Historically, gay bars were the only spaces where queer people could be visible, as if that visibility could exist only within the imagined. Now it seems that reality outside the bar is so grim that people would rather preserve this fantasy, not just out of safety but as an emotional necessity.
—Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, 2017
It’s starting to smell like penis in here.… His words hovered in the claggy dark. The other men laughed soundlessly. I couldn’t be sure how I’d arrived in their circle. The room had become crowded like a bumper car rink, until I was no longer steering but carried along by collisions. I must have willed this, really. Still I hadn’t discerned how these men formed one group. Their bodies circumscribed a turf, as on a playground or prison yard. If I’d encountered their type someplace else, I’d be averting eyes and stammering. I still was, but they not only sniggered, they touched me.
That is a ripe arse you have, man, the youngest and blondest had remarked in a maybe Irish accent. Whether or not I deserved the compliment, I would take it. I’d manifest the ass he desired. I would do so by tensing it slightly. I’ll have a piece of that, or you’ll suck me, the blond continued, pushing me to my knees as he and the others closed in. Someone else commanded, G’on—suck it, you’ll like it, it’s the biggest one here, like a benevolent bully. Then with a kind of brutal elegance, the group spread apart like the blades of a pocketknife.
That’s when: It’s starting to smell like penis in here.…The voice was at once queeny and thuggish, the line nearly sung, a lewd here we go again…trailing off as he moved away, leaving me on my knees to the blond. The room did smell of penis, maybe. Like fog machine or nitrites, syrupy lager spilling over thick fists, smoker’s breath, someone’s citrusy cologne, the bleached vinyl seats. It reeked of toxic masculinity. It stank of the clammy skin of white Englishmen, which is like wet laundry hanging to dry without wind. Overhead, passing trains shook the black ceiling. The rumble disturbed the black partition that bisected the room at a diagonal, a false horizon promising someone better just out of reach.
The night’s men-only rule was proclaimed on a printout along with the name of the event, Brüt, in a tool-kit typeface connoting a narrow definition of gender. The men skulked in trackies, inhabiting or playacting working-class bodies. I thought then I had better not speak. My accent is too equivocal, scuppered somewhere on the Atlantic and apologizing. The point here was to be regular. The only distinguishing feature should be an erection the size of a Sky+ remote control. The haircuts were skinhead or fade. Leather daddies were present, but the group I’d fallen in with wore the uniform of rough council estates: polo shirt with collar popped, white trainers, white cap. It crossed my mind I was playing with men who emulated porn actors pretending to be rough trade.
I saw these men as being in their domain, depraved and sketchy, whereas I was just passing through. Then again, I understood I’m the company I keep: a man over forty with a Friday night hard-on, passing as desirable in the dark. I didn’t end up here out of loneliness. I’d arrived with my companion, the Famous Blue Raincoat. We’ve been domestic for years. ‘It may seem difficult to understand why two men who are happy with each other will take the risk of going to these places where the whole atmosphere of the group will tend to drive them apart,’ wrote Gordon Westwood—a pseudonym—in his 1952 book Society and the Homosexual. It was the author’s hunch there was no other spot for these coupled men to rendezvous. To the homosexuals, ‘in a pathetic kind of way this place is their home.’
But that was another era. I hadn’t been driven to The Bar by society’s lack of understanding. Throughout the twentieth century, London pubs, cafés and clubs would be taken over—‘selected’ as Westwood put it—by a homosexual clientele. The unofficial meeting places could be so discreet most other customers wouldn’t notice, and occasionally so brazen an orchestra would strike up a tribute when an attractive male entered the room. Proto-gays were segregated by class as much as anything else, sticking to the exclusive cellar bar at the Ritz on the one hand or an East End boozer on the other—or, in the case of privileged men in pursuit of a bit of rough, moving from the former to the latter. In this diffuse network of commercial spaces, the clientele might be tolerated to various degrees because it brought business. (Matt Houlbrook, an authority on London queer history, figures: ‘The pink shilling was a potentially lucrative market, and men’s demand for a “home” always ripe for exploitation.’) Now we were being elaborately catered to: The Bar was designed for a demographic of masc-presenting homo satyrs.
The steel and brick and the exposed, girthy pipes declared this as manly terrain. The hint of disco in the DJ’s mix got me thinking about Andrew Holleran’s 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance, in which hedonistic gays haunt Manhattan’s derelict warehouses, abandoned factories and dilapidated piers. ‘We were ghosts,’ the narrator says. In 1918, the British war poet Wilfred Owen wrote of loitering along the wharves on the River Thames, where ‘I am the shadow that walks there.’ The final line—‘I with another ghost am lain’—could reference troops in the trenches, but really must mean horny men who move that way to this day, as phantoms, with that slow walking, the opposite of rush-hour commuters who dart quickly but attempt to avoid collision. The cruiser ambles in pursuit of contact. It’s a saunter that wills a larger terrain, populated by more attractive men. I’d determined myself into that pace. I had not gone upstairs to be anything but another ghost.
We go out to get some. On certain evenings Famous and I intuit we’re going to end up in such a place without the need for discussion. We go out because we’re thirsty. We go out to return to the thrill of the chase. We want to be in a room full of penises wherein each contains the strong possibility that it is, to use the old-fashioned queer initialism, tbh—to be had. That phrase looks forward to fondly looking back, all about the conquest and bragging about it later. But I could be at home, thumbing through a grid of tbh torsos on my phone. We go out for the aroma. Some nights just smell like trouble. The city at dusk carries the scent of all its citizens commingled. We head out on the dopamine. There are nights that have an audible pulse, so we dance.
I thought then of two lines from Paul Verlaine: ‘I dance to save myself, and find / Swimming in sweat, it’s in our common breath I fly.’ We were not dancing, exactly, but the DJ was building up propulsive tracks, throbbing and hissing. I turned my cap backwards so the brim wouldn’t impede my access to the blond’s full shaft. I wanted my snout buried as much as anything else to prove my commitment to the scene. His pale foreskin was pulled back. The penis had been overhyped, but I decided still it was lovely. It was pleased with itself, like a toddler standing proudly at a scene of destruction. I plunged onto him, the decision to do so lagging behind the act. I reached to one side toward an onlooker, thinking: why not roll with this and grab a random dick. I touched something like a rubbery cauliflower. Its owner swatted my hand away. I left the voyeur to whatever that was: eccentric prosthesis or zealous case of HPV. He’d be happy enough just watching. Then the blond lad was yanking me toward the cubicles, and one of his mates fell in line.
In turn, I grabbed Famous, who pulled up his waistband and grinned as he joined us, abandoning unknown paramours. I got him those trackies—boys’ size 13–14 he’s so skinny. We formed a chain like kids on a field trip. Then, four in the box, we made a sight to peep from the glory holes, pressing together and kissing like an onanistic king rat. Other limbs tried to force the door ajar, as the blond shoved it closed with his forearm. When men barricade in a dark room, it turns certain other contenders into zombies. You’re never sure which ones they are, because they lay in wait until your consummation begins. Then, out of sight lines, they try to wedge their way in, to prize open doors, pound on them.
Suddenly, the blond lad pulled back and stumbled out, muttering either need a cigarette or not feeling it. It was brighter in the cubicle, and the light must have disabused him of the impression of me as one archetypal thing. His mate was unamused: What th’ FUCK, the fuck ya goin’? The blond moved across the corridor crabwise past men who leaned against walls with flat palms as if load-bearing. He was shaking his head in the inebriate way that indicates an aversion to listening.
