Two new chronicles of coast-to-coast bar crawls have much more to offer readers than a vicarious hangover: Krista Burton’s Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America(Simon & Schuster. $28.99.), and Greggor Mattson’s Who Needs Gay Bars? Barhopping Through America’s Endangered LGBTQ+ Places (Stanford University Press. $30. greggorrmattson.com) vividly chronicle what may be the dying days of cherished institutions.
Burton, a freelance writer and blogger, writes in an upbeat, engaging voice that makes you feel like you’re chatting with her over beers; Mattson, Chair of Sociology at Oberlin College is a more of dry martini stylistically, but plenty accessible nonetheless. While their titles hint of crises, both books are at their best when the authors describe being happily ensconced in queer watering holes and caught up in friendly conversation with locals rather than more abstractly addressing topics like the impact of dating apps on the queer bar scene, or whether straight people should be welcomed as customers.
That said, the books make it clear that bars for LGBTQ+ people remain very much needed in more rural and conservative areas of the country, where they sometimes serve as centers for queer community building. Both authors’ meanderings lead them to Alibi’s, a lesbian-owned (but all-are-welcome) watering hole in Oklahoma City, and Mattson makes his way toBasix in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Club Xclusive in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Burton’s touching personal stories about topics including her trans-man husband and the time she took her devout Mormon mother to a gay bar make Moby Dyke a tad more suited to leisure reading, but both books offer plenty of worthy food, and drink!, for thought. They’re perhaps the best queer American travelogues since Edmund White’s States of Desire was published way back in 1980.
If you love reading about gay life, you owe a debt to the late Michael Denneny. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Denneny cofounded Christopher Street, history’s most influential gay literary magazine. He edited, published, and helped readers discover authors including Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer, Paul Monette, and Randy Shilts; and was the first openly gay editor at a major publishing house (St. Martins’ Press, where he oversaw the Stonewall Editions paperback line). Denneny, who now works as an independent editor and consultant in New York, looks back at the three final decades of the 20th Century in On Christopher Street: Life, Sex and Death after Stonewall (University of Chicago Press. $22.50). His retrospective collection of interviews, essays, and other writings is particularly valuable for its reflections on gay life between the twin tumults of the Stonewall riots, in 1969, and the AIDS crisis, beginning in the early 1980s: It’s an era that, while largely overshadowed by its momentous historical bookends, is also the very period in which “gay books” first won respect as a literary niche.
We live in speedy times. At just 32 years old, Zachary Zane is piqued by Gen Z’ers who pointedly describe themselves as pansexual after he tells them that he’s bi: “I really get the vibe that pansexuals feel like they’re out-woke-ing and one-upping bisexuals.” If Zane, author of Boyslut: A Memoir and a Manifesto (Abrams. $26. zacharyzane.com) feels defensive and old-fashioned (“I don’t want to feel like my identity is somehow outdated, ignorant or non-progressive”), maybe those of us north of 40 should resign ourselves to exile in fuddyduddydom. On the other hand, we can follow Zane’s lead in largely blowing off the never-ending nomenclature wars to focus on mutual- and self-respect in regard to sexuality and identity. Cocky, comic, and clearly heartfelt, Boyslut offers a vision of non-toxic modern masculinity that allows for all the quirks, kinks, and fetishes one’s dirty mind desires. Zane, whose writing has appeared in publications ranging from Men’s Health to OUT to The Washington Post, shamelessly details his own sexual adventures (“I’ve dommed, subbed, switched, fisted, DP-ed, spit-roasted, tied up, and cuckolded”) both to entertain readers and to help them shake off their stigmas.
