by Audre Lorde
We were healthy young female animals mercifully more alive than most of our peers, robust and active women, and our blood was always high and our pockets empty and a free meal in convivial surroundings – meaning around other lesbians – was a big treat for most of us, even if purchased at the price of a bottle of beer, which was fifty cents, with many complaints.
Dancing wasn’t allowed at Laurel’s so it never got to be as popular as the Bag, except on Sunday afternoons. Muriel preferred it because it was always quieter. Trix ran the place, and always had a hand for ‘her girls’. Tiny and tough, with a permanent Florida tan and a Bronx accent, she took a shine to Muriel and me, and sometimes she would buy us a beer, and sit down and talk with us if the place wasn’t too crowded.
We all knew the situation with gay bars, how they came in and out of existence with such regularity and who really profited from them. But Trix was pretty and bright and hard and kind all at the same time, and her permanent tan particularly endeared her to me. She looked like one of the nicer hickory-skinned devils who used to people my dreams of that period.
Actually, the life span of most gay bars was under a year, with the notable exception of a few like the Bag. Laurel’s went the way of all the other gay bars – like the Swing and Snooky’s and the Grapevine, the Sea Colony and the Pony Stable Inn. Each closed after a year or so, while another opened and caught on somewhere else. But for that year, Laurel’s served as an important place for those of us who met and made some brief space for ourselves there. It had a feeling of family.
On summer Sunday afternoons, Muriel and I would split from the gay beach at Coney Island or Riis Park early, take the subway back home in time to wash up and dress and saunter over to Laurel’s in time for the food at 4:00. I had my first open color confrontation with a gay-girl one Sunday afternoon in Laurel’s.
Muriel and I had come back that day from Riis Park, full of sun and sand. We loved with the salt still on our skins, then bathed, washed our hair, and got ready to go out. I put on my faded cord riding britches with the suede crotch, and a pale blue short-sleeved sweatshirt bought earlier that week at John’s on Avenue C for sixty-nine cents. My skin was tanned from the sun and burnished ruddy with the heat and much loving. My hair was newly trimmed and freshly washed, with the particular crispness that it always develops in sustained summer heat. I felt raunchy and restless.
We walked out of the hot August afternoon sun into the suddenly dark coolness of Laurel’s downstairs. There was Muriel in her black Bermuda shorts and shirt, ghost pale, her eternal cigarette in hand. And I was beside her, full of myself, knowing I was fat and Black and very fine. We were without peer or category, and on that day I was conscious of being very proud of it, no matter who looked down her nose at us.
After Muriel and I had gotten our food and beer and copped one of the tables, Dottie and Pauli came over. We saw them a lot at the Bag and in the supermarket over on Avenue D, but we’d never been to their house nor they to ours, except for New Year’s food, when everyone came.
‘Where you guys been?’ Pauli had an ingenuous smile, her blonde hair and blue eyes incandescent against the turquoise mandarin shirt she wore.
‘Riis. Gay Beach.’ Muriel’s finger crooked over the bottle as she took a slug. All of us eschewed glasses as faggy, although I sometimes longed for one because the cold beer hurt my teeth.
Pauli turned to me. ‘Hey, that’s a great tan you have there. I didn’t know Negroes got tans.’ Her broad smile was intended to announce the remark as a joke.
My usual defense in such situations was to ignore the overtones, to let it go. But Dottie Daws, probably out of her own nervousness at Pauli’s reference to the unmentionable, would not let the matter drop. Raved on and on about my great tan. Matched her arm to mine. Shook her pale blonde head, telling whomever would listen that she wished she could tan like that instead of burning, and did I know how lucky I was to be able to get such a tan like that? I grew tired and then shakingly furious, having enough of whatever it was.
‘How come you never make so much over my natural tan most days, Dottie Daws; how come?’
There was a moment of silence at the table, punctuated only by Muriel’s darkly appreciative chuckle, and then we moved on to something else, mercifully. I was still shaking inside. I never forgot it.
In the gay bars, I longed for other Black women without the need ever taking shape upon my lips. For four hundred years in this country, Black women have been taught to view each other with deep suspicion. It was no different in the gay world.
Most Black lesbians were closeted, correctly recognizing the Black community’s lack of interest in our position, as well as the many more immediate threats to our survival as Black people in a racist society. It was hard enough to be Black, to be Black and female, to be Black, female, and gay. To be Black, female, gay, and out of the closet in a white environment, even to the extent of dancing in the Bagatelle, was considered by many Black lesbians to be simply suicidal. And if you were fool enough to do it, you’d better come on so tough that nobody messed with you. I often felt put down by their sophistication, their clothes, their manners, their cars, and their femmes.
The Black women I usually saw around the Bag were into heavy roles, and it frightened me. This was partly the fear of my own Blackness mirrored, and partly the realities of the masquerade. Their need for power and control seemed a much-too-open piece of myself, dressed in enemy clothing. They were tough in a way I felt I could never be. Even if they were not, their self-protective instincts warned them to appear that way. By white america’s racist distortions of beauty, Black women playing ‘femme’ had very little chance in the Bag. There was constant competition among butches to have the most ‘gorgeous femme’ on their arm. And ‘gorgeous’ was defined by a white male world’s standards.