Downstairs, near the bar, a couple of younger guys actually danced. A wryness tugged at their lips. One had brown skin. A tall figure in high heels swayed near the DJ, as if they’d walked from the nonbinary present day into a clone scene from the seventies—checked their pronoun at the cloakroom, hoping the bouncers wouldn’t look down at their feet. For over a century, policing queer sites entailed the persecution of the effeminate, the screamers—in powder and perfume, perched on a knee, calling one another girl or queen. After the late thirties, the monitoring of London venues shifted from surveying the people inside to targeting the premises, so that a landlord could be accused of keeping a disorderly house if he was host to gender deviance. Masculine—normal—men with stealthy predilections could be invisible and thereby beyond the law. Properly behaved places were left alone. This encouraged what Matt Houlbrook describes as a collusion between proprietors and patrons ‘to construct a queer consumer who was not obviously queer.’ At The Bar, masculinity had been twisted into something perverted, yet still functioned to banish effeminacy. We were now self-policing—and frankly that contributed to the arousal. But I for one was pleased to see those high heels slip through.
* * *
The Bar had been trading less than a year. When it opened in 2017, everyone said gay bars were doomed. (Financial Times: ‘The party is coming to an end.’) More than half in London had folded within ten years. This was blamed on property developers, apps, assimilation. In Britain, the steep decline came not long after civil partnerships were introduced in 2005. When same-sex marriage was legalized in New York in 2011, the journalist June Thomas wrote, ‘I can’t help wondering whether, as gay rights move forward, the gay bar—the place where it all began—may get left behind.’
The name of a gay bar, Stonewall, provides the metonym for gay liberation. It figures the place was a dump. The Stonewall Inn, like other gay bars, was mafia-owned, selling watered-down drinks to a clientele of both the furtive and the flagrant. The 1969 uprising against police raids there—the fabled brick crashing through the window—makes a fabulous origin myth. But gays had been acting up in their chosen watering holes and all-night cafeterias for years. Just around the block from the Stonewall Inn is Julius’—where, three years before the Stonewall rebellion, a trio of activists drew attention to exclusion by pronouncing their homosexuality to the guy working the bar. He took his cue to turn them away. An image of the bartender placing his hand over a glass was snapped by photographer Fred W. McDarrah. This raffish provocation—a sip-in—marked a step toward establishing the right of gays to assemble in the state. Younger-generation gays stand on the shoulders of such insurgent bar patrons, but we form a precarious pyramid. We’re shaky on details, partly down to the booze. Certain pivotal events come across as staged: when the New York Times covered the sip-in, the headline was ‘3 Deviates Invite Exclusion by Bars’ with the subhead ‘But They Visit Four Before Being Refused Service.…’
Now our turf was under threat not so much by police, but a juncture of economic factors like unchecked property speculation and an upsurge in stay-at-home gays. I responded to the closures with an automatic, nearly filial sense of loss, followed by profound ambivalence. The gay bars of my life have consistently disappointed. Activists claim they should be kept open to facilitate knowledge passing between generations. Had I ever received wisdom on a barstool? Not really. Instead, I recalled a dive in Los Angeles that I’d timidly entered in my youth, only to be told You’re too good for this place. The gentleman rested his hand on my thigh with an infuriating lack of intent. Not long ago I looked that bar up online, and read a pundit’s one-star review complaining that the crowd there groped him when all he wanted was to celebrate New Year’s Eve with his wife and friends (‘all Heteros,’ as he wrote). ‘I certainly don’t expect to have my physical space violated just because I may choose to party in a gay area,’ he asserted. I thought: to be violated was my expectation back when I ventured in.
Perhaps the bars were only ever meant to be a transitional phase. When a BBC article queried ‘Do gay people still need gay bars?,’ I wondered which people and what places. It’s been proposed that in less liberal countries the advent of gay bars will be eclipsed by hookup apps. Was the BBC talking about those citizens? About lesbians, who barely had any places left anywhere, or young queers who anyway tend to prefer roving parties that reflect their fluidity? Was the BBC talking about me? I had to consider whether gay bars promised a sense of belonging then lured us into a trap. In a gay bar, am I penned into minority status, swallowing drinks that nourish my oppression—have gay bars kept me in my place?
The BBC could just as well have asked ‘Do gay bars still need gay people?’ Straight drinkers now blithely invade our territory like the gaggle of sloppy strangers who show up at the end of a house party. The New York Times put it this way: ‘How “Gay” Should a Gay Bar Be?’ The article discussed another spot I used to know in West Hollywood, where it eventually got to the point that every table was booked by bachelorette parties; the owner placed a moratorium on their presence until gay marriage legislation passed. When that happened federally in 2015, and the gals piled back in to take group photos with the go-go hunks, the management opened an adjacent space devoted to a clientele of actual gay men.
‘What are they doing at the hall of the outcasts on this night?’ wrote Donald Webster Cory—another pseudonym—back in his 1951 book The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach. ‘Did they arrive by accident, or have they friends or brothers here, or are they among those rare souls who especially enjoy the company of gay folk, although they are not themselves gay? Or perhaps, are they thrill-seekers and slummers who have merely looked in upon another world?’ We’d since been outnumbered: more fag hags than fags. The misogynistic old trope of a lonely heart attached to sexual criminals out of compatible ostracization had been replaced by one of basic bitches latching on because the gays turned out to be winners. They’d shove me out of their way and cry yasss. When Famous and I returned after many years to a rustic gay saloon in the woods of northern California, a bartender approached midway through our first Lagunitas. I want to thank you for coming, he said. And for being, I presume, gay. Not sure how to respond, I tried: You, too. He continued, It’s changing here, now that ‘gay is accepted.’ A bar rag hung from his air quote. Weekends all you’ll see is bachelorette parties. I nodded. Frankly, it was better when we were unacceptable, he said ominously.
And yet: in 2017, a poll revealed homophobic attacks in the UK had surged eighty percent in the previous four years. In the States, the year 2016 marked the most violence against gays ever recorded, even without the forty-nine casualties at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. A Vanity Fair article on the tragedy was headlined ‘Mass Murder at the Gay Bar: When a Refuge Becomes the Target.’ The journalist Dave Cullen began by disclosing his position. After publishing a book on the school massacre at Columbine, he’d become a go-to consultant every time a mass shooting occurred. ‘And then, when my part is over, I need a drink. I’m gay, so that means a gay bar,’ he wrote. I recognize myself in that line—and how what seems obvious to him (and to me) may need pointing out to readers who’ve never frequented such a place. He declares an affiliation—leading me to wonder why it is that certain of us don’t hesitate to regard the gay bar as our natural terrain.
If the habitat—the gay bar—faces extinction, the possibility arises that gay identity is an endangered species. I’m talking about gay rimmed in lightbulbs, GAY shouted in all caps, G-A-Y spelled out like the namesake of the British nightclub chain. To many, that’s nothing worth preserving. But, confronted with the husks of gay bars on city streets, I found myself increasingly in support of that brand of gay—as in blatant, an embarrassment, a blight. I’ve found myself drawn back to the ghetto, where groups of gay men converge to lick one another’s wounds, or pour salt on them, and in other ways behave inappropriately. If my experiences in gay bars have been disappointing, what I wouldn’t want to lose is the expectation of a better night. Gay is an identity of longing, and there is a wistfulness to beholding it in the form of a building, like how the sight of a theater stirs the imagination.
