<Past Articles

Bar Stool Stories
A look back at lesbian nightlife

You can hear the history of the women’s scene evolve simply by listening to the sounds of different voices. Raspy are the voices from the women of the ’50s and ’60s, their smoky tones carrying harowing tales of raids on gay bars, and of the $5 that was always tucked in their pocket to avoid arrest for vagrancy. Soft but passionate are the voices of the women of the ’70s. Their bars were their homes, they’ll tell you, refuges for like-minded women teeming with political energy. They were places where you could just as easily get falling-down drunk as you could raise up your social consciousness.

Women of the ’80s speak in more jubilant and enthusiastic tones. They sound somewhat unencumbered, their recollections rich with stories of club hopping and their favorite DJs. But while women’s bars became plentiful in those days, they were often fly-by-night establishments. Patchy memories of everything from the Marquee to Indigo help portray a bar scene in the ’80s that was transient and in flux, setting in motion a nomadic pattern that has plagued the women’s bar scene since.

“It’s gone backwards,” says Merry Moscato, an original member of the collective that formed The Saints, a lesbian bar that operated full time from 1972 to 1980. “We started out one night a week, and now it’s back to one night a week.”

It is said that in order to move forward, we must go back. Back to a time when 42-year-old Eileen Kelley was an underage kid sneaking sandwiches from the bar at Somewhere to keep from starving. Back to when Moscato, now 56, watched women learn how to change kegs as they transformed a men’s luncheon into a lesbian bar by night. And back to a time when 73-year-old Alice Foley was shoving the night’s receipts into a paper bag to keep the vice squad from causing any trouble for the gay clientele at the Napoleon Club.

It seems trivial, perhaps, to trace a history of lesbianism from strobe-lit dance floors to musty backroom watering holes. But, young or old, many gay women will tell you that these bars and their sense of gay history—and of themselves—are inextricably linked.

“We’ve Gotta Get the Fuck Out of Here”

For three women who frequented the bars in the ’50s and ’60s, tales of their first adventure to a gay bar are almost identical. They all arrived at the Midtown Rendezvous on the arm of some man, but quickly noticed that a different crowd of people was scuttling downstairs, sneaking past some mafioso bouncer, and into a sea of unbridled homosexual energy.

“All of a sudden I felt alive,” says 71-year-old Eileen MacLean of her first experience at the Midtown. “I felt like now I know where I belong.”

But that initial excitement of infiltrating this secret society was tempered by an atmosphere of fear that overwhelmed the gay bars of the time. When the doorman brought up the lights, gay couples broke grip and grabbed a dance partner of the opposite sex to avoid arrest. Good nights passed with only a scuffle, or with the evening’s receipts appeasing the cops. On bad nights, the Black Maria paddy wagon would load up with Midtown revelers. Women were often escorted away in private cars, only to suffer a worse fate if they didn’t want to be arrested and outed.

“We all knew that meant there was a blowjob involved or something,” recalls Foley. “It was really tough.”

Though gay bars like the Midtown and the Napoleon Club catered to a mixed crowd, some predominantly lesbian establishments began popping up in the early ’60s. By most accounts, the rough and tumble dyke bar, Cavana’s, on lower Tremont Street, was one of the first bars that catered to a lesbian-only clientele beginning in 1960. A weekly South End scandal sheet, the MidTown Journal, described Cavana’s in a 1962 article as “the bar where muscular amazons, who could punch as hard as Popeye after he had eaten three cans of spinach, would cuddle blonde cuties on their laps as they guzzled boilermakers.” First-hand accounts from former patrons are just as grizzly. They recall the dingy joint as a distinctly butch-femme bar where educated, middle- class girls in their slacks would sip cocktails on one side of the room while factory girls with cigarettes rolled in their sleeves pounded down beers on the other side.

“They were very, very tough,” Foley says of the women at Cavana’s, which she and her Irish girlfriends mistakenly called Cavanaugh’s. “I always made a point of getting to know them because I figured some day I might need them on my side.”

Even one of the bar’s classier moments—a wedding ceremony—turned violent when “Big Esther” and her bride, “Little Shirley,” wound up in what Foley describes as a “knock-down-drag-out fight,” with Little Shirley leaving Cavana’s on someone else’s arm.

Two doors down from Cavana’s at the St. Moritz Hotel was Vicki’s, a lesbian bar with a notorious backroom accessible only by wading through a sea of foul-mouthed, trucker-types that the women referred to as “fish queens”—straight guys out to score lesbians.

“It was like walking the gauntlet,” says Helaine Zimmerman, 67.

In operation during the mid-’60s, Vicki’s was much like its namesake—rough looking and mean. Butch, working class women dubbed Zimmerman and her feminine, collegiate crowd “The Beacon Hill Gang.” “That’s back when women wore Bermuda shorts and knee socks and loafers,” remembers Foley. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that now.”

With Vicki running the place with a clenched fist, the bar was prone to verbal sparring and drunken brawls. Foley remembers one of her last visits to Vicki’s, when a woman reached across the crowd, grabbing her by the collar of her fashionable crew neck. “We ended up in such a tussle,” she says. “I thought, ‘This is foolish. We’ve gotta get the fuck out of here.’”

