by Guy Branum
A key tool in establishing this order for representations of clubs in film is the emphasis of racial and sexual otherness in the space. Those shots of the club show beautiful people dancing, but they also show drugs, they show various kinds of queer sex, and they show racially diverse spaces. We are asked to assume that no place so diverse can be wholesome. In the film 54, this otherness is embodied in Disco Dottie, an elderly woman in slutty sequins who frequents the eponymous club. We’re supposed to be unsettled by her contribution to the carnivalesque atmosphere—shouldn’t this grandma be at home, baking blondies? Then we transition to pathos as she dies of an overdose on the dance floor in the arms of our white, male, heterosexual protagonist. This is propaganda.
Disco Dottie was based on an actual patron of Studio 54, seventy-seven-year-old attorney Sally Lippman. “Disco Sally,” as she was known, found the club not long after her husband’s death and began frequenting it. A beloved fixture, celebrities waited turns to dance with her, and she found a new boyfriend, a twenty-six-year-old she called her “Greek god.” Sally didn’t die tragically of an overdose; she wasn’t a symptom of necrotic decadence. She was a cool, powerful lady who found fun and acceptance in a diverse and happy, if libertine, world. Movies can’t tell you that story, because the only story about pleasure we want to tell is “The Ant and the Grasshopper.”
Since all I knew of clubs was what pop culture told me, I was scared of them. I was pretty certain there was no place for me there. Still, they fascinated me. They were representative of the wide swath of life I’d declared off-limits. Who would I be at a club? I wasn’t hot. Could there be not-hot people at clubs? Movies like 54 were always showing us our hot protagonist getting into the club while his or her not-hot friends, whom our protagonist should really be more loyal to, weren’t. I expected that inevitable fate. I was waiting for this cold, hateful den of shallowness and drugs to reject me. To say that there was no place for me.
Also, all of those movies about how shallow clubs were? None of them ever seemed to be about the people who couldn’t get into the club. The movie was judging the club for letting only the hot one in, but the movie itself was letting only the hot one be central. Who’s shallow now, movie?
There were two periods in my life when I went to clubs a lot. The first was in Minneapolis, in the wake of my coming out.2
When you come out of the closet, you have this interesting moment in which you might reset your life. It’s like when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil and finally saw their nakedness. I saw my nakedness and was, of course, horrified. After all, everyone is supposed to be horrified by their nakedness. We don’t like clubs for the same reason we don’t like people who like their own nakedness. Acceptance of yourself on the terms by which you exist now seems as arrogant, unambitious, and un-American as going to a place that is entirely about having fun in the present. Righteous, God-fearing citizens are too self-conscious to enjoy dancing or removing their clothes.
So, while you’re accepting that significant chunks of your closet-years self were bald lies, you get to shed other parts of yourself alongside those lies. I determined that I would put personal attention into what I wore.3 I decided that my fatness was simply a reflection of the fact that I had denied my body and sexuality. My fatness was going to end. And my being a person who sat at home on Fridays was going to end. This was my makeover montage. And we know I love a makeover montage.
I followed that line of thinking after I came out. I was going to have a whole new life. Yet I had no idea how I was going to pull it off. I did a lot of whining in my head about how figuring out a new, gay life had to be much easier for boys who’d been tempted from the closet by some dashing suitor. But whining wasn’t going to yield results. After a few months of moping around law school, I finally located a spot on the Internet4 where the gay men of Minneapolis congregated to relax and find strangers to have sex with. In its way, Gay.com, the most lamely named, now defunct website in an era of lamely named, now defunct websites, was the first club I entered. (In many ways, it was also the cruelest. However, such stories are not visual nor dynamic, so let us move forward the plot.) I found friends. Through sharp wit and strong takes, I won over some gay guys in the chat room, and we started hanging out in real life. There was Kevvy, the sweet one; Matt, the cool, sexy one; and Steve, the cautious, introspective one who was—GASP—over thirty. Essentially, Kevvy was the Charlotte; Matt was the Samantha; Steve was, fittingly, the Miranda; and since I am currently typing reflections on my laptop, let’s say I was the Carrie, even though all of you reading this should, by this point in the book, realize that I was a Miranda who slowly, over time, evolved into a Samantha.5
No one teaches you how to be gay. I know you’re going to say, “No one teaches you how to be straight,” but if you were in front of me and said that, I’d slap you and say, “Society teaches you how to be straight. Your parents taught you how to be straight. Every movie you ever saw taught you how to be straight. That’s why all those rapes in 1980s sex comedies fucked up society for years to come.” And you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, but you wouldn’t really have slapped me.” But back then, in 2000, in Minnesota, fresh from the rage and depression of coming out, I would have slapped the shit out of you. I was fucking crazy, deal with it.
