For some reason my thoughts started drifting recently to Uncle Joe's, which used to be Jersey City's gay bar. It had been a Prohibition era speakeasy, and then who knows what kind of bar, then when I first moved to JC in 1993 it was a bar in a desolate area of downtown that cops and some artists frequented. Then it turned into a gay bar, and for a few years it was our local: then it got sold and turned into a straight live-music bar; now I think it got knocked down so they could build another skyscraper -- gentrification. Anyway, while it was a gay bar it was a particular kind of public space, which I've been thinking about because I've been working on an article about the use of streets as queer public space. New York City gay bars tend to be pretty specialized, but in smaller towns they draw more of a cross-section of the community, so when you hang out in one for a while you meet a lot of different people. My mind started drifting to people I'd met in Uncle Joe's, and knew only there, for one little slice of their lives -- and hadn't seen or thought about in years. (A few people from Joe's became friends, but that's another story.) Public space is an ephemeral thing: take that bar -- it existed for a few years, and became a regular stopping place for a lot of people. It was a hang-out place rather than primarily a pick-up bar, so you could end up having lots of different conversations, and finding out a lot about the lives of the regulars. It seems to be a function of queer space that this kind of mixing happens -- what people have in common is their queerness, which cuts across other identity category lines, so I had conversations with people I might not have met in my usual social paths. The conversations may have been casual, but the fact that they stuck in my brain indicates how stratified my social paths are these days; the older I get, the more I can predict exactly what kinds of people I'm going to meet unless I make some effort to branch out a bit. (And that's a subject for another post.)
Many of the people I saw regularly in Uncle Joe's, I've never seen again, even though we have a new gay bar in town, just a few blocks away. In the eight-year gap between one and the other they must have found some other place to serve as a social nexus. But that's puzzling. So I ask myself what I did when there was no local gay bar: what purpose did Uncle Joe's serve for me, and do I no longer have those needs? Because, truthfully, I myself don't got the new bar very often, even though it's very friendly and nice. Apparently, this type of public space doesn't work for me anymore, perhaps because my connections with the Radical Faeries have created a substitute community that's more nourishing and meaningful to me.
When I would go to Uncle Joe's, I could sit there quietly at the bar, not necessarily be at the top of my game, and maybe have some casual conversations with the bartender or other people sitting there. The more I went, the easier it was to have those casual interactions, because familiarity adds ease -- you don't have to know anything much about the person sitting at the bar, just that his continued presence there means he's accepted the social contract of that space. And of course it was usually a "he," which is important because men occupy public space differently than women do. Men are really comfortable going to a bar by themselves; women aren't. Men feel entitled to sit there as long as they want, to drink slowly or fast, to talk or not to talk. But I always went with my girlfriend anyway, so that wasn't quite such an issue. Uncle Joe's was a bar for everyone, but it was still mostly men, like many "mixed" spaces tend to be.
Going to Uncle Joe's was sometimes just a relief, of course -- a place to have a beer and not get hassled, a place to watch people pursuing whatever they were pursuing, while not necessarily taking part. You could go there without a particular purpose, even though it's always problematic to be excluded from the sexual economy of a social space (doubly excluded when you're both in a monogamous relationship, and a woman in a male-dominated space). The sexual economy of any gathering space is always such an important line of energy that to be removed from it is to participate less than fully, not to be your whole self. That's a conundrum I've never figured out: it's not about what you actually do or don't do, it's about what you've ruled out in advance. Having made a decision not to participate sexually changes one's entire relationship with a given community, yet not in a way that is ever openly articulated. I know very few monogamous gay men, so it's my experience that this is far more an issue for lesbians -- and I know very few lesbians in long-term committed relationships who've managed the polyamorous balancing act successfully. (Is it my age? Are younger lesbians managing it better? I hope so.)
Maybe that's what's interesting about public space: a place like Uncle Joe's exists, and you choose to go there because that decision also enables you to choose which parts of yourself you want to bring to the table. Maybe it's your sexual self, maybe it's your neighborhood self, or your community organizing self, or your bitter old queen who wants to talk about movies self. Maybe you want to remind yourself every now and again that you are indeed capable of talking about the weather or telling jokes or just shooting the breeze. But public space is not the same thing as community, because there's no pressure to bring the rest of yourself: you can always opt out, you're never obligated, or invested. Sure, I've watched Last Call at Maud's and seen the way a bar could in the past be an actual focal point for a real community of dykes, but I've never myself experienced that, and anyway, that movie was precisely about the demise of that scene. At this point in my life, I need more, I need real community, and so I give the bar a miss. But public space always has that tantalizing potential to coalesce into something more: the Cedar Tavern, Maud's, the place where the right people meet each other and start some fabulous project. Maybe I should give it another try, and bring my most creative self to the barstool.
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