For me, going into the Bag alone was like entering an anomalous no-woman’s land. I wasn’t cute or passive enough to be ‘femme’, and I wasn’t mean or tough enough to be ‘butch’. I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.
With the exception of Felicia and myself, the other Black women in the Bag came protected by a show of all the power symbols they could muster. Whatever else they did during the week, on Friday nights when Lion or Trip appeared, sometimes with expensively dressed women on their arms, sometimes alone, they commanded attention and admiration. They were well-heeled, superbly dressed, self-controlled high-steppers who drove convertibles, bought rounds of drinks for their friends, and generally took care of business.
But sometimes, even they couldn’t get in unless they were recognized by the bouncer.
My friends and I were the hippies of the gay-girl circuit, before the word was coined. Many of us wound up dead or demented, and many of us were distorted by the many fronts we had to fight upon. But when we survived, we grew up strong.
Every Black woman I ever met in the Village in those years had some part in my survival, large or small, if only as a figure in the head-count at the Bag on a Friday night.
Black lesbians in the Bagatelle faced a world only slightly less hostile than the outer world which we had to deal with every day on the outside – that world which defined us as doubly nothing because we were Black and because we were Woman – that world which raised our blood pressures and shaped our furies and our nightmares.
The temporary integration of war plants, and the egalitarian myth of Rosie the Riveter had ended abruptly with the end of World War II and the wholesale return of the american woman to the role of little wifey. So far as I could see, gay-girls were the only Black and white women who were even talking to each other in this country in the 1950s, outside of the empty rhetoric of patriotism and political movements.
Black or white, Ky-Ky, butch, or femme, the only thing we shared, often, and in varying proportions, was that we dared for connection in the name of woman, and saw that as our power, rather than our problem.
All of us who survive
d those common years had to be a little strange. We spent so much of our young-womanhood trying to define ourselves as woman-identified women before we even knew the words existed, let alone that there were ears interested in trying to hear them beyond our immediate borders. All of us who survived those common years have to be a little proud. A lot proud. Keeping ourselves together and on our own tracks, however wobbly, was like trying to play the Dinizulu War Chant or a Beethoven sonata on a tin dog-whistle.
The important message seemed to be that you had to have a place. Whether or not it did justice to whatever you felt you were about, there had to be some place to refuel and check your flaps.
In times of need and great instability, the place sometimes became more a definition than the substance of why you needed it to begin with. Sometimes the retreat became the reality. The writers who posed in cafés talking their work to death without writing two words; the lesbians, virile as men, hating women and their own womanhood with a vengeance. The bars and the coffee-shops and the streets of the Village in the 1950s were full of non-conformists who were deathly afraid of going against their hard-won group, and so eventually they were broken between the group and their individual needs.
For some of us there was no one particular place, and we grabbed whatever we could from wherever we found space, comfort, quiet, a smile, non-judgment.
Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different.
Each of us had our own needs and pursuits, and many different alliances. Self-preservation warned some of us that we could not afford to settle for one easy definition, one narrow individuation of self. At the Bag, at Hunter College, uptown in Harlem, at the library, there was a piece of the real me bound in each place, and growing.
It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather the security of any one particular difference. (And often, we were cowards in our learning.) It was years before we learned to use the strength that daily surviving can bring, years before we learned fear does not have to incapacitate, and that we could appreciate each other on terms not necessarily our own.
The Black gay-girls in the Village gay bars of the fifties knew each other’s names, but we seldom looked into each other’s Black eyes, lest we see our own aloneness and our own blunted power mirrored in the pursuit of darkness. Some of us died inside the gaps between the mirrors and those turned-away eyes.
Sistah outsiders. Didi and Tommy and Muff and Iris and Lion and Trip and Audre and Diane and Felicia and Bernie and Addie.
Addie was Mari Evans beautiful, a wasted sister-soul. Driven as we all were driven, she found ways out that were still alien to some of the rest of us – harsher, less hidden.
That Sunday afternoon while Muriel and I waited for Flee and our photography lesson, Addie was turning Flee onto smack for the first time in a borrowed apartment across Second Avenue.
30
The spring of 1956 came with a plethora of ambiguous omens. I had stopped therapy because of our shortage of money. What had seemed just enough to get by on a year ago had shrunk through inflation or recession or whatever they chose to call it in the New York Times. Fingering over my private structures became a luxury I could not afford. Therapy was the last possible cut to be made. Neither of us said a word about Muriel’s inability to look for work. She did not deal with her self-loathing, and I did not deal with my resentment. My physiology professor at Hunter College tried to help my financial problems by offering me a job as a live-in maid in her Park Avenue house.