I had to learn from these guys how to be gay. I used to spend a great deal of time fantasizing how much easier it’d be if I were regular and cute and had a boyfriend who was teaching me the lay of the land. But I had no such Virgil to delineate the rings of this underworld. There weren’t even YouTube videos to teach you how to clean your butt for sex back then. You had to learn from word of mouth,6 and these guys’ mouths were the ones I had. Kevvy showed me Into the Woods for the first time and gave me a basic primer on sex hole sanitation. Steve taught me how to dote on a boyfriend, how to pine after an ex-boyfriend, and how to get blown in the back room of a club.7 And Matt, he taught me the best lessons: how to drink, how to be promiscuous, how to have swagger, and, most important, how to go to a club.
I was scared shitless of going to a club for all the culturally defined reasons cataloged above. Furthermore, it was a gay club; visiting it would mean all my desires would be laid bare before me. I couldn’t sneak a look at a cute boy, then run and hide behind the pretense of heterosexuality. I was going to play the real game. But mostly, my fear was rooted in the fact that my body was abnormal. I’d be showing up there fat. Fat in the way that gay men and people at clubs are not supposed to be. My essential fear was that someone would say, “You should go; this place is not for you.”
I have gone to great lengths to argue that we do not tell positive stories about clubs in TV or film, but there is an area of American culture where club life is celebrated as paradise: popular music. 50 Cent drinks Bacardi like it’s his birthday in the club, Nicki Minaj steps up in that party like her name is “That Bitch,” Destiny’s Child leaves their man at home because the club is full of ballers, Beyoncé even skips to the front of the line. And these songs encourage people to do exactly the destructive things that curse the supporting characters in our nightclub movies: sex, drugs, and living in the moment. Pitbull insists you give everything tonight, because we might not get a tomorrow. Nicki Minaj blows off all her money and she don’t give two shits. One reason songs celebrate the culture of clubs is obvious: They are played in them. Dance music and clubs have a commensal need to romanticize the other; they, with alcohol, cocaine, and genitals, are vested stakeholders in the thriving concern of nightlife fun.
Now you may point out that the first document I cited to prove our popular disdain for nightlife was a song. This leads us to the second reason clubs are positively referenced in songs. Yes, “Shape of You” shits on clubs, but who sings “Shape of You”? A white guy. A significant aspect of the demonization of clubs rests on the diversity of the clientele. In Cocktail, Tom Cruise8 goes from his white, middle-class suburban family bar in New Jersey to a Manhattan club full of drugs, r
ich people, black people (there aren’t many, but that’s still a lot for a Tom Cruise movie in 1988), and maybe even gays. In 54, Ryan Phillippe makes the same journey from New Jersey to a place with even more queers and people of color. The reason pop music is able to be enthusiastic about clubs is because, unlike films or TV, it’s often made by queers and people of color.