The closing gay bars had me thinking about the finitude of gay. The American activist Harry Britt once said, ‘When gays are spatially scattered, they are not gay, because they are invisible.’ The question becomes whether that dissolution of identity is the ultimate civil rights achievement. By 2018, an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz declared, ‘Being Gay Is Passé.’ A few years prior, one poll showed half of young people in Britain were identifying as not completely hetero, with most of those placing themselves in a nonbinary area on a scale of sexuality. So, not completely gay. I came across a statement online by a woke young person expressing his consternation that cis gay males remained the most culturally validated type of queer. He himself identified as a gay man—but as much as anything, he clarified, as a reminder of his privilege. I questioned how I would speak with him about his daddies if given the chance—they were far from perfect, some outright villainous, but they’d been through it. And they aren’t a monolith. I struggled with how we could reframe the narrative when we were each trepidatious about the word gay, yet both still inclined to use it. The identity, foisted upon me since the days when other boys in my scout troop noticed my bubbly handwriting, had come to have a faded quality. I considered I might have Stockholm syndrome for the epithet. But more and more I heard myself defaulting to queer, somehow both theoretically radical and appropriate in polite company. The word gay was intoned like a joke or an elegy.
Then in London a handful of new venues popped up, often not gay bars but queer spaces. Many folded in no time. Itinerant parties were a more feasible or cooler option (a return to the peripatetic socializing of London before gay bars, when homos assembled at whichever spot was in favor). Sober nights were tried out as a thing. Events were developed for trans, femmes and womxn of color. There, inclusivity might not mean everybody. It could indicate the rest of us. Inclusivity could be enforced by a strict door policy, raising the question of how identity is legible—how to differentiate, for example, a questioning person from a voyeur. Some parties issued charters that proscribed judging and patriarchy, as well as groping and leching—all of the stuff encrusted like grime in the gay bars I’d known.
* * *
The Bar was a throwback—randy and problematic. At a glance, the homo- prefix meant not just same sex but same gender, race, class. It seemed to me it was not only the dominant demographic of white men that hearkened to an earlier time, but the propensity for barebacking. The club opened on the brink of the distribution of PrEP. (Patrick Califia predicted in 1998: ‘When there is a vaccine or an effective treatment or, please Goddess, both, some will return to pre-AIDS sexual behavior. And that’s as it should be. Because there was nothing wrong with that behavior in the first place.’) England’s National Health Service enrolled ten thousand people on a PrEP trial starting in the autumn. Promiscuous gays seemed to think they got their magic bullet, and apparently then all went to The Bar.
It was in Vauxhall, just south of the River Thames, having taken the space over from a hip-hop club shut with ignominy after a series of violent incidents, culminating in the death of an aspiring pilot after being held down by the bouncers. By contrast, The Bar’s application for a late license played the gay card, brandishing words like community, cabaret, eclectic, diverse. A member of the House of Lords wrote a letter of support in which he elucidated the need for safe spaces—a term entered into the Merriam-Webster dictionary that year. The letter alluded to the dangers associated with meeting strangers online, suggesting that gay bars facilitate a vetting and self-monitoring among members of a community. The year before, the Old Bailey had handed down life imprisonment to a serial killer who drugged, raped and murdered four young men whom he’d met on apps.
In actuality, the place turned out to be, if by no means unfriendly, not exactly what the term safe space brings to mind. Whatt’ya need a Viagra for, an ursine bartender grumbled to a bouncing young man fiendishly trying to secure a pill. You kids today, he added kindly, as the boy began to totter and sway. The place offered that kind of camaraderie—a gruff maternalism simultaneously defaulting to certain Vauxhall stereotypes: masculinist, debauched, dodgy. Vauxhall was saddled with a reputation in the aughts as a destination for those with a death wish—heavy drug users and bug-chasers, the bad seeds of the gay populace. The risk taking seemed to have been sublimated into a risky aesthetic. Crossing the empty dance floor at The Bar, Famous and I were once stopped by a manager and asked to present more fetishistically. Famous shrugged and took off his t-shirt. I winced and pulled mine over my shoulders like a harness. That’ll do, the man said.
Our first time there, it was just before Christmas. We’d been down the street at the Eagle London watching yuletide Golden Girls episodes. The Eagle too once had a dark room and sold poppers, but after someone collapsed naked on the dance floor, it cleaned up its act—planted ivy on the roof and began hosting vegan barbecues. The Eagle is part of an informal network of leather bars going by the same name in several different cities—at its peak, there were some fifty in the convocation. Since its makeover, the London iteration had become a spot for healthy-looking men with neat beards and t-shirts with social media slogans (#mascfag)—the type Famous and I call happy gays. But on this night, there was hardly anyone there, just a couple of nicotine-stained men and their bosomy friend hacking over Sophia’s insults and Blanche’s side-eye. The beer went down cold in the empty room. Gay bars can be festive—a bunch of bears singing along to ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’ (On Christmas day of the previous year, Famous and I found ourselves at another Eagle, in Los Angeles, dancing to George Michael songs just hours after it was announced the singer was dead.)
Having had our fill of Rose’s idioms, we thought we’d walk to The Bar, a new cruise club in the arches I’d seen listed in XY. It was barren there, too. A brawny little Polish guy made out with us briefly, then declared he preferred one-on-one, also noting that the scene paled in comparison with that of Berlin. We wound up giving head to a man who told us it was his birthday and that he didn’t want to blow his load—he’d been edging for days—but we finished him off, bringing his party to a fizzle. Because he was pockmarked with big feet, I’d perceived him as brutish. But, awkwardly waiting next to him at coat check, I clocked his outerwear, a practical navy number from Michael Kors, and any such delusion faded.
On subsequent visits, there was far more action. For a time, Famous and I found The Bar made a suitable last resort. I’d bite a blue pill, and we’d each wash half down with the lager that came with the door fee. On a good night, each gesture and grab, even chortle or rejection, enhanced a cumulative fever. Men sat side by side along the edge of the room in a lustful stupor. Certain duos or threesomes drew a crowd who circled to watch intently as if it were blood sports. Guys in jockstraps positioned themselves on all fours on the benches. One had FUCK THIS with an arrow written on his ass cheeks. I held on to the thick chain around the long neck of a greedy lad who tongued my face like a lizard; the next time I was there, he did the same thing again. More than once, a man followed Famous and glowered when I came into proximity. Men inhaled poppers, some while genuflecting at my erection, and I was flattered by their thrall. A twink begged me to finish in his gaping mouth as I kissed another man. I glanced down; the boy looked polite, the type to be well liked and reliable in the office. He crouched like a gargoyle on haunches, then slipped down to his knees. After splattering onto him, I was compelled to disregard him immediately, sensing that must be what he wanted. As Michel Foucault put it, ‘You meet men there who are to you as you are to them: nothing but a body with which combinations and productions of pleasure are possible. You cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity.’
