Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. The gay bar changed my ideas of movement, dance, collaborative ecstasy, connection with those I did not know, anonymous solidarity, all of it happening in an aura of a generalized permission to live, to breathe, to desire, to find “your people” for a time. It would not be where I now go to find community, but I certainly once did. It has a retro feel, and maybe even cultivates that as a market niche. There’s still a gay bar around where I currently live: the East Bay. And the realization that alcohol and drugs destroyed some people’s lives and relations gave way to a broader reflection on how communities can and must sustain each other.Īs categories of gender opened up, the sense of community became ever more complex and the tasks of solidarity more challenging. But somewhere in the course of all these changes there was a sense that desires were to be lived and honored in a network of supports. The public refusal to acknowledge HIV’s seriousness, the state refusal to fund its research, gave rise to rageful and pointed action. HIV shot mourning and politics into the scene, and for most of us, divisions between women and men seemed to break down. Over the years, so many people and communities, so many real and potential pleasures, were driven out of those neighborhoods, the ecstasy replaced by dispossession. Another, on West Fourth Street, was great, but today it seems to be a looming bank. If you wanted a bar for women only, you had a few options, but one of them, Sahara, was expensive and I felt awkward in my sweatshirt. We spilled into the street: For brief moments, we seemed to own the neighborhoods. The whole place was warm, if not hot.īy the time I started going to bars in NYC in the late ’70s, there was the feel of a celebration and a political movement. In Albany, however, the different strata reflected different vibes: There was dancing to disco on one floor, slow cruising on another, and I was, well, not so very sure about what was happening in the recesses of the building. Oddly, the same structure characterized the gay bar I went to outside of Albany in the mid-’70s. Men were upstairs, and drag shows became regular events, a kind of pre-Provincetown testing ground for the up-and-coming. In New Haven, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the bar Partners was known for its upstairs-downstairs configuration.
They seemed to be spaces of freedom and excitement, islands in an otherwise unfriendly world. I am not sure about my earliest memory of the gay bar, but I do know that I was in bars very often starting at the age of eighteen, or just before. Photo: New-York Historical Society Museum.