The night before my last session in therapy, I dreamt that Muriel and I stood waiting for a train in a midnight-blue subway station. There are clusters of people about, but their backs are turned and I cannot see their faces. As the train pulls into the station, Muriel falls off the platform beneath its wheels. I stand on the platform as the train rolls over her, powerless to do anything, my heart breaking beneath the wheels. I awake to tears and a sense of mourning too deep for words, that would not go away.
Muriel was having trouble sleeping. Night after night she sat up on the couch in the middle room, reading and smoking and writing in her journal, and sometimes I woke to hear her talking to herself. I found out only later the desperate quality of those hallucinations which she hid from me under irascibility or humor.
Other nights she stayed out drinking until I had gone to sleep. I could wake and look through the doorway of our bedroom to find her, night after night, leaning against the pillows on the couch propped up against the wall. Her dear dark head outlined in a circle of lamplight, Crazy Lady and Scarey Lou curled up together against the warmth of her thighs. Sometimes I felt we were as lost to each other as if one of us were dead.
In the morning when I got up to dress for work, I would find her asleep on the couch looking worn and vulnerable, her pale hand still holding the book fallen upon her breast, the two little kittens entwined, asleep, upon her tummy. She was getting thinner and thinner, eating less and less, insisting she was not hungry, even though it seemed very dangerous to me to be living on beer and cigarettes. I turned off the lamp over her head, pulled the covers over her, and went on to work.
Que Será, Que Será,
Whatever will be, will be …
Spring came in with extraordinary fervor, and the sounds of Doris Day’s wide-mouthed rendition of ‘Whatever Will Be, Will Be’ resounded from every jukebox and soda fountain radio.
One brisk Sunday evening in early April, Muriel and I ran into my old school friend Jill crossing East Houston Street, huddled into a worn pea coat two sizes too big for her. I had not seen her for almost two years, since she and The Branded had used my Spring Street apartment after I left for Stamford to work. Both poets, renegades, and very determined young women, there was much that connected Jill and me across our differences. There was also a lot of unfinished business that separated us. It made us wary of each other, at the same time as we valued each other’s insights.
Jill was on her way to her father’s law office downtown to use his electric typewriters after business hours. Muriel and I joined her, and for several Sundays thereafter, we typed our poems and themes on elegant IBM machines. There was a guarded truce between Jill and me, as if we had decided to forget whatever had occurred before without speaking of it, as if the connections and the history we shared were enough to bridge the differences between us. At least Jill was a fighter too, another confirmed outsider. As infants, we had grown up in the subliminal echo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s determinedly optimistic fireside chats. We each had absorbed some of his prescription for progress: When times are hard, do something. If it works, do it some more. If it does not work, do something else. But keep doing.
The next week, coming out of my german class one evening, I heard someone calling me by name. Turning, surprised, I saw Toni, ex-varsity star of Hunter High School. We had only been bare acquaintances before, but here in the inhospitable wastelands of Hunter College, we greeted each other’s familiar face warmly and with welcome relief.
‘Let’s go for coffee next week,’ I suggested, as the bell rang for the next class and we dashed for the elevator. Toni laughed and shook her close-cropped blonde head.
‘Why coffee? How about a drink! There’s a great bar downtown on the West Side called the Sea Colony. We can drive down after class, and it’s not too far from where you live, is it?’
So Toni was gay. Another welcome not-quite-surprise. And she had her own car, no mean accomplishment three years out of high school.
Toni was by now a registered nurse, teaching a course in Hunter’s nursing program once a week. I was amazed. It seemed as if she had gotten on about the business of making her life work while we were still trying to reconstruct the world. Toni seemed so grown-up and capable and settled and prospe
rous in comparison to Muriel and me. She was a year younger than I was, and she owned her own car and rented a summer house at Huntington Station and never had to worry about what she spent for food. Very much in the closet at work and school, Toni still had a reputation for having ‘unconventional’ friends.
We saw a lot of Toni; Muriel saw more of her than I did, since I was in school until 10:00 four nights a week.
I had just finished my advanced algebra homework, still confused about the function of sines, and climbed into bed when I heard Muriel’s key in the door. I felt the rush of damp air around her from the spring storm outside before I saw her now-gaunt face, glistening with wet from the long walk across town.
‘You still up?’ She shed her navy sweater onto the couch and came in to sit down on the edge of our bed. Happy to see her home before I slept and in a good mood, I sat up and reached for my glasses. Her note had said that she and Toni were going for a beer.
‘Where’s Toni; why didn’t she drive you home?’ I kissed her. She smelled of beer and smoke and April rain.
‘She got a flat near the hospital today so she didn’t have the car.’ Neither of us was used to including wheels in our lives.
‘I got an eight on my quadratics exam tonight.’ Trig had been a major stumbling block in math that term. ‘Where did you-all go?’
‘We went to the Swing but it was closed up, and I don’t know if it’s for tonight or for good. So then we went to a new place over on Bleecker called the Mermaid, but they had a dollar minimum which is shit-for-the-birds during the week, so we wound up at the Riv.’ The Riviera was not primarily a gay bar, but its sawdust floors and cheap beer made it everybody’s standby on Sheridan Square.