I’d rouse myself from the reverie of getting blown by a dubious-looking lover with talented lips, in order to keep an eye out that Famous wasn’t doing anything I wouldn’t do, or moreover wasn’t involved in something better than what I ended up with. I’d push off the two middle-management types burrowed into my armpits, alternating drags of my stink with nitrite hits, and make my way, parting voyeurs, toward Famous and the lithe brown-haired lad whom he tentatively caressed. My final time there before the bar shut for good, I topped a lout in a cubicle who wanted me to finish inside him. I could tell he was unconcerned about whether I was wearing a rubber, and may have preferred if I wasn’t. I was, but had rolled it on so hastily it was more like a beanie atop my glans than a sheath. Come in me, he panted, probably amped on PrEP. Bored, I pretended to finish. As we left the cubicle, he laughed heartily with his mate, who, I now realized, had been peeping from next door.
One night as we approached, Famous and I encountered a young man befuddled at the back door. I was aware the venue alternated that entrance in the alley with a street-facing one; I muttered as much and we all walked around, at a distance, to the other side. He was tall and towheaded, looked Swiss or at least like a scion who’s inherited his father’s Swiss watch: upright, careful, well bred. An hour or so later, in the scrum upstairs, I caught sight of the young man watching some fucking. He hadn’t come to the wrong place, after all. I moved closer to him. He took off an ordinary sweater to reveal a leather harness across his fluffy blond chest. I began to kiss him, grabbing onto the straps. I slipped my hand down his unbuttoned fly, but had no access; his crotch was a smooth leather mound. The harness, I realized, extended into a chastity contraption, so that there was no way he could get fully erect beneath. His pleasure was distinctly not about his penis; or rather it totally was but in a theoretical way. Its containment drew attention to the everything else of his body; it made him into a whole, not just a setting for the phallus. Soon I found my face in his pit, ripe and wet. It was grassy, wild and vast—a savannah. He grinned. We’d exchanged an intimacy I never would have anticipated on the street. I passed him to Famous who inhaled the blueblood deeply. Another time, in the toilets downstairs, Famous and I found ourselves burrowed into either armpit of a short brunette. His aroma was bituminous and sweet. He grinned and told us he was celebrating his thirtieth birthday. Thank you, boys, he sang as he drifted away, with the familiar timbre of a dirty-minded twink.
In each case, the encounter was something more or other than maschalagnia—it was tender. Roland Barthes proposed that a touch of sentimentality might be the ultimate transgression: ‘the transgression of transgression.’ I experienced for those boys a genuine fondness. I nestled into that place that causes embarrassment daily, that is rebuffed with antiperspirant, where we confess our passion and fret as it deliquesces, where we check for malignant lumps, where we years ago discovered puberty and marveled at what sort of men we might be.
* * *
Maybe it’s borrowed nostalgia, but to me the destination of Vauxhall still promises seediness. Vauxhall lies in the shadow of the hulking MI6 headquarters; the building blocks the view of the river. Its architecture is intimidating yet goofy, influenced not just by local industrial edifices from the thirties, but Aztec and Mayan temples. Like the men around here, it’s a little too much and gives itself away. The neighborhood is being encroached by development to the west, including the new American embassy. The cranes and glassy high rises hover like chaperones. Vauxhall is for passing through. Cars rush by after crossing the river. The bus station is sheltered by a cantilevered split roof sticking into the air like a pair of skis. Trains pass above every few minutes on the brick viaduct.
The Bar occupied one of the railway arches, flanked by a sauna and another nightclub. The first time we exited, through the back door in the wee hours, a member of staff called out, Come again. I found myself announcing I might apply for a job. Come see us in the new year, he hollered cheerily. But the place required the presence of beings more definitive—bartenders with nipples that protrude like duckbills, poking from tight black t-shirts, men built like chesterfields. I could never be a part of that furniture. Outside, the air smelled faintly of garbage, and I detected the whiff of stale jacuzzi from the sauna next door. A pipe spilled chlorinated water. The brickwork had grown mossy down the length of its trajectory, like a viridescent trail to adventure on the building’s belly. It seemed at once sad and to muster a kind of comical hope. I thought of the essay by the artist Robert Smithson in which he portrays a great pipe on a riverbank as ‘secretly sodomizing.’ This one was jerking off. It probably actually was leaking semen into the alley.
The sauna was the last remaining in what was once a group of four. When this location opened in 2006, a Starbucks followed nearby soon after. The way the urban scholar Johan Andersson saw it, the businesses did not represent competing visions but neoliberal neighbors: ‘Rather than being “pushed” out by gentrification, public sex has been commercialised and incorporated into the high street as yet another chain branch.’ The former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is credited for popularizing the sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s term third place, a social spot between home and work. In free market terms, there may be no reason to distinguish coffeehouse from gay bathhouse, to monitor what people want from their steam.
In total, the viaduct is two miles long, comprising eighty million bricks and nearly three hundred arches. There have been other raunchy clubs and cheesy bars in these arches, though more and more have gone out of business. The Portuguese family restaurants seem to persevere. A small theater puts on gay plays. A neon sign in a handwritten script mounted over one pedestrian tunnel reads Pleasure, a frivolous play on the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, which once sprawled across this terrain.
When the viaduct was constructed in 1848, it was designed to circumvent those renowned grounds, at one time the top visitor attraction in England, but by that point becoming lusterless and verging on closure. From the late seventeenth century, the shaded land was said to harbor strumpets and other deviants. Over time, the gardens were made reputable and illuminated at nightfall by oil lamps ignited ceremoniously. Still, rustlings from the penumbra continued to arouse suspicion. The avenue Druid’s Walk—or Lover’s Walk—remained unlit. Disused boats swayed from tree branches, occupied by men who nestled there to smoke. Among the boughs, a series of roofed arbors, some adapted from old coaches, provided nooks for assignations. They had names like pubs—the Royal George, Checker, King’s Head. The gardens were reputed to be rife with dandies and queers. Princess Seraphina, named John Cooper at birth, was known to have attended the Ridotto al Fresco ball in June 1732, the same night one waiter became so drunk he excited himself into a gown. Though Lover’s Walk was finally under lamplight by the late eighteenth century, it intersected another avenue at the gardens’ far edge. This was known as Dark Walk, an unlit stretch giving shelter to the concupiscent. In the novel Vanity Fair, Thackeray alludes to the terrain in plural: ‘the dark walks, so favourable to the interviews of young lovers.’
The gardens have since been reduced to a manicured, undulating public green. It’s pleasant enough. There’s a basketball court. Joggers circulate. At lunchtime, office workers stroll the paths. A man might hold my eye contact briefly—very different from the carnivorous stares inside the clubs.
My personal favorite Vauxhall monument must be—on a traffic island in the busy intersection where the bus and train stations meet—a concrete and metal pissoir, brutalist in style, with a sign that reads Urinal in the trustworthy Transport for London typeface. It’s a very British architecture. It just stands there, dour, gray, with that blunt word in the sky, calling to mind a nineteenth-century neologism: first Urning in German, coined by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in his bold and iffy hypothesis of a third sex—basically, a male body with a female sex drive—then adopted by Victorian emancipators as Uranian, mythical code word for comradely love.
Public toilets have been repurposed for homosexual encounters to the extent of requiring new descriptors: tea room in America or cottage in Britain. In London, various architectural defenses—brighter lights, partitions—have been implemented to deter frisky goings-on. In the case of this Vauxhall pissoir, it is the notably open design—no doors and a trough only semiconcealed by low walls—that foils untoward activity. Even a wayward glance would be conspicuous. (Foucault: ‘visibility is a trap.’)
