"Wish We Didn't Have to Meet Secretly?": Negotiating Contemporary Space in the Lesbian-Bar Documentary

In the introductory essay of "Lesbians and Film," a special section of Jump Cut published in 1981, editors Edith Becker, Michelle Citron, Julia Lesage, and B. Ruby Rich suggest that the growth, diversity, and success of the nascent practice of lesbian independent cinema is contingent upon, among other key facets, its inclusion of lesbian history. In particular, the editors note that, "despite a network of lesbian and gay history projects," they "have yet to see any film about that venerable mainstay of lesbian culture, the bars." ¹ At the time of their writing, lesbian filmmaking projects certainly were scant, and historical projects virtually nonexistent. ² By the mid-eighties, however, the lesbian historical film began to flourish, and in the nineties a small but significant number of films and videos centering around the lesbian bar emerged, comprising, as documentary theorist and historian Thomas Waugh suggests, its own genre. ³ This essay focuses on three documentaries from this new genre: Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (dir. Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie, 1992); The Boy Mechanic (dir. Kaucyila Brooke, 1996); and Last Call at Maud's (dir. Paris Poirier, 1993). ⁴

Several factors help explain the growth of the lesbian-bar documentary. Since the late eighties lesbian artists have been working within a political and cultural economy that has enabled a thriving lesbian alternative film and video culture (albeit one that is still marginalized by dominant "independent" film networks). ⁵ Coupled with the changing landscape of lesbian alternative media has been an historiographic impulse born from a late-eighties mix of second-wave lesbian and gay civil rights work, Queer Nation politics, lesbian visibility, and AIDS activism. For lesbians, this newly politicized climate mobilized "a decentralized, grassroots social history project of impressive dimensions" and an "activist-archivist impulse to locate and document lesbian resistance to oppression." ⁶ In this common project, the lesbian-bar documentary has been instrumental. Along with a spate of lesbian-bar ethnographies and remembrances emerging at approximately the same time, the lesbian-bar documentary presents an historiography of lesbians' entry into and unique relationship to public space. ⁷ The bar documentary genre highlights how, because of the heteronormative and homophobic policing of public space, lesbians desiring to make sexual and social contacts within the public realm historically required the space of the lesbian bar, whose paradoxically clandestine and public character both enabled and (ostensibly) concealed lesbian public life. ⁸

It is the lesbian-bar documentary's foregrounding of lesbians' historically restricted relationship to the spatial public sphere that leads me to suggest that the rise and success of the genre is indicative of more than either the cultural economy or the historiographic impulse of lesbian film- and videomaking can wholly explain. Rather, I argue that the lesbian-bar documentary--both in its emergence and in its various emphases--articulates contemporary lesbian anxieties regarding the continuously vexed relationship of lesbians to public space. In particular, I suggest that the bar documentary is a register of lesbian anxiety regarding our access to and claims on public space in the contemporary moment, especially as this anxiety crystallizes around the current waning and transformation of lesbian-bar space.

Motivating this claim is certainly the fact that the lesbian-bar documentary revolves around closed or closing bars: Forbidden Love documents the lesbian bars of the pre-Stonewall urban centers of Canada; The Boy Mechanic documents both the former and contemporary lesbian-bar scene of San Diego; and Last Call at Maud's documents the history of pre-Stonewall California bars and the last days of the San Francisco bar Maud's. As the closing of public institutions is always consequential for those whose lives thrive on them, it is necessary to give more than a passing nod to this unifying feature of the lesbian-bar documentary, particularly given the centrality of the...