When I Go, Im Goin’ Like Elsie

if you ever need to cry on cue, what works for me is thinking about the fact a queer person once would call every gay bar they had a number to just to hear the sound of other queers laughing somewhere, just listen, say nothing. as to not be alone. every week. for fourteen years.

i remember reading that interview like, six years ago, and FEELING this knowledge integrate itself into my cellular makeup. i can never unknow this window to someone’s loneliness and need. and now you have it too. godspeed

INFORMANT: Well, I had insomnia. I used to phone up all the gay bars, just to hear them answer the phone … Just to hear the noise, oh yes.

INTERVIEWER: So you would call and just be on the phone?

INFORMANT: No, I would just hear the noise and the laughter in the background. I just wanted to be there.

INTERVIEWER: … it helped you just to know it was out there?

(Pause)

INTERVIEWER: .. that’s a really special story.

INFORMANT: Yeah, oh God.

PREFACE: MYRNA’S STORY

I would stay on the phone … that was my lifeline.

“I came out as gay in 1945-the year that the war ended” Myrna Kurland told me from her home high in the Hollywood Hills of California. “I was dating a softball player that I met at the gay bar. I met her at Mona’s or else it was the Paper Pony. My first night in a gay bar was—freedom. I had a gay male friend and he took me there.”

Myrna was in the gay bars for eight years. She showed me her “treasure from the 40s"—a gold softball on a necklace chain from her first lover—inscribed with the initials from the professional softball league to which women belonged while the men were in the war. “We went to the bar all the time. My entire social life was there—there was no other place.” However, that night she first went to the bar-something else happened. Her father died that night. And she blamed herself, even though she knew that was irrational. She couldn’t get over it. Also she told me that, “I’m Jewish and we lost so many people in the Holocaust. I felt it was my duty to have children.

There was no other way to have children in the 1950s without getting married to a man. I married someone I disliked that’s what I felt I deserved because I was gay and I felt so guilty” She married a psychiatrist—someone to whom she would never be able to tell her secret. Her husband’s practice was very involved in actively trying to change the sexuality/sexual deviancy of his clients as would be almost any psychiatrist’s practice at the time. If her sexual past and preference had been known to him in all likelihood she would have lost her children.

This brief story came as I was packing up my things, and although we had been speaking for about three hours, this was in response to my final question, “Is there any last thing you want to say about what the bars meant to you?” I meant when she actually went to the bars in the 1940s—not knowing there was another story. She told me a story about when she did not actually go to the bars, but when she made sure the bars were still there—when she was married.

INFORMANT: Well, I had insomnia. I used to phone up all the gay bars, just to hear them answer the phone … Just to hear the noise, oh yes.

INTERVIEWER: So you would call and just be on the phone?

INFORMANT: No, I would just hear the noise and the laughter in the background. I just wanted to be there.

INTERVIEWER: … it helped you just to know it was out there?

(Pause)

INTERVIEWER: … that’s a really special story.

INFORMANT: Yeah, oh God.

MYRNA’S STORY … CONTINUED

Myrna was married from 1953 to 1968 when she separated, and then divorced her husband in 1970 when no-fault divorce law passed in California. She had terrible insomnia throughout her marriage. “I would get up at one or two a.m. and I would call every gay bar I had the number to from the 1940s. I wouldn’t say anything. I would just stay on the phone and listen to the sounds in the background. I would stay on until they hung up, and then I would call another one of my numbers, until I had called all the numbers I had. ‘That was my lifeline.”

What did it mean to call those bars and to hear the sounds in the background? “That phone. Those numbers. That was my lifeline.” she whispered, and put both hands by her heart. “It meant there was a place somewhere—even if I couldn’t go there—that place was out there. I could hear it. Freedom.” She called the bars two to three times a week like this—for fourteen years.