In 1937, the publishing firm Routledge brought out For Your Convenience, a little green book later posited as the original gay city guide; it is ostensibly an overheard conversation in a private gentleman’s club regarding how to follow drainage routes in order to cruise for sex. The design is replete with an illustrated map of central London public toilets as endpaper. In his book Queer London, Matt Houlbrook postulates how an association with degraded places helped construct homosexual identity as filthy: ‘notions of the queer’s character were derived from the nature of that site at which he was most often arrested.’ In 1954, one police constable testified: ‘I think they get a great deal of satisfaction from the chase, shall I call it, the chase. These urinals have got a certain odor inside them, staleness, and it does excite them, there is no doubt about it.’ Scrubbed clean, he declared, they stayed away, until the antiseptic aroma wore off and once again ‘you can see these people definitely working themselves up into a frenzy inside, and once they are on heat, that is the way to describe it, it is like the bitch, once they have the scent there is no holding them, they are oblivious to everything else.’
In 1985, Vauxhall’s liberal local council decreed a ten-minute maximum for police officers in public lavatories. The Sun headline: ‘Lefties to “Clock” Cops in the Loo!’ The new law attempted to put an end to the decades-long tradition of assigning so-called pretty police to London toilets with the intention of ensnaring insatiable homos. With the change in law, attendants became responsible for reporting any cop who prolonged their visit.
* * *
There’s another pissoir, on the pavement beside the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. This one waits dormant underground until rising to street level vampirically at dusk. It stands embarrassingly close to the picnic tables at which chummy pubgoers sit smoking. The regular crowd at the RVT comprises cuddly bears in checked flannels, weedy bespectacled types, dykes with facial piercings. The RVT is in many ways the opposite of the sketchy scene at The Bar across the alley. Everyone here looks like they were in drama as a teenager, maybe as members of stage crew.
If I were to picture the last gay bar standing, it might look like the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. The building is uniquely isolated, as if on a corner without streets: It was built as the vertex of two Victorian terraces, and when the vicinal houses were knocked down in the seventies, only the pub remained, which explains its distinctive wedge shape; it looks like a slice of a cake. The RVT was built in the years after the pleasure gardens ceased operations in 1859, along what had been its western edge. Throughout the barroom are six cast-iron pillars with Corinthian capitals, and another half dozen line the pub’s bowed facade. The columns are thought to have been purchased at auction from the gardens, which would make them the only known material relics of that famed site to subsist locally. A curving bar once snaked alongside these posts, doubling as a catwalk for twiggy drag artists lip-syncing to bubblegum pop. (One act by a swinging sixties type climaxed with the popping of her balloon-pregnant belly against a column.) The serpentine bar was later removed but the columns remain, still swung from by performers during barnstormers like ‘Survivor’ or ‘It’s Not Right but It’s Okay.’
These columns, and the queens wrapped around them, won the pub a Grade II listing from Historic England in 2015, the first instance of a public site achieving this status based largely on its queer history. The RVT came out as a gay bar gradually: after the Second World War, the clientele combined returning servicemen and local homosexuals. Truck drivers and market traders sat in their own section behind engraved glass. It’s held to be among the oldest gay pubs in the country, that way inclined since at least 1950. I would have thought its historical listing to be a fait accompli; there are Grade II listed phone booths in this country. Enough time has passed that gay bars, once a scourge, have become monumental in their own way. But their vastly undocumented history requires transcribing. As the critic Ben Walters wrote in the building’s listing application, the queer archive is ‘fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps.’
Gay history tends to make an antagonist of authority. In January 1987, thirty-five police officers raided the RVT. One burst into the dressing room of the preening drag queen Lily Savage, who took him for a stripper. Eleven people were arrested, essentially for being drunk at a pub. The cops wore surgical rubber gloves, contending it was a precaution over the threat of contracting AIDS or hepatitis B by way of a needle (the cops being squeamish about the blood they were prepared to shed), as well as protection against the spillage of amyl nitrite. But it’s said that on that night nobody was actually searched for drugs. ‘Instead,’ as Ben Walters has written, ‘the gloves seemed like a perfect symbol of oppressive marginalization, speaking to a deep-seated abhorrence of queer bodies.’ He adds: ‘But they also had tremendous camp value, looking rather prissy in themselves and being just a dash of poetic license away from the rubber gloves used for washing-up—a classic accessory of feminized domesticity.’
Onstage a few nights later, the drag queen Adrella brought forth a container of fake blood. She suggested that if it came to it, the gay men in the audience could squirt it onto their skin to put a scare into fearful cops. This was met with hearty laughter—tiny release amid a crisis. Every day, another friend was diagnosed or succumbed. The pub was hosting funerals. Gay men, recently identified as the most affluent minority in the nation, were more visible but no more popular. They were endangered not only by the virus but vigilantes, not just by the police but Members of Parliament.
The listing of the pub was orchestrated by a scrappy cohort of customers, event promoters and performers who called themselves RVT Future. They were strategic in making their case by imbuing the bar with an almost traditionalist sense of value. Tales that play off the royal in the pub’s name were accentuated, namely the legend that Princess Diana was once there. The perhaps tenuous connections to the historical pleasure gardens were convincingly underscored. They found a champion in not just the swish actor Sir Ian McKellen but in Boris Johnson, then the mayor of London. Their mission expressly did not have the support of the pub’s managing director or the building’s owner, an Austrian company that specializes in converting historical properties into luxury accommodation. The company launched its own petition in opposition to the listing, which campaigners decried as an example of astroturfing, as in fake grass roots. Subsequent to the successful Grade II listing, the pub’s clearly annoyed managing director updated his bio on the RVT website to include a line about how the place now operates under ‘onerous restrictions.’
For the campaigners, preservation was a political statement, a way of archiving gay history in the form of a building. It was activism by way of paperwork, putting in mind the critic Gayle Rubin’s proposal of queering bureaucracy. Rubin admits that bureaucracy lacks glamour and charisma, and that queers are prone to live for the moment. But: ‘momentary excitements are intrinsically fragile, evanescent, and unstable. Part of the reason for our impaired memory of the older strata of queer knowledges is that the institutions and organizations that produced them are gone. Queer life is full of examples of fabulous explosions that left little or no detectable trace.’ The question is whether the spark is extinguished when an official story is made of the blast.
* * *
In 2017, the British establishment was ready to institutionalize the subculture as heritage: queerness was a national treasure. The year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which partially decriminalized sex between men in England and Wales. Commemoration was widespread. It seemed that employees and volunteers of nearly every major institution were being issued rainbow lanyards. Around the necks of old codgers and pimply teenagers, this lent a respectively woebegone or awkward effect.
The normally fusty National Trust re-created a place called the Caravan club. The original, on Endell Street in London’s West End, was only open for around six weeks, in July and August 1934, in the basement of a building notorious for prostitution and gambling. A card circulated, full of genteelisms: ‘London’s Greatest Bohemian Rendezvous…said to be the most unconventional spot in town…ALL NIGHT GAIETY.’ During its brief existence, hundreds of people from disparate social strata became members. After the commissioner of police received an anonymous note calling the Caravan ‘absolutely a sink of iniquity’ that was ‘only frequented by sexual perverts, lesbians and sodomites,’ a sting operation was put into motion. The statements by undercover cops paint a colorful picture. The constables were in agreement that the place was run by a figure called Iron Foot Jack, and that couples in a variety of gender combinations lay about on cushions. Effeminate men, pipe-smoking lesbians and ‘coloured people’ were present. The single bathroom was an oversubscribed destination, with same-sex couples going in for three to twelve minutes at a time, to be asked ‘Was it thrilling’ by their peers upon exit. One man was observed sitting on the toilet blackening another’s eyelashes.
