My Childhood Gay Bar
In Memory of The Bacchanal
My friend June Thomas asked her talkative friends — people like Alison Bechdel, Dan Savage, and Matt Crowley— to tell her the story of their first visit to a gay bar.
Alison really captured the zeitgeist of being shocked, awkward, and INITIATED:
The first gay bar I ever went to was Satan's in Akron, Ohio. It was the summer of 1980. I went with a carload of friends from college, and it took us an hour and a half to drive there. No one questioned a three-hour round trip for the chance to be in a place full of gay people.
It was a mixed space, half men, half women. I'm pretty sure that, at 19, I was underage, but they let me in. I stuck close to my friends, didn't dance, just looked around at all these other queer people with amazement. There was something kind of melancholy about it, too—excited as I was to be there, it was pretty chintzy and tacky.
Was I going to be spending the rest of my life in places like this?
The scariest part was figuring out how to get a drink. There was a thick throng around the bar itself. I had to let go of my individual self and become part of the mob, like finding myself in the middle of an indigenous ritual that I had to follow along convincingly with or else be killed. Somehow, I managed to order and pay for a Budweiser. I spent the rest of the night peeling the label off it and watching, watching, watching.
I think my own first visit to a bar took June by surprise. I wasn’t a patron— I wasn’t even tall enough to steady myself on the bar.
I was 11, the first time I stepped into my Aunt Molly's place, the Bacchanal, on Solano Avenue, near Berkeley.
It was 1969. She took me inside before the bar opened, to clean it up and do a little carpentry work. I got a silver Kennedy dollar for my labors. (Still have that piece!).
I had no idea what "gay" was, let alone the nature of the establishment I was mopping down. Molly played the sexy black-and-white Marlene Dietrich LP while I dusted and oiled the wooden bar, which was quite glorious.
I figured out what the Bacchanal was, long after those days I was a sad little Irish maid.
In the early '80s, I'd just graduated from college and was living in San Francisco with my 13-years-senior lover. She cracked a joke one day, about a venerable lesbian bar called The Bacchanal.
I cut her short—“What are you talking about? That's my aunt's place!” A hundred family dramas, wounded looks, and years of silent treatments came together in a snap.
I remembered my mom sobbing one night, “Molly won't, she just won't wear a dress!”
That was was true, my aunt could easily pass as a man and never seemed to care. When Moll tried to put on lipstick for the O’Halloran Christmas party, it was like a red crayon that zigzagged across her mouth. She spent most of the time outside chopping wood and smoking. Of course, all the kids liked her best.
I learned from my lover that Molly wasn't ‘Molly’ among her gay peers, she was Sean. Sean Halloran. That made me burst into tears. I was so sad she’d kept her real life away from us. Surely things had changed.
I didn't hear from my aunt when I came of age, even though I she was right across the Bay Bridge. Now I understood why. With my girlfriend’s inspiration, I looked her up, dialed her old number, eager to have a big hug and a gay history chat.
Moll turned me down cold. She was not up for an interview, and took a dim view of all things queer and outspoken. We met in a cafe on Solano Avenue, and she told me gay pride parades made her want to “throw up.”
HA! She was old, old school.
A lot of things happened before I’d try again. But it was worth it.
Molly came out to my mom, Betty Jo, just before she died, when they both were in their 70s. “I told her I love her, Susie!” Mama called me from Minnesota just to tell me that.
My family wasn’t much for declarations. The Say Nothing tribe. They’d been through so much. But that is a story for another day . . .
