Sappho's Overhead Projector

by Bonnie J. Morris

  “No. Stay here in town and fight. I’m not ready to be a museum piece,” Moira argued. “Putting our community into an archive— that feels like giving in. Preserving the mere idea of us when we’re still alive, when the bar is doing fine. Isn’t it?” She looked at Isabel, then burst into tears.

  Isabel moved quickly to stand in the circle of angry, confused bar patrons. “This community is safe,” she assured Moira, and Letty, and Dog and Yvette and Trale. “I’m keeping the bar going as long as you need. But we can’t hide from the changes of history, of our own time. This is one of the last women’s bars to have a private membership and café. We might well have a memorial in the manner Hannah’s grad students staged today, reciting instead the names of former lesbian bars.”

  “We created a time capsule right from the beginning,” Trale nodded. “Before the bar even opened so those who came later would be sure to see us for who we were. Not just a random collection of characters, but a tribe. A family. That capsule should be updated right now, this afternoon, while we’re all here.” She stood up, knees creaking. “Anyone with me?”

  “Well, if I could pick any dyke bar to be the dyke bar for display, it would be us here in this fuckin’ awesome space,” Letty went on, ignoring the fresh panic on Moira’s face. “I mean, we are it. Maybe we’ve always been kinda museum-ready, not because we’re aging out but because we’re still major full-on. You want a showcase bar some future kids can learn from, you won’t do better than what we had here. I mean, what we still have here,” she corrected herself; but it was too late.

  Too late.

  Hannah saw it. They all saw it: Isabel’s lips moving to shape the four words they recognized, on a regular basis, as the start to anything odd happening. Isabel was murmuring, “So mote it be.”

  “No!” shouted Hannah.

  Then Isabel seemed to spill outward, colorfully, like a poured dosage of strong paint spreading to fill a palette, and her voice boomed out an unexpected question— yet recognizable as a question every one of them had carried in their hearts all year: “Would you rather fade out over the coming years, ever less powerful, or disappear at your peak, forever remembered at your Amazon best?”

  And, with a puff of lavender smoke, the bar vanished. The doors slammed shut on a platform of wood and walls that glowed, just briefly, and then faded into air.

  Hannah felt herself plunged into a whirlwind of paper and heat, bodies and moisture, spilled beer and song sheets. She grabbed for Isabel’s hand. Isabel’s hand slipped from hers. There was only Isabel’s voice calling, “Wait for me there,” and then a swift lateral plunge into warm darkness. Falling, but not falling. A sense of placement by an unseen hand, or hands.

  Then lights came on again, most peculiarly as though streaming from the disco ball of the bar— the mechanism inside of which Trale and other founding members had once hidden the 1970s time capsule of the old bar. The disco ball was turning, and Hannah felt herself dancing— her feet not quite on the floor. She was dancing, but bumping up against a sharp edge like a wall, a defined space at the side of the floor. Something smooth and hard surrounded her at arms’ length. Glass!

  “I had to do it,” thundered a voice, and she looked up to see the Overhead Herself, projecting the sorrowful wise light of her ancient eyes downward through the bar’s disco ball; and Hannah saw that other mortal heads were also downward-peering as the Overhead faded back. The top of the bar had become a closed but see-through wall, filled with staring faces. The entire bar had been transported, all of them, except Isabel (where are you, Isabel?)— transported in perfect miniaturized preservation to the long glass case of the Great Hall in the Library of Congress.

  They were inside the first-ever exhibit on lesbian bars. No: they were the exhibit. Their bar was on display, and they were sealed in it, with no visible way out for any of the membership.

  They had become— all of them— lesbians under glass.

  • • •

  Everyone stood stock still, looking upward. Enormous tourists gawked at the tiny lesbians, some laughing and pointing, some taking photographs with exotic mobile devices Hannah had never seen before. We must be in the future, a not-too-distant future, she thought, straining to see if any of the bodies above them were clothed in sweatshirts with telltale NCAA tournament dates or graduation years. Her own watch had stopped again.

  There! There was Isabel, back behind the bar, mixing drinks as if nothing unusual had occurred. She had managed to stay cool and collected even in miniature, even with her bar served up as a remnant of late twentieth-/early twenty-first century dyke life. “Calm down,” she ordered. “Look around. The bar is preserved here in its entirety. Can you not understand?”

  Panicked cries subsided to puzzled silence. Then Letty announced, “Hell, yeah. Everything came with us. Bar still functions, right? Pool balls move? So we get to party on. I’ll have a beer— or eight. Trale, get over here and chalk that cue up. Damn if it ain’t playtime for all eternity!”

