Notes on November
queer bars, vegetarian meatballs, mommy baby tyrant serf in the LARB!
Hi all! I’ve made an executive decision to retire How to Open a Lesbian Bar for the time being. Basically, we remain in a real estate search holding pattern and there’s nothing new to report. When we find a spot and things start cranking, I plan to reprise the series. For now, I’m going to do a monthly Notes post (like this one and this one) for paid subscribers, which will include bar updates at the end as well as cooking news, media thoughts, and random musings/photos/whatever. These posts are fun for me to write (truly making me feel like the *blogger* I am), and I hope they are fun for you to read! I’ll leave the first couple items on the list open for all, and the rest (including bar stuff) will be paywalled. Let’s go! Notes on November. Too long for email, as is my way, so go ahead and open her up in your browser.
-For the last month or so, I’ve been getting daily likes on my No-Links Lesbian Gift Guide from last year. Maybe it’s uncouth to ask, but can anyone tell me what’s up with that? Like, are people Googling “lesbian gift guide”? Is Substack serving it up? Was it linked to somewhere? I have not been able to figure it out where this traffic is coming from and I am genuinely curious (and appreciate the love)! In the spirit of that post, I will not be elaborating on it this year. All items in that gift guide are timeless. But maybe next month I’ll report back on what we gifted each other in my little fam.
-Jenny Fran Davis (who you may know as the author of Dykette) extensively cited my “Mommy, Baby, Tyrant, Serf” matrix in an essay titled “Mean Mommies” in the Los Angeles Review of Books. I truly appreciate such a thoughtful and intelligent application of my work, and the essay is great - go check it out! It’s so fun to see how far and wide this blog post/framework of mine has circulated - Jenny mentions in her essay that the concept has been spontaneously brought up to her in conversation on three different occasions. Clearly it’s struck a chord. I love it.
-Alright, let’s get into the cooking report. This month, the most fucked up (positive) thing I made was an open-face vegetarian meatball sub.