Police Constable Miller detailed how men kissed and fondled, touching one another on the buttocks while passing endearing remarks. PC Bryant testified that one reveler put his right hand on the fly of another man’s trousers. (‘I heard one of them say: “Oh darling.”’) PC Slatterly noted that PC Mortimer dutifully socialized and danced with male prostitutes. The latter reported, ‘Men were dancing together and whilst doing so, paused, and went through the motions of sexual intercourse. Such expressions as “You need not do it anymore, I’ve come” and “Oh you bitch” were freely used.’ The fastidious constable watched two men gyrating together for one hour and eighteen minutes. Mortimer also found himself importuned by a male regular named Josephine, who promised to don turquoise blue the following evening in anticipation of his return.
From under the divans, evidence was collected: An assortment of lipsticks, eyebrow brushes and powder puffs, just beneath where two sailors had been sitting. A knuckle-duster. A used rubber. A slip of paper that read, in part: ‘This certifies that I, the undersigned, a female about to enjoy sexual intercourse with ____________ am above the age of consent, am in my right mind, and not under the influence of any drug or narcotic. I am in no fear of him whatever, do not expect or want to marry him, don’t know whether he is married or not, and don’t care.’ One officer brought the process of collecting evidence into the realm of ritual humiliation when he rubbed blotting paper on the cheeks of men in order to prove they wore rouge.
On the August night the club was raided, dozens were apprehended and twenty-seven eventually brought to criminal court. It was documented that one of them, Cyril de Leon, told the officer in charge: ‘I don’t mind this beastly raid, but I would like to know if you could let me have one of your nice boys to come home with me. I am really rather good.’ When the accused—largely flamboyant men—were brought into trial at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, the media had trouble discerning whether the crowd who’d gathered outside, including porters from the nearby Covent Garden Market, were jeering or cheering them on.
The project of simulating the short-lived nightclub to commemorate the Sexual Offences Act seemed to operate on this thought experiment: if only the Caravan had opened after the law changes of 1967, or if the act had gone through decades earlier—what good, libertine fun everyone would have had at a place like that, without interference from misguided police. In reality, while the Sexual Offences Act represented certain progress, its language was cautionary. At the law’s passage, one of its proponents, the Earl of Arran, spoke: ‘I ask one thing and I ask it earnestly. I ask those who have, as it were, been in bondage and for whom the prison doors are now open to show their thanks by comporting themselves quietly and with dignity. This is no occasion for jubilation; certainly not for celebration. Any form of ostentatious behaviour; now or in the future, any form of public flaunting, would be utterly distasteful and would, I believe, make the sponsors of the Bill regret that they have done what they have done. Homosexuals must continue to remember that while there may be nothing bad in being a homosexual, there is certainly nothing good.’
The act specified the right of two men—never three or more—to be intimate within totally private spaces. This actually reinforced the culpability of men caught publicly, whether in flagrante delicto or in the process of seduction. The exemption of private space privileged wealthier men whose residences were more secluded. Any site was deemed public as soon as a third person was present, and a commercial venue that allowed lewd acts was considered to be a brothel. In other words, the same accusations that shut down the Caravan would have held up after the passing of the act, perhaps more so. It’s been reported that the number of men convicted of gross indecency jumped from four hundred and twenty in 1966, the year before the new laws went into effect, to one thousand seven hundred and eleven in 1974. To my mind, the anniversary celebrations were marked by revisionism, as that equivocal piece of legislation was roundly characterized as emancipatory. In the process, once covert citizens involved with the scene were rendered public personalities. I saw it as a conundrum of whether such subcultures are heritagable at all.
* * *
When I say gay bar, you might picture a salon of effete dandies engaged in witty banter, a lair of brutes in black leather, a pathetic spot on the edge of town flying a lackluster rainbow flag for its sole denizen—one lonely hard drinker. Of course, a gay bar can be all these things and more. Many of us have believed finding a home in such a place meant finding oneself. Late at night, all the men in the room are referred to as boys (Hello, boys, shouts the drag queen) and this approximation of neverland evinces a mind-set of perennial searching.
A gay bar, it will be said, affords refuge. The Latin root refugium positions a refuge as a place to which one flees back—indicating regression, withdrawal and retreat. A gay bar could be seen as the last refuge of those addicted to sex or alcohol, to their own abasement or oblivion. The question arises as to what distinguishes an enclave from a quarantine, and whether either is any longer necessary. The young homos in my South London neighborhood create a parallel universe in mixed company. The blippy alert of an incoming Grindr message in a straight pub punches between worlds. A territory is not conquered, but complicated—revealed to be permeable. (Not to mention, in some cases, the pub in question once went through a gay phase.) The boys are comfortable enough in the desegregated space, but may keep one thumb on an app, migrating not their bodies but their attention to a ghetto of common lingo and desire. Is it enough to have a gay bar in the palm of your hand?
I’ve come across two separate interviews in which Alex Green, a campaigner for the reopening of London’s historic gay venue the Black Cap, has likened going into his beloved gay bar at the end of the day to unburdening himself of a backpack…or rather hoisting one on, a big gay backpack—he couldn’t be sure which way the analogy worked. This proverbial backpack makes sense to me: gay identity is a paradox of freedom and containment. The critic and activist Simon Watney once wrote of the sense of relief upon finding a gay bar in a new city, promising the chance to meet other people like us: ‘And yet the question remains, in what sense “like” us?’
Each time I step into a gay bar, I sense my identity being calibrated—a fleeting introspection at the threshold, sending ripples through my time there. The glance-over you get at the door, at sleazier spots entailing a request to strip down. The more banal costume change at a standard coat check, when I decide which layers to discharge and what significations attach to the clothes I keep on. But in a gay bar, do I become more or less gay? Is the mark of my queerness attenuated when contrasted with others more flaming than me? Is it absorbed by the dimness—or more fully exposed, as if under ultraviolet? Depends, in part, on the place. But no matter which type, in gay bars, if such a thing is possible, my self-awareness and sense of ease amplify concurrently. Twink, top, masc, queen, member of a throuple, tweaker, tourist, voyeur, exhibitionist, pee-shy, among friends, lonely, terrified of disease. In gay bars, I have been each of these things. I’ve found my identity affirmed and challenged. I have been tugged between isolation and camaraderie. As with other men, I suspect, my goal is to be basic, to blend in—but, with a snobbishness, to not appear like a native to the territory.
An acquaintance of mine, after an elegant company event, led a group of colleagues to G-A-Y, the bar in Soho. Standards had by that point resolutely lowered. While Mark generously ordered rounds, a thief observed him type in his PIN, then lifted his card. At the bank the next morning, the teller told a rueful Mark that he would read out a list of purchases. Mark was to determine where his spending ceased and the perpetrator’s spree began. The teller looked at a screen, which revealed the previous night’s transactions from G-A-Y. Okay, boomed the teller. These are the purchases that were processed in that period. Mark nodded his head.
10:45. £19.50. GAY.