Few people remember the shuttering of either Cavana’s or Vicki’s. Most likely, their popularity simply waned, or they were torn down as the neighborhood

became gentrified. Jacques, the popular drag bar, which opened in 1938, catered to a largely lesbian crowd from the late ’60s into the early ’70s. But its dank environs and a rationing of toilet paper in the ladies’ room didn’t make it the coziest home for lesbians. “Going into Jacques felt like you were slumming,” says Zimmerman. “It didn’t really make you feel that good about being gay because you thought you were condemned to these crappy places.”

According to Libby Bouvier of The History Project, which compiled the book, “Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland,” women started to breed contempt for places like Jacques, with its misogavana’s, and Vicki’s. They knew they were the only show in town and that you had to be there,” says Zimmerman. “They were power crazy.” By the time of the first Pride march in 1971, women were actively seeking social places that they could call their own.

“It Didn’t Feel Like a Bar”

When Merry Moscato arrived in Boston from New Jersey in 1970, the Second Wave of feminism was at its height. The women’s music scene was burgeoning. Betty Friedan’s 1963 “The Feminine Mystique” had become a feminist bible. But there were no bars for lesbians only, she remembers. “There was nothing,” she says.

It was Sandra Monroe, dressed in her see-through blouse as a waitress at The Saints on 110 Broad St., who asked her manager if she could open the luncheon as a women’s bar on the weekends. With the Financial District rolling up its sidewalks at night, what was the harm? Within two weeks, The Saints was operating seven nights a week as a lesbian bar.

“That was like the floodgate,” says Vivian Dalila Carlo, 59, a former regular at The Saints.

Opened by a collective of five women in early 1972, The Saints never hid its political colors. Most women who frequented The Saints say its culture mirrored the changes taking shape for women around the country, and it was this energy that united The Saints. Women came as much for the socialization as they did to find out about upcoming demonstrations. Conversations over the pool table revolved around injustices being done to poor women. And when the FBI started infiltrating the women’s scene after lesbian feminist icon Susan Saxe went on the run for bank robbery and felony murder, The Saints collective began educating its patrons about their legal rights.

Unlike gay bars of yesteryear, The Saints wasn’t a mafia-run ramshackle dive. Well-lit and adorned with furnishings from a defunct church (its name owed itself to the stained glass image of several saints above the bar), The Saints became known more as a community center than a bar. “It didn’t feel like a bar,” Moscato notes. In fact, recovering alcoholics were made to feel welcome, with nonalcoholic drinks named in their honor. And any patrons nervous of late-night walks to their cars would get a personal escort by a Saints’ staffer.

Though the collective that formed The Saints was a working class group, the bar also attracted the college set with their brewing political zeal. Progressive feminism united the disparate crowds. “We were feminists,” says Carlo. “We wore blue jeans all the time. We shopped in thrift stores. We didn’t wear makeup. Nobody had a bra on. People didn’t shave. ”

At this time, a distinct generational gap began to form between the out and proud political women of the ’70s, and the women of earlier decades who fought a quieter battle for acceptance. “Those years were so different,” Zimmerman says of the ’70s. “People were walking into The Saints with buttons that said “I am gay and I am proud.” Conversely, in those days, Zimmerman remembers ducking into the Citadel, a shady strip joint on Avery Street that some gay women populated. While patrons of The Saints talk of Joanne Little, an African American woman acquitted for killing a man who raped her, Zimmerman fondly recalls Frosty Winter, a stripper she once dated. “I was always a little fidgety in The Saints,” adds Zimmerman. “I used to like to walk on the wild side of town.”

Fortunately, for nightlife lovers like Zimmerman, a new women’s club opened at 295 Franklin St. shortly after The Saints got its footing. Dubbed Somewhere, the club was the brainchild of Bob White and Ann Maguire, who had collaborated on a women’s night at the 1270. Launched in January 1977, Somewhere became something The Saints was not. It was dark, saturated with a ’70s disco vibe, and loud enough on the second floor club to piss off the folkies strumming downstairs in the bar area. (Another bar, Club 76, opened in 1976. Most women remember it as very short-lived and overshadowed by The Saints and Somewhere.) Maguire, former campaign manager for Elaine Noble, the first openly gay politician in the country, says the opening of Somewhere coincided with a sea change taking place culturally.

“It was a pretty extraordinary time in many ways,” says Maguire, now 61. “It was the advent of disco, of dancing, of being out, of a more openness around who you were.”

Eileen Kelley, who went on to become a resident DJ at the Midway Cafe’s “Dyke Night” and still DJs at women’s clubs today, says she and her girlfriends still grow nostalgic over their days at Somewhere. Along with the disco music upstairs, and budding folk singers like Tracy Chapman and Patty Larkin playing downstairs, Kelley remembers a sign in the window to discourage men from entering: “All Men Must be Wearing a Suit and Tie.”