  “Not all eternity,” Isabel suggested. “Just a rehearsal. Moira, you said you weren’t ready to be a museum piece yet. But someone has to want us enough to keep us going in our own time. Our inheritors will have to bring us back, so we can live out our real lives in full.”

  As she spoke, more enormous heads loomed over them, this time four cultural anthropologists taking notes. Shoni gave them the finger, yelling, “Not again! First my ancestors, then me? Get me out of this museum!”

  Why couldn’t the Overhead intervene? Why had the Overhead put them there? Was this the next assignment? But couldn’t the Overhead prevent the vanishing of lesbian culture— keep it going just a little bit longer in Hannah’s time?

  Then Hannah recalled her long-ago first meeting with the Overhead, a Goddess in exile whose desk was littered with the material culture of women’s history. She would express her frustration by occasionally sweeping one long arm across her desk to scatter goddess figures and papers and gems off the desk’s edge, letting artifacts land in earthly fissures, caves, and cracks. Patriarchy had reduced the reach of Her power. Like Hannah, She had been denied tenure. All She was able to do was scatter women’s heritage where it might be rediscovered and appraised in a future time. A powerful rain: of memories from Her powerful reign.

  Hannah’s generation of women’s history scholars had carefully examined those ancient goddess sculptures and carvings and cuneiform writings to understand lost rituals women once celebrated. So why wouldn’t Hannah’s own tribe of party-throwing dykes be of interest to future historians? Would these later scholars be able to understand, by observing a model lesbian bar, how lesbians like Hannah had lived? Would they piece together broken shards of Olivia records and hear the siren songs of Cris Williamson?

  And in the future maybe everything was preserved, yet moving, under glass. Jordan Matthews had warned of this! In her letter to future readers! She had scrawled fiercely, “Even if all that might remain is one rusted pin declaring DYKE lying propped on velvet in some history museum, you will know we tried to share what we had. We may soon all be lesbians under glass . . .” It was already happening, anyway, thought Hannah. Her own undergraduate students had preferred to read on glass. Their encounters with women’s writing came from a tablet, a computer, a laptop.

  But at Sappho’s Bar and Grill, there was another aspect. They were all under glass because they were under the spell of Isabel’s drinks. Isabel had crossed time and space to collect and bottle the essence of lesbians and serve it back to the community, Sappho’s fragments soaking in oceans and rivers of time, water drawn up by women and girls who spread that lost poetry over their fields and gardens, food grown and fed to other women who birthed daughters nursed with breast milk formed from poet-water’s nutrients.

  Isabel had the essence of lesbians stored in the bar’s wine cellar, bottled in the cellar, enough original essence to re-create all the lesbian energy of time. That had been Isabel’s assignment, to be the great Mixologist and Brewmistr
ess who took the best women in any community, introduced them, and mixed their hearts with essences of others. In the veins of each member of Sappho’s Bar, lesbian history flowed. And if the bar was preserved in its entirety under glass, that meant the wine cellar had to be accessible, too, for these anthropologists of the future to pass along, preserve.

  Or maybe no one in the future cared at all. What if future administrators at the Library saw this very queer exhibit as just a temporary attraction, then shoved it in a box for remote storage?

  They could be suffocated in some archival packing crate, like the one Hannah had rescued from off-site agony— never seen, handled, touched, loved, known, ever again. They’d have to wait for some future Hannah Stern person to reshelve them, get them back to their own time. And if nobody cared?

  Her panicked existentialism was interrupted by Yvette’s practical action. “Hey!” Yvette shouted. “We all still have our cell phones. Let’s call our families!”

  Hands reached into back pockets, coat pockets, backpacks. There was a moment of mad scramble. Then:

  “I can’t get a signal,” Carol wailed.

  “I can’t get on Wi-Fi,” Dog howled.

  But Hannah stood up from her favorite padded barstool, and walked unsteadily toward the bar’s old wall phone, dangling as ever in its built-in shelf. She caught her lover’s eye, and Isabel nodded. Then Hannah dialed 202-554-4876.

  Deep within the Library of Congress, a very old pay phone began to ring in the visitors’ ladies’ room.

  It rang and rang, and they all waited, the good women of Sappho’s Bar and Grill. Who would answer the call? Who would rescue lesbian life and culture from being stifled under glass, relegated to history, made into a museum piece before its time? Who would revive the old-fashioned dyke bar, rebuild women’s bookstores, produce women’s music festivals again?

  The next generation. The next generation. The next generation.

