Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
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left, and ne’er the twain did meet—except, perforce, in the restrooms. And no one knows what goes on behind closed doors. Unless, of course, one peeks, but I personally have always adhered to the rules of etiquette in such places.
I ran across a similarly odd set-up once on a first time visit to Philadelphia during an Army-Navy game weekend, when I visited a bar recommended by a friend—the Pirate’s Cove, if memory serves me. I wondered at the recommendation. The place was near empty and achingly dull, until I got ready to leave.
“You should stop at the gent’s,” the bartender suggested, “before you head out into the rain.”
It seemed an odd suggestion, but I took it. To my surprise, the restroom itself and the long corridor leading to it were crowded with handsome young men, many of them actively involved with one another. It took me a while to discover that just around the corner from the entrance to the bar I had visited was the entrance to another bar, this one a straight bar and popular with the cadets. It seemed the two establishments shared the same facilities. The cadets, of course, could not be seen going in and out of a known gay bar, which was off limits to them—but their M.P.s apparently hadn’t checked on the toilets, an oversight that clearly delighted many of the cadets. I might add that I was pleased as well, for several good reasons.
Larger cities had multiple bars. The major ones each had at least one bar of a particular sort—ostensibly heterosexual but frequented by young, straight acting gay men (if you were the “swish” or obvious type and happened into the establishment, you would almost certainly be refused service and asked to leave) and the older, well-to-do gentlemen (many of them married) who wished discreet introductions—as a rule arranged by an accommodating bartender.
These were often hotel bars, for a good reason. Conventional bars were more likely to be frequented by friends meeting for drinks, or opposite sex couples, but single men were commonplace in hotel bars and no one was likely to raise an eyebrow if a friendly conversation was struck.
Many gay gentleman of a certain age will remember New York’s Astor Bar with fondness. In San Francisco, it was the bar at the St. Francis Hotel. (Indeed, the corner outside the St. Francis was a common working ground for hustlers of both sexes until the seventies, when a fifteen-year-old girl prostitute was found murdered in a hotel room and the vice squad started cleaning things up.)
This was long before anyone would have dared to publish a gay guide, but an underground network of gay intelligence kept one surprisingly well informed. Long before I left behind the divorce courts of Ohio for the lights of Los Angeles, I knew of the “bird circuit” in New York City and the Four Star Saloon in West Hollywood, even Les Trois Cloches in far off Cannes, France, which so far as I know is still setting them up.
And of the once infamous standing room at the old Metropolitan Opera in New York City, or “Kiss me Quick, I’m Carmen” as we used to call it. Some of the regular standees allegedly wore special trousers, with zippers in the rear for convenient access. It was largely because of the blatant sexual activity that Rudolf Bing, when he became general manager of the Met in the mid-fifties, tried to eliminate standing room, but the chorus of objections was too great, and he relented. Time and the advent of friendlier places for get-togethers has eliminated the problem—so far as I know. I was never comfortable singing if I couldn’t see the baton.
There were the gay meccas—Fire Island has probably been gay since before the coming of the pilgrims and New Orleans has always been famed for its tolerance. Key West came to gay prominence in the late sixties but I doubt that it was ever entirely lavender free. By the seventies Saugatuck, on the shores of Lake Michigan, had quite a name for itself, though I personally never ventured into those sand dunes.
Then there was San Diego. All those military installations, all those men—and right across the border, Sin City itself, Tijuana. It’s hard to imagine these days when you stroll around in quiet, ultra conservative—oh, let’s face it, dull—San Diego that Broadway downtown was once a carnival of locker clubs, peep shows and bars (gay ones, too—one infamous one right smack where Planet Hollywood sits these days). And men, dozens of them, hundreds, lining the streets, time on their hands, fire in the blood, and nothing to do but, well, find something to do. On a Friday night, or a Sunday afternoon, you could just go shopping, and pick out whatever you wanted in the way of size, color, uniform, whatever.
I say Friday or Sunday, because the conventional wisdom was that Friday night, they had just gotten leave and were very horny and weren’t going to be picky. By Saturday night, having somewhat mollified their biological urges, they were likely to be more selective. On Saturday they wanted women. Sunday, however, leave was almost over. This was no time to be too choosy. The same boys who sneered at your offer on Saturday were often amenable to a quickie before they headed back to the base or the ship.
It wasn’t just American sailors either. San Diego saw ships from almost every country you could imagine and many of their crews were even less inhibited than our own boys in blue. I visited on one weekend with a friend and at a coffee shop we soon struck up conversation with a pair of officers from a Greek ship. For reasons we needn’t go into, they were not at the moment available to retire to our rooms for a bit of cross-cultural fraternization. They told us to wait at the coffee shop, however, and were soon back with not two but three enlisted men, to whom they introduced us before going about their own business. Now that’s what I call noblesse oblige. Yes, of course the numbers weren’t quite even, there were three of them and only two of us, which makes dancing awkward, but we overcame that difficulty. I felt the reputation of our nation’s hospitality was at stake. Sometimes you simply have to swallow your pride.
Not every city could offer the sort of smorgasbord that San Diego did in its glory days but every city had at least one hangout. In Muncie, Indiana, it was the three or four stools around the end curve of an otherwise straight bar in an otherwise straight restaurant. The knowing bartender sort of directed traffic on Saturday nights to see that everyone found his right place. It worked better than you might imagine.
Some of these bars were known on the underground network, many were not—which meant that when you came to visit you had to find them for yourself. Everyone had his favorite method of finding a bar in a strange city. A tip to a hotel bellboy was often effective; indeed, more than once I found that I needn’t go out at all, which is always convenient in inclement weather and so could be considered a boon to one’s health. Cab drivers could usually tell you where to go, though you ran the risk of finding one who was homophobic. If you were lucky you would be ordered from the cab. Once or twice I wasn’t that lucky—this was not so healthy.
Some individuals favored bookstores and antique shops for striking up a friendly local acquaintance who presumably would know the spots, and others just lingered on a street corner and followed a likely looking passerby, though there were obvious pitfalls in that method. Most cities had at least one bathhouse where not all the steam came from water pipes.
Some travelers automatically headed for the YMCA when they arrived in an unfamiliar city. You did understand, didn’t you, why the Village People chose to celebrate that institution? In those days the Y was exclusively male, often with a nude-only pool in the basement, and most were known for their, ahem, fellowship. Some of them, such as the Embarcadero Y in San Francisco and the Sloane House in Manhattan, were downright legendary. I shall always fondly remember walking into the men’s room at the Sloane House to discover a little old Jewish man naked at the urinals and masturbating energetically while singing, with gusto, Happy Days Are Here Again.… There’s something about seeing another person really enjoying himself that truly warms your heart.
I think the most unique approach I ever heard of to finding the local gay spots was that of the gentleman who, upon arriving in a new city, called the police department to explain that he was looking for his younger brother who had disappeared from home and who he thought might be found in a gay hangout—could the police suggest where he might look? I never tried this method but he swore it was infallible. Who would know better than they?
Then there was the friend who just hung around at a Lane Bryant store. Sooner or later, he insisted, a rather fey gentleman was certain to ask about dresses for his sister—who happened to be “about my size.…”