Word spread that if you want to experience what the community was like, go there. I love older spaces and things from a different time. I heard, "It's for the older crowd." But I was curious. Michael: Yes, the oldest currently operating. Julius (in the Village) is the oldest place, right?
Kyle: My favorite is probably the Ninth Circle (a fab West 10 th Street steakhouse-turned-gay-bar full of leather clones, twinks, hustlers, and celebrity drop-ins, all either cruising, playing pool, doing drugs, or rubbing against each other.) The location was so great-Mapplethorpe, Warhol and Lou Reed were all there in the late '60s. Once a year-for three years in a row-they've done Gay Bars That Are Gone, an informative walk as part of Jane Jacobs festival, in May. By day, Kyle does comedy, historic restoration, and works for Wilsonart, while Michael is involved with TED (as in TED Talks). To learn more about the places we miss, I turned to Kyle Supley and Michael Ryan, who specialize in documenting the formative days of bar hopping. (She died in 2014.There will always be gay bars, but will they be as vivid, sexy, and subversive as the haunts of yore? The history of NYC nightlife is studded with the memories of fascinating boîtes that attracted gays in desperate need of connection, then ultimately fell away as newer spots and trends emerged. “We keep these spaces alive by going to them,” Rathert, a registered nurse who works with homeless LGBTQ youth, rousingly concluded as we stood outside Henrietta Hudson, shortly after a guest speaker had told us about the great butch African-American shero Stormé DeLarverie, the self-appointed “guardian” of West Village lesbians who worked as a bouncer at Henrietta’s (among many other dyke bars over the decades) until 2005, well into her eighties. One example: The current occupant of 21 Seventh Avenue South, the former home of Crazy Nanny’s (1991–2003 or 2004) - which I used to frequent in the mid-to-late Nineties and where, prompted by the thought-experiment directive of Nic Rathert, our tour guide, I remembered delivering my best pickup line - is Dogma, a high-end canine day care and spa. (Too far to walk to, Meow Mix, the East Village dyke redoubt that closed in 2004, was noted during the tour, as was Catty Shack, the two-story lez emporium in Park Slope owned by Meow Mix’s Brooke Webster that opened in 2006 and closed a few years later.) Winding our way through these downtown blocks, we were reminded of the absurdities of New York real estate, of the obscenities of Manhattan boutiques. Over the two-hour stroll, we visited the former addresses of some of the mighty Manhattan lavender fortresses that had fallen - the Duchess, Bonnie & Clyde’s, Crazy Nanny’s - many the victims, at least in part, of gentrification.
Stormé DeLarverie greeting women outside the Cubby Hole in 1986. Although that number is puny - according to Alana Integlia, one of the founding members of Dyke Bar Takeover and the project’s researcher, in 2015 there were 53 LGBTQ (read: mostly gay-guy) bars, down from 86 in 1985 - several major cities, like Philadelphia and, astonishingly, San Francisco, now have no lez clubs at all. These bars, along with Ginger’s in Park Slope and the Bum Bum Bar in Woodside, Queens, are the only four nightspots in the city catering specifically to queer women year-round. We had assembled for the inaugural “Dyke Bar Walking Tour,” a psychogeographical, herstorical odyssey sponsored by Dyke Bar Takeover, which, per its Facebook page, “is a group of artists and activists dedicated to creating and supporting Queer space for self-identified women, transgender and gender non-conforming people of all races.” (Proceeds from the event, which charged $25, or $15 for pre-registrants, are going to the Trans Justice Funding Project and the New York City Dyke March.) We were there to drink and mingle at two sapphic boîtes: The tour, divided into two groups, kicked off at 2:30 at the Cubbyhole, at the corner of West 4th and West 12th streets, and concluded, after a short detour east, at Henrietta Hudson, about half a mile south. We were in search of the lost lesbian bar.
On a recent hot Sunday afternoon in the West Village, roughly fifty daughters of Gomorrah - and some allies - gathered to go on a time quest of our own. It was a French gay male neurasthenic, nearly a century ago, who perhaps best expressed the particular paradox of lesbian recognition: “The daughters of Gomorrah are at once rare enough and numerous enough for one not to pass unnoticed by another in any given crowd,” wrote Marcel Proust in La Captive (1923), the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time.