A Dyke Bar in Toledo, Ohio
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Gertrude, for I drove past burnt-out houses and abandoned hospitals with limb-twitching anxiety, hopefully gripping a plastic steering wheel.
In a boot-lacing crisis and hoping for guidance I went to the strobe-lit gay bar looking for a woman of your luster.
What matching cargo pants! Deck shoes and T-shirts! What closeted teachers wearing sweaters at night! Bathrooms filled by the doubles! I saw long-hair tucked up in Tiger’s hats, vomit on linoleum, and you, Christy White — what were you doing gripping your girlfriend’s arm, pushing her out the plywood hinged door?
I saw you, Gertrude, you curmudgeonly old mister looking strong-eyed at the woman bringing you whiskey. I saw what you asked of them, each bender that bumped your elbow: Who decorates this joint? What’s all this yapping about? Where is my Picasso?
In and out of the backroom I followed your lead, dodging the dirty condoms, diving into clouds of thick smoke for the ripest look at the color gray. We opened and closed every cabinet door behind the bartender, looking for limes, donning gay.com x-tra large t-shirts, slipping past the shriveling doorman, flashing my fake ID.
Where are you going, Gertrude Stein? There’s after hours at Hooters! Down what alley will the clicking of Basket’s nails us in the morning? Return with me over potholes and past the old Jeep plant. The woosh of the cars adds noise to noise; don’t wake the family as you enter.
Ah, dear stubbornness, stately old dismantler. What America did your inheritance let you leave behind when you donned your hat and strolled to the Paris square with Alice on your elbow? How did a life without punching a time clock get you sat down in a house of small paintings thinking about a piece of coffee?
This poem is part of a wider poetry project I am working on that engages the writings and teachings of Lesbian ancestors. This poem is unique to the project in that it touches four layers of white American queer literary ancestors — it is inspired by and written in the tone of my favorite poem by Allan Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California. The poem is itself an imagined run-in with his queer literary ancestor, Walt Whitman. In this poem, Ginsberg imagines that he goes into a well-lit grocery store, a fairly new phenomenon at the time Ginsberg wrote the poem in 1955.
He sees Whitman touching the displays of fruit with joy, sampling the artichokes, and weaving among the brilliant displays of cans stacked up. He sees Whitman cruising young men and asking a question that would have been quite normal in Whitman’s time — who killed this pig I am considering eating? Ginsberg follows Whitman around the store and then they leave together. As they stroll Ginsberg wonders if it’ll be dark in their separate houses, then in the next sentence they are mourning a lost America together while returning to a cottage that is collectively theirs. They belong to each other.
While the poem starts with Ginsberg encountering Whitman as an ancestor that he’s enthralled to see, Whitman becomes a kind of lover and companion at the end of the poem. Whitman joins Ginsberg and is in some ways an internal emotional guide for how Ginsberg interprets and experiences the world he’s moving in in 1955. These interpretations are attuned to the wonder Whitman expresses about the industrial colonization projects of early America such as the building of the Brooklyn Bridge or the movement of white people West into Indigenous territories and the landscape he encounters. As problematic as we can see Whitman and Ginsberg’s white man roles as authorities in what U.S. cultures were at the time of their writing (and as kings of U.S. poetic canon in their eras) the poem is also a model to me of ancestral intimacy. Imperfect evidence that you/I/we are not a mistake nor an anomaly.
As a young Butch poet, I was so grateful to have evidence of my own kind among the canon of poets I had access to — Eileen Myles, Letta Neely, and Akilah Oliver were all living in close proximity to me when I was writing, and I cherished their work and their existence. Gertrude Stein seemed far away and magical to me — this clearly masculine clearly Lesbian public figure who was in this symbiotic two-woman partnership. She wrote in a different time, wrote in a style of writing that gave no fucks about the established conventions or a need to assimilate to what was considered palatable writing from women at the time.
After the sheen of wonder wore off, I began to reflect on how my working-class young adulthood was so different from a queer young adult path Stein had and would have had if we dwelled in the same place-time. She was wealthy — she went to Harvard’s woman’s college, Radclyffe, and studied medicine at Johns Hopkins long before student loan debt was a path available for women to thrust themselves toward upper-middle-class stability. I reflected on how, as a queer elder, she is both cherished and deeply imperfect. I wondered about dynamics of misogyny in her relationship — the story presented to us is that she was the worker/writer/public connector and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, cooked and cleaned and managed the house. As a person who does a lot of those tasks in my own relationship, I know they require skill and labor. But the one considered genius is Stein. I am making no final conclusions about their dynamics in a very different historical and cultural context, but these questions are present in the poem and in the way I am reflecting on following the lead of elders and ancestors, and recognizing that those models are also imperfect.
Just as Ginsberg was manifesting his queer ancestor by imagining him cruising in a completely new-to-the-era cultural format (the supermarket), in this poem I imagine seeing Gertrude in the first Gay Bar I spent time in when I was 16–18 years old in the late 1990’s: Bretz Bar in downtown Toledo, Ohio. Our paths come together, and our paths part. I need her with me, and also I imagine if we shared time and space, we would move apart. Perhaps that too is a valuable lesson of exploring queer ancestry—a low-risk practice of how to be together even if we are not each other’s inner crew.