11:10. £13.00. GAY.
11:50. £37.50. GAY.
12:15. £26.00. GAY.
In telling the story, Mark reenacted glancing around the bank, wishing the teller had a quieter voice or the bar a different name. We laughed with him because a mundane interaction had become an incidental humiliation. Wayne Koestenbaum writes, ‘Humiliation is always personal, even when it lands on an individual because of group characteristics.’ Mark wasn’t the guilty one, though somehow exposed, as if he were a sitcom character, either closeted and at risk of being inadvertently called out or straight and misidentified by association. Plus, there does remain something embarrassing about a gay bar. It’s so conclusive, especially one that spells out its own name.
I often think of that bank teller, as if he were the embodiment of social policing. I hear it in my mind: gay four times pronounced with a guttural g followed by a diphthong vowel, accentuating how that word manages to convey an abstract onomatopoeia. Nobody thinks of themselves as just another homosexual, but it’s what the teller sees on the screen. Sometimes labels are funny, as are patterns of behavior, stigmas, even stereotypes, being interpellated in a bank. I consider myself lucky to be in on the stolen bank card joke, swinging off that gay diphthong flamboyantly.
The word gay may have suggested dissoluteness from as early as the fourteenth century, and its meanings over time have implied a carefree quality but also a looseness of morals. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, historical senses have included: bright, lively-looking, brilliant, showy; finely or showily dressed; lighthearted, disposed to joy and mirth; exuberantly cheerful, merry, sportive; offhand or airy (probably dismissively); a dog’s tail carried high or erect; wanton, lewd, lascivious—obsolete since the mid-fifteenth century, but also promiscuous, frivolous, wild, crazy, flamboyant; a female living by prostitution; a male living by prostitution (if a gay boy or gay cat, as opposed to a gay man, who was a womanizer); attractive, charming; specious; in rude health; forward, impertinent, too free in conduct, overfamiliar or reckless (when phrased as: to get gay); foolish, stupid, socially inappropriate; a noble lady or gallant man; a childish amusement, trifle or whim; a picture in a children’s book; various lighthearted matters, as contrasted with the grave.
Gertrude Stein may have been the first to publish the word meaning homosexuality, in 1922. It being Stein, who knows what she meant. She deployed it with characteristic recursiveness: ‘They were together then and traveled to another place and stayed there and were gay there, not very gay there, just gay there. They were both gay there.’ Elsewhere in the text: ‘They were…gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay…they were quite regularly gay.’ The first occurrence of the term gay bar in print is thought to be in the 1947 diary of the comedian Kenneth Williams, who wrote from Singapore: ‘Went round to the gay bar which wasn’t in the least gay.…’ His usage is timeless in the way it expresses ironic disappointment. Three years later, what’s considered to be the first recorded use of gay as a self-description for a homosexual man, in Sir! magazine, was even fuller of despair: ‘I have yet to meet a happy homosexual. They have a way of describing themselves as gay but the term is a misnomer. Those who are habitues of the bars frequented by others of the kind, are about the saddest people I’ve ever seen.’ With queer etymologies, usage is often ironic or counterintuitive from the start. One of the earliest published occurrences of coming out in the sense of revealing sexual orientation appeared in an article on gay London life published in The Observer in 1971: ‘“I enjoy my double life,” said a delicate youth wearing a gold chain belt in a Chelsea pub. “I don’t want to come out.”’
A friend of mine, Robbie, used to wear his brown hair to his shoulders, and threadbare t-shirts of bands like the Breeders. One night he stood in line for G-A-Y Late, the sister club to G-A-Y Bar. The bouncer denied him entry at the door. Why not! Robbie barked back. Because, she said, you don’t look gay. Robbie was bemused, possibly a little flattered. But I am, Robbie contested. Like, one hundred percent. The bouncer appraised him again. Well, you don’t look like it, she said, removing him from the queue. These stories circulate because, whether being unintentionally proclaimed gay or told you’re not gay enough, there will always be a slight misfit. A friend’s complexities have been flattened, and the punch line is how someone can get it right yet so wrong.
* * *
We go out to be gay. We crave this when once again growing bored with the straight world. I will announce to Famous: I want to be gay this weekend. This carries an ineffable but precise connotation along the lines of white girl wasted. It means we don’t want to, for example, attend a recital of minimalist composition. That’s something we might otherwise do. But when we decide to be gay, we want to dance to ‘Starships’ by Nicki Minaj, and go downhill from there. On nights when we crave not dick but ridiculousness—the bad taste and nostalgia—we head to a venue less sleazy, more cheesy, where every queen appears to believe their own hype. They invent tiny melodramas. Group conversation involves a lot of squawking in pursuit of a collective cackle. A gay bar can be a repository for all the extra that doesn’t fit into other spaces. When a gay person remarks they’re being a bad gay, it doesn’t mean unethical, but that they haven’t been conforming to type. It means they’ve been a bad gay culturally. Hence: I really should go out; I’ve been such a bad gay. We pretend we go out as an obligation.
‘Queer scenes are the true salons des refusés,’ wrote the critic Michael Warner, ‘where the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their common experience of being despised and rejected in a world of norms that they now recognize as false morality.’ I imagine that Warner, a theorist prone to questioning presumptions of gay identity, would also recognize how in these spaces we don’t just find great intimacy in the face of false morality, but fall into false intimacy. This doesn’t have to be a problem. To me, it’s a draw. Gay bars are sites of genuine artifice. We go out to be real, which in gay argot can mean fake it.
We go out to be on the inside. Once, Famous and I disembarked at Waterloo station with the intention of walking along the bank of the Thames to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Approaching the river, we came upon an elaborate queer party en plein air. I assumed this to be a product of Sadiq Khan’s affirmation of the city’s nightlife in the face of its many setbacks. Khan published his vision for a twenty-four-hour London shortly after becoming mayor in 2016. He created the esoteric-sounding role of night czar and appointed Amy Lamé, a gregarious fixture of the RVT scene. (She’s been at it for decades; the last time I saw her hosting, she wore Birkenstocks but still bellowed to the crowd Snog a stranger! from the stage.) Together, the pair hailed the ‘nighttime economy’ as a means of revenue and place-making. Khan’s vision must’ve looked something like what we now stood before: a large crowd singing along to ‘Smalltown Boy’ and ‘I’m Coming Out’ under a synthetic snowdrift. Everyone likes a gay anthem of transformation and freedom. I gave in, but with a sense of dislocation, almost as if I was appropriating my own culture. The drag queens on the bandstand began to berate the staff of the adjacent bar. The performers are entitled to free cocktails, they squalled into the microphones. And somebody better bring shots. That’s how it works. The staff of the tourist trap apparently did not know gay bar etiquette. After a dance, Famous and I continued on our way to the RVT. We didn’t mind paying the cover charge. We wanted to cross its threshold, be inside the walls, where the codes are self-evident.