Mainstream films cost millions of dollars to make and release; television, until recently, took nearly as much money and the cooperation of a major TV network. This meant control of such ventures usually rested in the hands of white, cisgender, heterosexual men. Making a song is way more democratic, and it means queers and people of color have been able to make music for ourselves for decades. Twenty years ago when gay characters9 weren’t even allowed a chaste peck in a mainstream movie, German electronic music group Interactive made a dance song that was just the word “dildo” repeated over and over again.10 Part of the reason nightlife movies are showing you diverse club-goers is because those clubs are powered by music from LGBT people and people of color. A nice guy like Ed Sheeran might be focused on meeting a nice girl he can settle down with at the bar, but for a gay kid without the protection of his family or society, giving everything tonight because he might not have a tomorrow makes more sense. Film had spent my entire life telling me that clubs were sordid and dangerous. What I didn’t realize was the reason it thought they were so “dangerous” was because they were full of people like me.
I went, on a Thursday, to the Saloon. This was the crown jewel of the gay week in Minneapolis—nay, the entire upper Midwest. Guys came from as far as Duluth and Eau Claire to partake of this Lutheran bacchanal. And it wasn’t just any Thursday; this was the Thursday of Pride Weekend, the formal beginning of the most decadent four days Minneapolis could contain. The Bud Light flowed like water.
On a Thursday one year before, I was working at one of the large law firms in Minneapolis, and one of our file clerks, an exceedingly gay one, perfunctorily informed his supervisor that he’d be back on Tuesday. When I asked her why, she said, “Oh, he takes off for Pride every year . . . plus one day for recovery.” This, to a closeted me, was the height of glamour. I wanted to be that gay guy.11 Now I was that gay guy.
The Saloon in Minneapolis was what midwestern gay bars have long been: a black, windowless club that protected the privacy of patrons who may not have been out in every aspect of their life. It also carried the midwestern responsibility of being as many types of bars as possible under one roof. In a town where you didn’t have too many gay options, you needed a space that could be a dance club, a video bar, a bingo parlor, and a barbecue. I think at this point in time, the Saloon even had four PCs in one of the bars so you could troll for sex and/or check your eBay auctions. (The first tech bubble was great.) The Saloon was and is a magical, sexy place. Yes, it was full of midwestern practicality, but it was the kind of strong, attractive, well-educated practicality that made Minnesota homosexuals so valuable as Broadway chorus boys or Disney Cruise Herculeses.
I entered, shaken. My body was raw to the experience of being perceived by strangers as gay. Not just strangers. Hot strangers. It prickled. They knew me. They knew what I wanted. If seeing my own nakedness was bad, this was excoriating. I’m sure I made that dumb “look at this” face Ryan Phillippe made when he first went into the club in 54. Luckily, I had my friends—guides who could pull me out of panic and into the back-room bar.
I got drunk. Matt told me to order a Malibu and pineapple.12 It was delicious, and after months of starving myself into a new identity I’d never achieve, the decadent run of simple sugars into my system was as intoxicating as the alcohol. Finally, I understood why all my high school classmates had been so thirsty while trying to flirt with each other.
Sliding into the warm onesie of tipsiness, I took in what was around me. Boys dressed smartly in a way I never could. Cheekbones. Abs. Rough and confident bartenders. Comfort. Prowess.
Then I noticed that something was off. The guys in this bar were bad dancers. I thought that gay guys were supposed to be good dancers. It was early in the evening, and the dance floor was pretty sparse. I couldn’t tell if what I was seeing was an insight about the homosexuals of Minneapolis or just errata. It was, however, just the cruel judgement I needed to feel a little less exposed.13
I was to learn over the course of the following year that what I was seeing was solid, representative data about the dancing skills of Minneapolis. I’m not saying they’re all terrible dancers; like I mentioned before, many of them go on to be highly successful Flying Monkeys in touring productions of Wicked, or the previously referenced Disney Cruise Herculeses. I’m just saying that a combination of bulky winter wear, Norwegian emotional distance, closeted-gay alienation from one’s own physicality, and fierce cultural isolation make the gay men of Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas not the most amazing at isolated hip motion.