Though Somewhere was still enjoying its popularity, the women’s scene started to change in the early ’80s. Newer bars like Greystone’s in the Financial District and Prelude in the Back Bay were popping up just as quickly as they were disappearing. Whether the scene became diluted, or people just began to outgrow it, women weren’t coming out in large numbers. Soon, the dollars started to dry up.

The male owner at The Saints began cutting shifts for employees, and soon he took away their health insurance. On a Sunday night in September 1980, employees arrived at The Saints to find its owner and his girlfriend drunk in the bar. “And he fired us. He just fired us,” Moscato says. For three months afterwards, the women of The Saints collective stood outside their old stomping grounds informing women that after eight years, the bar had been closed.

Although The Saints collective tried for years to establish a new home, it was not to be. “It broke our hearts,” says Moscato, who now runs the City Girl Caffe in Cambridge. “It was our dream.” Two years later, a suspicious fire broke out at Somewhere. Maguire is tight-lipped about her departure from the club in 1982, referring questions to Leslie McGrath, who took the reins as manager and renamed the club Somewhere Else. (Multiple calls to McGrath were not returned prior to press time.) By all accounts, the club never enjoyed the same success after the fire.

“It Could Never Be As Meaningful”

Listening to women talk of the bar scene in the ’80s is a bit like watching someone trying to solve a “Wheel of Fortune” puzzle. They shout one name, take it back, offer another, trying to remember a litany of club names and locations. There was the Marquee in Cambridge, Indigo, Upstairs at Ryles, and a host of others. By the early 1980s, club culture had become transient. Rather than a bar being home to one thing, each night was raffled off to the promoter who could bring in the most money. By the late ’80s to early ’90s, the women’s scene had reverted to being a patchwork of nights scattered about the city. Dyke Night, The Jungle, H20, Esme, Lava Bar, Circuit Girl, Tiger Lily and countless others all came and went over the last several years. Newer bars like Hollywood and Toast have either recently lost their locale, or folded due to quarrels with management.

Despite their differences in age or political leanings, lesbians of years past agree that the history of the women’s scene has been lost, and that the root of its failure is simple: money.

“There was a commitment to people, not a commitment to money,” says Carlo, adding that she never paid cover charges at bars in the ’70s. “History won’t be as rich, because it could never be as meaningful.”

Club owners are now reluctant to sacrifice a night to an inherently frugal lesbian crowd, women say. Even back when The Saints collective opened their bar, the owner was laughed at for offering the night to lesbians, Moscato claims, even though 20 men’s bars were in operation. In the end, she says, it all came down to money.

“No matter what we did,” Moscato says, “in the end we didn’t own it.”

But the thought of opening a full-time women’s club nowadays seems a Herculean task. Coveted liquor licenses are all but impossible to secure in this city. Rents have skyrocketed to historic levels. And club culture nationwide has become more of a one-trick pony. Additionally, gays and lesbians now enjoy greater acceptance, so there isn’t an overwhelming desire to establish places of their own. It is both a blessing and a curse, women say. “People want to assimilate, and when you try to assimilate you lose things,” Moscato says.

Right now, the women’s scene seems shakier than ever. Just last month the former promoters of Hollywood found a new locale with lightning speed, securing the downstairs of Jae’s restaurant in the Back Bay as Liquid, “Boston’s Hottest New Women’s Night.” Lines of trendily dressed women wended down Boylston Street to gain entrance, and the night received rave reviews from attendees. It lasted two whole weeks before management pulled the plug on club nights at the venue. A Saturday night for women at the hard-to-find Opal Lounge in Downtown Crossing has suffered from a lack of bodies. And significantly subdued social gatherings for women have been hosted by places as unlikely as the Elephant Walk, an upscale French-Cambodian restaurant in Cambridge.

People are still holding out hope. They point to Club Tribe, the Thursday night for woman at Felt in Downtown Crossing, as a sign that the women’s scene is on its way up. Hosted in the penthouse quarters of a four-story club whose chic industrial décor is softened with plush furnishings, Tribe has been wall-to-wall women since opening in mid-February. The usual hip-hop vibe permeates the place, with baby dykes in their baggy jeans and backwards baseball caps doing their best adolescent boy impressions. An occasional stiletto-heeled femme will muscle her way through the throbbing crowd. But androgyny seems to be the look of the day, as gender roles blur to a point of imperceptibility. Wedding-banded women grip hands on the dance floor, celebrating a new era of acceptance that is on the horizon.

From high above the city in this swank penthouse setting, women can look out and almost catch a glimpse of a young Helaine Zimmerman sneaking through the Combat Zone in search of beautiful, topless women. The faint sound of disco music at Somewhere still wafts through the air from just over on Franklin Street. And the shadows of women at The Saints still appear to be staked out on that Broad Street curb, begging women to hang in there until they find them another home. They are all just ghosts now. But their voices are still whispering, asking us to remember what took us from the cellars of this city to its starlit sky.

Jeannie Greeley is a Boston-based freelance writer. You can reach her at Jgrls76@aol.com.