We go out to be nobodies. We head for a gay bar when we want to be anonymous homosexuals, what the sociologist Erving Goffman called ‘eventful to no one.’ At my preferred type of gay bar, there’s no obligation to network; I’m there to be with people not because of what I do but who I fuck. Another night at the RVT, a Saturday—it was nearing Christmas again—having escaped from a salon in a lavish town house piled with cocaine and decorated in humongous black-and-white photographs of the unfortunate and impecunious, we were received by the glamorous vampire who works the door. They’re a tall, glassy-eyed creature with lank hair and a way of coolly receiving us as if we were expected—and not for being us, thankfully, but just two more soused midnight shadows. We gave them our cash and moved into the humid jostle. ‘He’s on the Phone’ by Saint Etienne was playing, the lyrics quintessentially London—lipstick and Leicester Square—painting the city as an ocean of ships passing in the night. I took a hit of Amsterdam Gold during Robyn’s ‘Dancing on My Own.’ After the small talk of that middlebrow art gathering, we both prayed not to see anyone else we knew. Maybe, I thought, we could go to The Bar in the arches afterward, and abandon any remaining semblance of respectability. Famous whispered into my ear, I like being in places where I don’t know anyone. I concurred. Fuck that salon, I said, as we swiveled to the Magician remix of Lykke Li’s ‘I Follow Rivers.’
The only time she was inside the RVT, Princess Diana went there explicitly to be an anonymous homosexual. It was 1988. The actress Cleo Rocos has written that she and her television costar Kenny Everett had begun drinking peach bellinis with Diana at a brasserie in Kensington earlier in the day. They ended up at Kenny’s penthouse up the road to watch Golden Girls. Eventually, Freddie Mercury showed up. According to Rocos, the four of them sat on the sofa in front of the show, and Kenny turned the volume down so they could replace the dialogue with their own ribald improvisations. Diana played Dorothy. They became giddy, with Diana burying her giggles in a cushion. Freddie reported they’d be going to the Vauxhall Tavern; Diana said she’d like to come along. There was much protesting as everyone feared she’d be found out there. Kenny warned it would be full of manly, hairy gay men. But Diana was resolute, and was soon in a cab adorned in Kenny’s fatigue jacket, leather cap and aviators. When they arrived at the RVT it was full. The group pushed toward the bar, greeting acquaintances along the way. ‘Our hearts pounded with every new leather-clad hairy body that approached,’ Rocos reports, ‘but no one, absolutely no one, recognized Diana.’ The goal of the princess was to order a drink undetected; that accomplished, she was back in a taxi to Kensington Palace, waving goodbye to the boys gathered outside.
The line I’ve read that best distinguishes a gay bar may be from the journalist June Thomas. She wrote, ‘There’s more literature in gay bars’—meaning the magazines, health pamphlets, guides, maps and flyers that pile up on the peripheries. At the RVT, I spied a booklet, beer-soaked and footprinted, on the sticky floor at the base of one of the columns. It was not a small square concertina like HIV-prevention pamphlets, nor a glossy listings magazine. Picking up the matte-yellow stapled journal, I saw it was the publication of the Urban Laboratory at University College London, which had become the authoritative force in the study of London’s precarious sites. I took it home and dried it on the radiator.
The pamphlet compiled essays from those who work in queer spaces or study them academically, or both. One contributor, Joe Parslow, wrote an essay that refers to the critic José Esteban Muñoz’s paralleling of the word stage in the sense of a platform for performance with stage as a phase that queers are told to get over—as when parents contend it’s just a blip. In 2009, Muñoz wrote, ‘Today I write back from that stage that my mother and father hoped I would quickly vacate. Instead, I dwell on and in this stage.’ Parslow explains how he was inspired to think from the stage outward when he designed his own venue, Her Upstairs, one of those few places that opened against the wave of bar closures; it shut down after only a short spell.
In his listing application for the RVT, Ben Walters offered another symbolic interpretation of the stage. When Pat and Breda McConnon took over the tavern in 1979, they made the decision to put an end to the messy tradition of bartenders serving drinks between the legs of the drag queens atop the curving bar. But rather than cancel the entertainment, they renovated the interior, removing that bar and installing a bespoke stage. Walters points out the meaningfulness of this move. Performing on the bar had meant that a drag queen could be swiftly cleared away and the performance denied at the sign of a police raid. The McConnons permanently ensconced queer performance in the materiality of the building. Their stage was not a phase.
Another thing that marks out gay bars: the mirrors over the urinals in the men’s bathrooms. This used to disturb me. I remember the first time I experienced it, years ago. Famous had taken me to Heaven. I was aghast at the mirrors directly above the trough, including one angled strategically in the corner like those used to monitor shoplifters. In general, urinals in England come with their own set of challenges. British men are prone to making conversation there, a comment about the night, the state of the toilets, sports. This puts me in an awkward position. When I open my mouth, as a friend says of himself, my handbag falls out. It’s less, these days, a fear of being bashed, more a matter of not wanting to embarrass my neighbor. I don’t want to watch him adjust to my gayness, to act like it’s cool—as if gay is not a lot to do with enjoyment of penis. Then I am ashamed that I am ashamed that he is ashamed that I am ashamed. I shake myself, and leave with dripping hands as I don’t want to stand under the dryer any longer than necessary. I scurry away. Scurrying is also a telltale trait—the way so many gays always appear like they’re about to miss a train—but at least I’m on my way out.
In a gay bar bathroom, the dynamic is less predictable. After years of recoiling, my dick a shy slug, I’ve discovered my exhibitionist streak. This must have changed after the time I’d taken too much of my mom’s cannabis tincture before going to the Eagle LA when we were back on the West Coast. She had warned me, reporting that once on two droppers of the stuff, she lost all sense of linear time while chopping onions. But I ignored her advice, took a second dose and by the night’s end was at the corner toilet giving a peep show in the dim light. Since then, overconfident from the generally positive response, I have stood with the open hips of a yogi. I make other men pee-shy. The next time I went to the Eagle LA, I found myself, inebriated, starting up the same act. Just when I thought I was about to bask in other men’s admiration, one shouted, We’re all here just waiting—are you going to piss or what?
At the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, there are mirrors but, because of the tone of the place, they seem more flirty than licentious. An attractive man glanced at me with a smile and said cutely, Now I can’t go. Soon after, I saw him on the dance floor, whispering to his friend and nodding at me. We all knew he still had to pee. Fleeting, gently pervy interactions like that may be the closest I get to experiencing a sense of gay community.
It was last call at the RVT. Famous stole away to the toilets. ‘Family Affair’ by Mary J. Blige began to play—a song meant for the start of the night. I danced on my own by the door, near the shelf of condoms and literature. I recalled another time I’d been there recently. I’d given my coat check ticket to the most boyish and poised of the bartenders, the one who moves with a distinct admixture of flirtatiousness and efficiency. He brought my jacket from the cloakroom, the blue nylon I wear when I predict I’ll end up going out, because it promises to wipe clean easily. About to hand it to me over the bar, he said, You know what…and brought himself around the hatch, with shoulders alert like a pantomime butler. He held up my jacket with alacrity to indicate I should turn around so he could slip me into it. I momentarily forgot that I don’t smile in gay bars. He both served and took the upper hand: to get into the jacket, I had to turn my back to him, and yet into the sleeves it was I who inserted. I submitted, but he received.
On this night, I glanced over and saw that the bartender was busy, holding someone else’s attention in a brief exchange. He fetched them their extraneous last drink. Famous bounced forth. I caught his eye and pointed my index finger to the speakers. This song, I mouthed. Famous tilted his head. We pushed through the doors into the wind. I’d put my jacket on myself this time, without ceremony. But leaving on a good song also makes a fine exit. Mary J. Blige sang at our backs about starting the party as we took long strides down the street.