Lesbian bars

Krista Burton wrote an unusual essay that appeared  in the Sunday’s New York Times entitled, “I Want My Lesbian Bars Back.”  In it, Burton bemoans the fact that so many lesbian bars have gone out of business.  “I love hanging out with my people, but these days I hardly ever go to lesbian bars,” she whines.  “I want clear, dedicated spaces where queers hang out, places that sneering teenagers can drive past and secretly wonder about.”  She acknowledges that society has become more accepting, “But there is still a need for queers to have a community with spaces of their own.”

Just as astonishingly, over 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and over 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education, African American students at a number of different universities are demanding—and getting--- segregated dorms for blacks.  Black students at Oberlin College recently sent a letter to the president of the college demanding, among other things, that the college provide them with a “blacks only” recreation center.  California State pushed this concept even further and held a “blacks only” retreat, as did Columbia University.

So after a multigenerational battle to achieve acceptance and mainstreaming (more recently for gays), it seems that some LGBT and African Americans are waxing nostalgic for the good old days of separatism. In one of the scenes in the movie Hidden Figures, one of the African American mathematicians has to take long breaks because the “coloreds only” women’s bathroom is way on the other side of the NASA complex.   Is that the world that they want to return to?

I am not wholly unsympathetic to this desire.  It is part of human nature to want to commune with people that share common interests, characteristics, and problems.   This need can manifest itelf in different ways—both informally and formally.   “Girls night out,” or “Boys night out,” rarely raises an eyebrow, even today.  Many professional and trade organizations have women’s groups.  One of the professional organization to which I belong has both a women’s group and a group devoted to networking activities for young people—a Next Gen group.  The Booth School of Business, for instance, has an African American Business Association and even a Pakistan Club. These associations and clubs do address certain segments of people with certain commonalities. 

But the new push by some African Americans for separate facilities in universities and the opinion piece by Ms. Burton raises certain issues.   While these associations are formed out of a common bond, they are also implicitly or explicitly exclusionary.  To what extent are we ok with them and who gets to exercise this exclusionary privilege?    To what extent may we exclude by race, gender or sexual preference?   Does the preference always flow one way?   Almost all the bastions of white male bonding have been torn down.  Country clubs and eating clubs no longer exclude by race or gender (although many still are at least implicitly exclusionary by religion—there are Catholic country clubs and Jewish country  clubs).  May only perceived “victim classes” have their own places and clubs?  A liberal friend of mine was surprised and a bit disdainful to learn that my Catholic parish still had a men’s club (although I am sure that many of his friends belong to Jewish country clubs), as he saw that as a vestige of archaic patriarchy.   What makes it ok for a lesbian to yearn for the good old days of lesbian bars but if a man rues the day they permitted women to become members of his country club, he is derided as some sort of knuckle-dragging misogynist.   And now that we have learned that mortality rates for white middle aged males have contracted recently (mostly as a result of stress, alcohol and drug use and suicide),  perhaps they now qualify for their own victim class and can return to their historical segregated communal groups.  

But I am not too rigid about this.  I was generally supportive when Milwaukee introduced the concept of a limited number of schools for black males (although it got shot down by the courts) and I believe that HBCU’s still have a role to play and a place in our society.  I have been supportive and helpful to the Network of Women and the Minority Business Development Agency Capital Center at our local business trade organizations.  But the demands of black students for a separate dorms  and rec centers and the desire of LGBT folks for their own bars smacks a little of wanting to have it both ways—of wanting to be both mainstream and segregated and just picking and choosing when it suits them,  without the reciprocal privileges offered to people outside their group. 

It would be a perverse thing if university presidents started overturning Brown v. Board of Education piecemeal.  Returning to lesbian bars and segregated dorms are, I think, a bridge too far.