That evening at the Saloon, I went wild. I talked to strangers. I danced. I grabbed guys’ butts. I know we’re not supposed to grab strangers’ butts anymore, but I would kindly ask you how I was supposed to know that then. Had I seen gay men socializing on TV or in movies? Had anyone talked to me about it? “Well,” you would say, “you should just know that’s not proper behavior.” I would respond by asking you if consensual gay sex is proper behavior, because the sequence we are discussing is taking place in a state that had14 a perfectly valid sodomy law on the books. As a law student, I could tell you that what each and every person was doing in that bar was, technically, conspiracy to commit sodomy, thus a felony. Should I have just known what was right, acceptable behavior? In a place that my parents and culture had spent my life telling me was morally wrong and corrupt, was I supposed to instinctively know right from wrong? Was it so simply evident? Later, on the dance floor, when a gentleman slid his hand down Matt’s pants and started giving him a hand job without saying a word, was that a wrong that this man was supposed to have intuited, or was it fucking great?15
What cultural context I did have was from those movies we discussed before, the movies that said there was no safe or moral way to be a person in a club. In for a penny, in for a pound. Once you start barbacking at a club, you’re just a few montages away from doing cocaine, making out with a person of the same sex, making out with someone who is not hot (the greatest indignity) but from whom you want something, and then, finally, eventually, selling your baby for crystal meth. I had abandoned the propriety I knew. Like Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, my pretenses to propriety were gone, and all that remained were my desires. I must be sad when I have cause, eat when I have stomach, sleep when I am drowsy and laugh when I am merry. It must not be denied, but I am a plain-dealing villain.
I grabbed butts. It was Pride Weekend. People were having a good time and seemed pretty comfortable facilitating the good time of others in whatever way they could. Some let me know they weren’t interested with a simple facial expression, so I left them alone. I’d started homosexuality far too late to waste too much time with people who were less interested in fun than I was. My point is that I did it: I had a good time at a gay bar, and if you’re looking to lecture people about transgressive and exploitative sexual behavior, maybe focus on the sexual orientation that systematically dehumanizes and disempowers half of their participants. Gay guys are different, our system works differently, and I don’t necessarily need straight men and women to tell me how my community is supposed to mirror theirs. After twenty-three years of longing, I got to touch some butts and some pectorals. It was pretty great.
Though I had been dropped into very cold water, I learned to swim. Minneapolis was just the right size to have a different place to go every night of the week, but never two places to go on any night. I met guys, and while I lusted after some, I befriended others.
Underneath the very real fun, though, was an ever-present fear: Eventually, someone was going to tell me that I was too fat to be there.
One of the first times16 I was at the Saloon,
I saw The Most Beautiful Boy in Minneapolis.17 I recognized him from online. His Gay.com username was LukeMichael, and he was a six-foot-eight-inch dancer who went to college in Iowa. He had perfect abs and golden hair and a beautiful face and was generally the kind of muscular, trim, goyische golden beauty that I had always dreamed of being or touching. He was dressed exactly as a gay man was supposed to dress in 2000: powder blue T-shirt, male capris, male slides with a SMALL heel, and an upside-down turned-around visor. I was young and simple and knew that if I were someone like him, I would have no problems. I just wanted to know what all that absence of problems smelled like.18
We were out on the patio of the Saloon, relatively early in the evening. I was sitting down, waiting for my friends to show, and LukeMichael came out with his small court of attendant almost-but-not-quite-as-hot guys. I heard him say something about Gay.com, and I went in hot. Going in hot would eventually become my signature move: Storm into a stranger’s conversation, co-opt it, and make them fall in love with me in the process.19 It’s my favorite sport. Unfortunately, at this point 197in time, I had no idea what I was doing, so I stammered out some line about how LukeMichael was out for a lovely evening and should stop focusing on the virtual experience of online chat. Even the take was hack. LukeMichael simply turned his head away. His eyes didn’t need to suffer my unpleasant countenance. Another guy, his grand vizier, chief among his almost-as-hot friends, turned to manage me. “Ummm . . . Hi, sorry, but we don’t come here to meet new people. We just want to talk to our friends.”