple of hours in a place
where I could once again dance a
lesbian dance. V

Copyright Lee Lynch 2005. Lynch
is the author of eleven books
including The Swashbuckler and
the Morton River Valley Trilogy.
She lives on the Oregon Coast. Her
web page is at http.'//leelynch6.tri-
pod.com.

 

Dangerous living; 

nd Reid Williams and narrated by Janeane Garofalo, examines the
truggles and triumphs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
eople in the Global South. This film is the first documentary to
eeply explore the lives of lgbt people in non—westem cultures, from

concept 2

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