You and Me Together: An Elegy for the Queer Bar

Nile Rodgers’ guitar line slips in and out like a tongue, flicking around the drum kicks and spasms of electric bass. The piano comes in, slapping syncopated block chords just before the strings rise, lifting me as if I’d downed a hit of ecstasy forty minutes ago and every muscle in my body is starting to liquefy. And when Sister Sledge slides in with that first chorus—Oh what, wowww…He’s the greatest dancer…Oh what, wowww…That I’ve ever see-een—something else rises (a clotted smell: cologne) that chokes out my euphoria, kills it with the realization of where I am, which is on a stool, pulled up to a beer on a scarred and sticky bar at 4:30 on a January afternoon in San Francisco. It’s 2016, and I’m on deathwatch.

The patient is all around us in the form of the Gangway, said to be the oldest gay bar in San Francisco, in danger of imminent shuttering (any day now, news reports say). I came to have a couple of last drinks, here where I never really hung out. (I moved to San Francisco across the bay from Berkeley, in 1982.) We’re all drinking on borrowed time—me, Mr. Basic Cologne who slipped onto the next stool, those three boys straw-sipping vodka-Sprites at the other end of the bar.

Bobby, the middle-aged bartender in a rolled-sleeve dress shirt and black Nike cap, takes a bite from a sandwich.

The historical society is coming Saturday to film everything, he says, gazing at the walls, the framed clippings of candlelight marches and softball wins, party-store paper flowers left up after a wedding or a memorial, plastic rainbow Pride flags (souvenirs of witness) faded down to pastel colorblocks. Bobby grips the double electrodes of an imaginary defibrillator, thrusts his hands forward and pulls them back, pretending to zap an invisible chest.

It’s like last rites for the corpse, he says, blasé, through a mouthful of turkey-avocado.

It’s only now that I notice how worn the Sister Sledge sounds on what has to be a twenty-year-old hits tape, Now That’s What I Call Disco or something as ridiculous, spun so often the treble spikes sound hissy. Queer bars were always patched-together spaces: the bouncer on a padded duct-taped stool, stacks of queer weeklies at the door; inside, the reek of dirty dried mop water and spectral wash of blacklight on a ten-by-ten dance floor, everybody’s vodka-soda turning radioactive under the glow. They were places where the DJ hauled in her own milk crates of vinyl and moved as hard as anybody to the tracks she pumped, General Public, Dead or Alive, Bronski Beat: Name me an illness, call me a sin/ Never feel guilty, never give in.

These places were shitty and ad hoc, yet they were where community showed itself to me; where I discovered that feeling connected to strangers, needy in exactly the same way that I was, is an act of making culture; of gripping tightly to life, especially when so many around me were dying.

We were all terrified of being tested at the start, after HIV testing became available in 1985. What was the use of knowing when you were sure you were already marked? Why trade slim hope for certainty about death? I cooked side by side on a restaurant line with Don, who wrote about music for the same queer paper where I wrote about food. Some nights we’d go out together after our shift, and we’d broken down the line, washed the stainless-steel walls, and scrubbed the grill and burner grates. We talked often about the possibility (actually the probability) of being infected. One night at The Stud, after last call and the regretful shuffle out to the street, he dragged on a cigarette and told me to promise that if he died from the disease I’d help throw a big memorial for him, mix his ashes into lime Day-Glo paint and spray WORK MY BUTT on a wall in an alley cul-de-sac outside the bar. In death, he’d write one last joyful, defiant imperative.

Maybe the biggest myth of food is that it brings people together; everybody sharing fellowship around the table. That food itself is an automatic medium for community. I’ve ground out a living in food for more than thirty years, sixteen as a cook, and for the past seventeen as a writer. It was never eating together around a table that gave me a sense of shared values and purpose.

In the panic during first-wave HIV/AIDS in the mid-‘80s, after San Francisco closed the bathhouses it charged as public health risks, I saw community as a different kind of spiritual. Someone who called himself Father Frank opened a gay sex club in a warehouse South of Market and registered it as a house of worship, the Church of St. Priapus. He scheduled weekly services after which men would disappear into a plywood warren of dark corners. Father Frank sold hot dogs, grilled on a Weber out the back door, and cans of beer from coolers. Using the justification of a crisis the federal government failed to address (an act of queer genocide), the city and county of San Francisco sought to control our desires, the thing that delivered us to ourselves. They sought to erase us. We found communion in guerrilla defiance, in sex, and in the salty audacity of hot dogs.

