By 1957, when O’Hara wrote the untitled poem that opens “I live above a dyke bar and I’m happy,” he and LeSueur were sharing a third-floor apartment, actually two doors down from The Round-Up. (Or was that Stirrup, or Silver Spur? LeSueur later flippantly misremembered.) According to the date and location, I’d suggest it was the Bagatelle-“the Bag”-a Mafia-owned venue at 86 University Place that counted writers Ann Bannon and Audre Lorde among its regulars. LeSueur would peer out his window, attempting to discern the psychosexual dynamics playing out on the street.
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He surmised the men who dropped in to pick up lesbians must be the hetero version of trade queens, those gay men with a preference for straight guys who lend their bodies disinterestedly. In San Francisco in the early aughts, I lived directly above a dyke bar. Of sorts: El Rio was a chummy neighborhood dive run by lesbian academics, queers of color and FTM hipsters. It had opened as a Brazilian leather bar in 1978. By my time there, it hosted post-punk gigs and poetry readings. On Sundays, the back patio filled with salsa dancing, which I watched from the fire escape. I co-hosted monthly film screenings in a sideroom, the most popular being Wild Style, the graffiti documentary. The manager suggested we provide markers to encourage the crowd to tag the bathroom walls. For my contribution, I block-lettered some favorite lines from Lynda Barry’s novel Cruddy.
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Within weeks, someone had written PRETENTIOUS with an arrow pointing to my citation.
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Gay bars made their own lexical dent by way of furtive codes, ribald commentary and camp parlance.