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They work long hours for money and status, the twin gods of the city. Los Angeles first, because he starts with it, and he actually figures out the city: Only after a few days in Los Angeles did I discover I'd been taken in by false advertising. When the book was published, I was familiar with five of them, and White does a very decent job with those. There were other books, which I just don't have enough information about beyond my own faulty memory, during the 1970s, but White's was different, since it wasn't really a guide per se, it was an attempt to tell his readers what gay life was like in America's big cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Chicago, Minneapolis, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Key West, Memphis, New Orleans, Atlanta, New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.). In Boston during the summer of 1971, which bar you went to depended on the night, and we only went to three bars anyway: The Other Side (dancing) Thursday night, 1270 (behind Fenway Park - dancing) Friday and Saturday, and Sporter's (across the street from Mass General Hospital - no dancing) Sunday. There were lists, and you could decipher the code, if you really needed to. but who really needs it with sites like this or this or this (although I have problems with a site that pretends to review gay bars when over half of the reviews are by hetero women in their 20s).īut I digress. Damron's guides stayed nominally pocket-sized (rear jeans pocket, at least) but it got bigger and bigger, and now it's online with all the interesting features behind a paywall. Several of the listings even saw me during the '70s and '80s: The Hub (now gone - a basic cruising bar) and the Four Star in West Hollywood (the Four Star was actually our bar of choice when we lived up the hill between 19 after a fire, it was reincarnated as Micky's and that's still very much in existence), and I honestly don't think there are that many bars in greater Los Angeles today. The 1966 guide listed 68 men's bars alone, 15 restaurants, 4 Lesbian bars and 2 bathhouses. In the 1965 guide, 68 gay bars and restaurants were listed for Los Angeles and its environs. Popular bars were distinguished with an asterisk. S (Shows, as in drag), SM (Some Motorcycle, for leather bars), RT (for hustler bars), and PE (Pretty Elegant for bars where a suit and tie would be appropriate, like the now defunct Candy Store on 56th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in New York). Then, there were the "secret" codes which required the kind of knowing James McCourt writes about.
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Simple codes: D meant dancing, P meant private, YC meant young crowd, G meant Lesbians, R meant restaurant, C meant coffeeshop, P meant private. By the mid-1960s, there were enough gay bars in enough parts of the country for Bob Damron to issue some pocket-sized lists. There may have been earlier lists (the archivists and I looked for them at one of the leading LGBT research libraries in the country and we couldn't find them), but the first guide I knew about was Bob Damron's guide. Bear in mind, there were access issues in the late 1970s, so this is probably a good place for a picture of Edmund White from 1980.įollow me below the great orange, um, wristband for my idiosyncratic take on his idiosyncratic take on things.
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However, it's not like gay life in these United States had ever been written about in quite this way before. So a brief history of the gay guidebook before we examine what White has to say about gay life in the cities (don't worry, he does five pages of self-criticism at the end of the book in which he beats himself up for no Lesbians, no small-town or rural gays, no gay Asians, no gay Jews, and a distorted view of what he DOES see). No, it wasn't really obvious in most American cities. Nowadays, of course, the information that we used to look at gay guides for is available online in lots and lots of places, but in the 1960s and 1970s, you needed a guide to tell you where gay men were accepted as customers and which establishments welcomed your business. Charles Silberstein on The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), a book which honestly could only have been written during the 1970s. Dutton) wanted him to write after his collaboration with Dr. The book is States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980).