Because the first thing to know about community, despite all the food-writing clichés of the farmers’ market and the CSA share and the sustainable restaurant with its own garden out back, is that it’s a mutual-aid pact of the threatened; comfort for the troubled. Community is what you make when there’s a world outside that wants to hurt you, to deny you your rights, and make you believe you’re less than a person.

Queers of my generation learned what it meant to be gay in bars. We inherited a culture of resistance from those who started a revolution on the streets outside one, the Stonewall Inn. The Black civil rights movement was nourished in Southern churches preaching universal human values through Christian worship. The Gay Liberation Front midwifed itself in a Greenwich Village bar not unlike the Gangway, by lesbians and faggots; queens, hustlers, and fairies; street kids and the gender nonconforming—people who knew what it was to be bullied and betrayed.

I’m 21, home on winter break from Cal. It’s only a few months since I’ve come out to my parents; nobody else knows. I tell my mom I’m going out. Half an hour later I pull up to the only gay bar I know exists, sequestered on a dark backstreet in a suburb near Palo Alto, in a block of daytime businesses. I’m so nervous my hand trembles as I push the door open. I’m wearing my dad’s old 49ers cap, swiped off a hook in the garage. It makes me feel only partly seen, which is what I want.

There’s a pool table. Twenty men line the bar (it’s a weeknight). Necks swivel, eyes scan—I keep mine focused on the floor and slug my beer too fast. I’m aware of a body near mine and lift my gaze. A guy in a frayed-straw cowboy hat smiles and makes a joke I fail to hear over the music but laugh at anyway. He’s older, mid-thirties. He has an accent. He tells me he moved here from Israel for work, buys us beers, and returns. He leans in to yell-whisper that he likes the flush in my cheeks.

He closes the door of his apartment behind us, leads me to the bedroom, and grinds the spark-wheel of his plastic lighter to make multiple candles glow. He kisses me and I recoil from the scratch of his cowboy hat. He takes it off. He’s bald. He’s nice, but whatever sexual possibility flickered has died for me. He’s already got his clothes off, and I don’t want to seem rude so I take mine off too, except I leave my boxers on.

Maybe if we could just talk for now, I say.

We sit next to each other on his bed in our underwear, backs against the wall. He fusses over me like an auntie, reaches across to pinch my cheek.

Look at that face, he says, and tells me if I don’t look out he just might eat me up. I tell him tonight was my first time at a gay bar. He says he could tell. He asks if I’m out of the closet. Sort of, I say.

He tells me what it was like growing up in a religious family; how when his father found out he was gay he told him he never wanted to see him again. How his mother and sisters cried, and yet, even forced to pay such a price, he’s never once regretted coming out. He goes to the kitchen and makes me a sandwich. I eat in bed while we talk.

He makes a weak final play for sex. Peek-a-boo! he says in naughty-boy voice, pointing to the opening in my boxers. I see a winnie!

In the second it takes me to realize he means weenie, I knew all I want is to go home and sleep. He sends me home with a plastic baggie of mini Toblerones and cookies he’s baked himself—sort of a coming-out gift for my first time at a gay bar.

You know where to find me, he says as he kisses me on the cheek good-bye. Of course he means the bar. And though I never saw him again, in a way he’s one of the most significant people of my adult queer life: my gay fairy godfather, an exiled Israeli cowboy who witnessed my first holy communion, who marked my conversion with cookies and a kiss. And for a couple of hours, as I allowed him to lavish me with food and the protection of his wisdom, I let him heal (at least for a while) some of the heartache of losing his blood family in Tel Aviv. I am his prodigal son, returned to him at a bar I’ve never been to and to which I’ll never return.

Mr. Basic Cologne spots a Latinx guy who’s settled a few stools down from us and calls to him: It cleared up, right?

Yep, Latinx guy mumbles.

Told-ya-it-wooould, Cologne answers in a high-toned singsong. Doctors always try and scare the shit out of everybody.

I signal to Bobby for another beer. That’s right, Cologne says, no reason to rush outta here.

I tell him I got nowhere else to go.

Bobby says, Not till they come in and rip the stools out from under us.

Postscript: The Gangway held on for another two years after my afternoon with the boys—it closed in January 2018. The space is now a bar with a vintage martial-arts theme, Young’s Kung Fu Action Theatre & Laundry. It is no longer queer.