  “But they have to want to,” Trale put in. “They have to want us.” She looked at Isabel and at Hannah, both of whom were forty years younger than herself. “You wanted me around. You kept it up: this bar, dyke herstory. So, it’s possible that the next round will keep a place for you, like you kept a place for me. Hell, we all have more than one life. Wasn’t Joan of Arc made a saint, eventually?” She went back to shooting pool.

  Ring. Ring.

  Moira wept openly, Yvette clenching her hand. Shoni lit sage. Bits of smoke escaped from the chipped edges of the glass case, startling the visitors above.

  The visitors above . . .

  “Look!” Hannah pointed. There, in the Great North Hall, in one painted mural on the ceiling far above the display case imprisoning them, was the only image of a woman among the many murals of famous men. How had she forgotten? She’d walked under this mural every day during her year of work at the Library of Congress, smiling to herself.

  “It’s a mural of Sappho,” Dog said, awed.

  “It’s the portal to the Overhead,” said Hannah. “Sappho is the Overhead Projector, and the Overhead’s Protector.”

  “I sure as shit don’t know what-all that means,” Letty complained.

  Ring. Hannah knew they needed someone. She had always been married to the movement and now she needed someone else to want, that badly, to be wedded to lesbian culture. Someone to step up to their altar and vow to protect them, through sickness and health. Ring. “And with this ring I do thee wed . . .” Ring. O, younger generation, will you marry us?

  And in the bathroom, someone picked up the phone. Hannah heard the unmistakable low voice of her graduate student, Dez, tentatively saying, “Hello?”

  That’s right! She promised to come to Washington after finishing her dissertation. She promised to work with me Very Long Distance. She must have headed to D.C. and the Library of Congress right after burying those textbooks at my old classroom. Why that classroom? Hannah wondered suddenly, though recognizing it as the last place she’d ever stood at a lectern and taught.

  But she already knew the answer. Dez had taken the old, unused, overhead projector that had started Hannah’s journey one year back. Dez, twenty years younger than Hannah, was the next generation that stood by to inherit her community’s power, to continue working in women’s history, with Sappho as her guide. Dez, faithful to them here in a future decade, could open that portal above them, and project them back to their own time, where the younger Dez needed Hannah and the bar members to mentor her forward. They’d fly back under Sappho’s wings, Amelia Earhart guiding them, the bar and its essences returned safely and good for one more generation— and maybe more.

  Isabel stood by nodding as Hannah clutched the phone.

  “Hello?” said Dez, the pilot of the next generation, ready to fly very long distance in service to women’s history. And Hannah whispered, “Save us. Save us. Save us.”

  Acknowledgments

  This is a work of fiction, with certain liberties taken regarding the Library of Congress “loading dock” and other aspects. However, there is indeed a mural of Sappho on the ceiling of the Jefferson Building, and a pay phone in the women’s bathroom on the first floor, with the phone number 202-554-4876. For immersion in the culture and structure of the Library of Congress, I am grateful to librarian Meg Metcalf and my colleagues in the LOC Women’s History and Gender Studies Discussion Group. For discussion on aspects of curating at the Smithsonian, I thank my friend Katherine Ott. For insights on library book culling, shredding, and repair, I thank Laura Brezel. For the time and space to work on this manuscript, I am most grateful to Veronica Calarco and my friends at the Stiwdio Maelor residency in Corris, Wales. Finally, I am of course grateful for the thoughtful guidance and enthusiastic support I enjoy at Bywater Books.

  About the Author

  Bonnie Morris earned her PhD in women’s history from Binghamton University and has taught Sports and Gender for over twenty years at campuses ranging from UC Berkeley to Georgetown and George Washington Universities. She is the author of sixteen books, including three Lambda Literary Finalists (Eden Built by Eves, Girl Reel, Revenge of the Women’s Studies Professor), two national first-prize chapbooks (The Schoolgirl’s Atlas, Sixes and Sevens) and the critical feminist texts Women’s History for Beginners, The Feminist Revolution, and The Disappearing L. Her recent exhibit on women’s music at the Library of Congress broke new ground in showcasing lesbian albums, and she is now a historical consultant to the Smithsonian Institute, the AP U.S. History exam, Disney Animation, the State Department’s International Visitor program and the Global Women’s Institute. She may be found lec-turing on C-Span, Olivia Cruises, Semester at Sea, the National Women’s Music Festival, and on Pacifica Radio KPFK.

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  Copyright © 2018 Bonnie J. Morris

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61294-140-0

  Bywater Books First Edition: November 2018

  Cover designer: Ann McMan, TreeHouse Studio

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