Gay bars made their own lexical dent by way of furtive codes, ribald commentary and camp parlance. Within weeks, someone had written PRETENTIOUS with an arrow pointing to my citation. For my contribution, I block-lettered some favorite lines from Lynda Barry’s novel Cruddy.
The manager suggested we provide markers to encourage the crowd to tag the bathroom walls. I co-hosted monthly film screenings in a sideroom, the most popular being Wild Style, the graffiti documentary. On Sundays, the back patio filled with salsa dancing, which I watched from the fire escape. By my time there, it hosted post-punk gigs and poetry readings. It had opened as a Brazilian leather bar in 1978. Of sorts: El Rio was a chummy neighborhood dive run by lesbian academics, queers of color and FTM hipsters. In San Francisco in the early aughts, I lived directly above a dyke bar. He surmised the men who dropped in to pick up lesbians must be the hetero version of trade queens, those gay men with a preference for straight guys who lend their bodies disinterestedly. LeSueur would peer out his window, attempting to discern the psychosexual dynamics playing out on the street. (Or was that Stirrup, or Silver Spur? LeSueur later flippantly misremembered.) According to the date and location, I’d suggest it was the Bagatelle-“the Bag”-a Mafia-owned venue at 86 University Place that counted writers Ann Bannon and Audre Lorde among its regulars. By 1957, when O’Hara wrote the untitled poem that opens “I live above a dyke bar and I’m happy,” he and LeSueur were sharing a third-floor apartment, actually two doors down from The Round-Up. Transplanting to New York, LeSueur was taken by Goodman to “the crypto-queer Sam Remo, the macho Cedar Street Tavern, and the blustering White Horse Tavern.” Through Goodman, he came to know Frank O’Hara, that centripetal force (“center of all beauty!”). A band of gay bohemians, LeSueur noted, more bohemian than gay-“they weren’t run-of-the-mill queers defined by their sexual orientation but fiercely independent intellectuals who happened to be homosexual and to me, they constituted a new breed, an elite brotherhood whose ranks I instantly wanted to be a part of.”
LeSueur was brought into his coterie, where the chatter was “like nothing I’d ever heard-knotty, incisive, often with a psychoanalytic thrust.” The talk was of poetry and The Partisan Review, Genet and Wittgenstein. Another night, Paul Goodman, a shabbily dressed, unprepossessing author from New York, persisted. The twink drew the attention of Christopher Isherwood, though they swiftly abandoned attempts at conversing amid the din.
Le Sueur’s fascination with the scene was at once othering and hankering: “‘It’s so sordid,’ I remember purring in appreciation the first time I entered the place with two other thrill-seekers from USC, ‘sordid’ being a key word in our lexicon, the standard to which we held our libidinous experiences.” In the late 1940s, the directionless blond undergrad Joe LeSueur ventured into Maxwell’s in downtown Los Angeles, a rough saloon populated by hustlers, drifters and the gender nonconforming. At a certain kind of joint, slumming it may be a sip away from hobnobbing with literati.