Free Labor of Love by Moira Weigel Page A

speakeasy was being able to ignore anyone who did not interest you. Being in public offered the same opportunity to women who had no interest in men.
    â€œGo away, I’m a lesbian! Get out of my life!” Pat Bond would shout when one of these men approached her. She felt both gleeful and enraged. The protection that being in the bar offered was not foolproof. Sometimes the men got angry when they realized that she was not pretending. Sometimes they waited outside to beat up dykes. Sometimes the cops raided the place. When they did, the women they abused and insulted had little recourse.
    Even in the best-case scenario, having to repeat I’m a lesbian! Get out of my life! again and again got tiring. But bit by bit, as women who wanted to date women continued to do so, and to tell off gawkers, they started to create something new: publicly recognized lesbian spaces.
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    The uncertainties involved in going out are a big part of its allure. The fun of flirting is that you are never sure what it means. The people we meet out , we approach because something attracts us. It might be his hair, or her glasses, or simply a beautiful face, the gender of which we cannot pin down. Often it is something intangible that we glimpse in the moment of our encounter. A gesture. A laugh. A way of ordering a drink. Something gives us a sense that we want to know more.
    In many ways, this wanting to know is the most exciting part of going out. It has an edge of risk. Not only do we not know whether the other person is interested in us. We cannot really know how interested we are until we have flirted. Our own level of interest is one of the things we are trying to gauge by flirting. Smiling back at a stranger across the room, you know little about her apart from the fact that you like her smile. This not knowing is an appealing change from the obligatory feel of many setups, Internet dates, or workplace intrigues, the rote feel of the questions you ask and the answers you get.
    Some risks, however, are not exciting to run at all. Almost everyone who goes out who is not a straight, white, and gender conforming man will at some point fear that a flirtation has put him or her in danger. To worry all the time weighs on you, oppressing you even if you never actually meet with violence.
    â€œMen do not text one another that they got home safe,” one friend points out.
    â€œIf a guy wants to know what it feels like,” another jokes, “he should try watching Fatal Attraction . For the rest of his life, he should watch it before every time he goes out.”
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    This was why José Sarria wanted to make the Black Cat Café a gay bar. Owner Sol Stouman hired Sarria as a waiter in the early 1950s. By that time, the Black Cat was already famous as a destination for Beats and Bohemians. The Armed Forces Disciplinary Control Board had added it to a list of establishments that military personnel were forbidden to enter, and Allen Ginsberg declared it “the best gay bar in America.”
    But at that time it was not quite “gay” yet.
    â€œIt was very subtle,” Sarria recalled. “Not like it was in later years.”
    In the 1950s, the Black Cat was a “wide-open” bar that allowed any kind of dress and behavior. Famous gay men like Truman Capote visited, but so did the Hollywood actors Bette Davis and Gene Kelly.
    â€œEverybody” went there, Ginsberg wrote. There were “all sorts and kinds of people”: “heterosexual and homosexual.” There were “gay screaming queens,” “longshoremen” and even “heterosexual gray flannel suit types.” “All the poets went.”
    Jack Kerouac set part of his seminal Beat novel On the Road in the Black Cat. The scenes where it appears make clear that the mix Ginsberg loved could be a liability as well as a source of excitement. The protagonist, Sal Paradise, admits to