Useful Histories
Does queer nostalgia make you feel more alive, or less?
Recently, I was interviewing a woman who lived in Boston in the 1970s for my research. My dissertation is about trans presence in lesbian communities during this era, with a regional focus on Philadelphia and Boston. This means I am interviewing a lot of dykes in their seventies and eighties, trying to get as rich and dimensional of an understanding of what the scene was like as possible.
It’s always interesting to notice what these women assume I already know about. Sometimes, they’ll mention something that it really seems like I should already be familiar with but I’m not, which I of course find embarrassing. Other times, it’s some event or book or group that holds a large significance in their own personal history but has been barely documented elsewhere.
During this particular interview, my interlocutor asked me if I knew the Saints. “Oh, yeah,” I replied, “I know it.” The Saints was a lesbian bar in downtown Boston that operated for much of the 1970s, run by a self-identified working-class, multiracial collective. The collective formed in 1972 and approached the owner of a luncheonette to ask if they could open a lesbian bar in his restaurant, which was closed at night. He agreed, and they remained open until 1980. During this period, it was a mainstay of the Boston lesbian scene. Most of the Boston women I’ve spoken to thus far were part of a socialist-feminist crowd, and they recall nights at the Saints after meetings and actions. (Note: I have heard several mentions now of a distinct Boston lesbian separatist scene but nobody is willing/able to put me in touch with women from it…I need to speak to the separatists!!) The Saints was the place to be on a Saturday night, a lively place, an electric place.
In 1980, the luncheonette owner decided that he wanted to run his own bar, and the Saints bought out an abandoned club in Jamaica Plain. Over the next few years, they valiantly rallied their community to renovate the space, but an unending battle with the city over the liquor license meant that the new location was never able to open its doors. The collective sold the building in 1986.
So, yes, I “know” the Saints. But I don’t know it the way my interviewee did. I know it through research, through sorting through files at the History Project archives in Boston, through noting mentions of it in memoirs and newsletters, through old pictures. She knew it by hours spent talking and drinking and dancing, by plans made, by gossip, by friendships and lovers. She knew floor plans, knew drink specials, knew what time to show up, knew bartenders, knew who was new in town, knew how it sounded and smelled and felt. I know papers.
Do I sound jealous? I am. Obviously I wish there were more lesbian bars; this is one of my most dominant personality traits. And I’ve often succumbed to the general gay nostalgia tendency that so many of us exhibit. It comes out in different forms, and there is a special genre of gay cultural production that I think of as the Lesbian Bar Elegy. Lesbian Bar Elegies runs the gamut from essays to news articles to fine art to legitimate documentaries to documentaries sponsored by liquor companies. They can commemorate specific shuttered lesbian bars, or discuss the general phenomenon of the “disappearing lesbian bar,” or contextualize still-existing bars as fighting against a mighty wave of extinction. People in my life send me links to Lesbian Bar Elegies pretty frequently, for which I have nobody to blame but myself because I have certainly dabbled in the form. If you are someone who has sent me links to these things, please know that I love you and appreciate you thinking of me, and this is no criticism of you whatsoever!! Also, some of them are great. However, I must say that I am overall getting tired of this particular sub-genre of gay nostalgia, and much of the gay nostalgia cultural complex altogether.
I’ve dedicated the next three years of my life (at least) to the project of LGBT history, and I feel a strong conviction that my project falls within the category of useful history. To me, this means historical work that helps to explain the present and that might help us think through the future. It also means that I hope that my work might become one small tool in the arsenal of contemporary political struggles toward a more just world. I assume that most people writing LGBT history think about their work this way. We want our work to be rigorous in its treatment of the past and steadfast in its responsibility toward the people who are here, now. There’s a long tradition of LGBT history that travels far beyond the academic realm, arming contemporary queers with a knowledge of those who came before.
There’s a slippage, though, that happens online (not exclusively, but frequently) between history and nostalgia. This is a particular nostalgia experienced by young people, oriented toward a time that they (we) did not experience. This nostalgia pushes people to make idols of certain figures (Marsha P. Johnson is one example who comes to mind) who we can easily see as uncomplicatedly righteous. It helps if there are cute pictures of these figures, to form an iconography that doesn’t require much in the way of engagement with that person’s actual work. Nostalgia also leads to things like the romanticization of bandana flagging and calls for the adoption of habits that arose out of material and cultural contexts that no longer exist - there are reasons why flagging was useful, and those contexts have totally transformed!
Most of this stuff is basically harmless, even if some millennial curmudgeons (*ahem*) find it irritating. But I’m leery of a nostalgia that lives online that tries to enliven the past while it deadens the present. Do we imagine that the queers who we claim as ancestors were somehow more alive than us? What would it take to fully meet the many challenges of our own historical moment? How can we move our history-making efforts out of online spaces that are designed to be addictive and numbing, and into real-world spaces that enliven us? Can elegies inspire us to create new spaces, that serve us now? If not, how else might we relate to the past?
I am trying to make these transformations within myself, and to notice which forms of backward-gazing serve me and which do not. I do think that Lesbian Bar Elegies are tired, but lesbian bars certainly are not. So if you know anyone who might like to help finance a lesbian bar in Philadelphia…..my DMs are open.
Val's 4ever