AS THE FINAL LINE of Whitney Houston’s I Want to Dance With Somebody faded into the ether of disco lights and carcinogenic party fog, two men managed a furtive glance across the dance floor. A drag queen—some fantastic pastiche of Joan Rivers, Edie Falco, and Rod Stewart—strutted her six-foot frame in four-inch heels and Diamonique earrings to the bar, where a butch-femme duo poured two-dollar drinks for a posse of twenty-something men sporting the newest line of A&F polo shirts. It was, on the surface, a rather average drag night in a rather average gay bar. In reality, Ms. Houston was singing her remixed swan song, the bartenders were pulling their last drinks, and the fantastic drag queen was preparing herself with Jaeger shots to give a final farewell speech. It is a truism that gay bars open and gay bars close. Sometimes it’s just a promotional gimmick, an easy way to exploit summertime weather and summertime dispositions. But in the waning moments of Fargo, North Dakota’s only gay bar, dispositions this sultry June evening seemed more reflective than forward-looking.
Nestled in the climatically harsh, topographically austere northern plains of Middle America, Fargo and Moorhead (Fargo’s Minnesotan neighbor to the east) comprise the largest metropolitan area in the upper Midwest outside of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Its nearly 145,000 residents brave winter temperatures that rival some arctic locales and fend off summertime mosquito populations that would challenge the nerve of even the most experienced equatorial traveler. Like most cities of similar size and location, the “F-M area” boasts a number of factoids that make for interesting fillers in Chamber of Commerce pamphlets: the Red River, which divides Fargo from Moorhead and North Dakota from Minnesota, is the only river other than the Nile to flow from south to north; fully one in six North Dakotans call Fargo home; the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash while bound for Fargo in 1959; the movie Fargo was not filmed in Fargo (in fact, it wasn’t even set in Fargo). Yet for all the things Fargo is known for, social progressivism (let alone homosexuality) is not one of them. North Dakotans in general take pride in a peculiar sense of conservatism—one born more from the fierce individuality cultivated in the agrarian tradition of times past than in the contemporary fanaticism of post-Reagan social bigotry. Like the winter winds that linger into May, change can be slower than in more “liberal” locales. Perhaps it is this Wordsworthian aversion to capriciousness that typifies the North Dakotan mind-set: leave well enough alone and “git-r-done.” Nevertheless, here I was, back in the state I was born in, only now with a perspective of eleven years spent in faraway southern California, bearing witness to the closing of the only gay bar in town. Slowly filing out of the I-Beam into the streets of downtown Moorhead, the fantastic queen drove west on Central Avenue in her Ford F-150 pickup truck towards the state line while the A&F posse smoked cigarettes in the parking lot and spoke of an after-hours party in West Fargo. Flush with the liquid perceptiveness only six or seven Bud Lites can produce, a sudden, nagging question came to mind: where was that drag queen going, anyway, now that the drag show was over for good? No more Barbra ballads to intoxicate Fargo’s apparently large homosexual population. Where, I wondered as I downed my seventh (eighth?) clandestine Bud Lite, would the shenanigans of the flirtatious couple on the dance floor take place now? So often the local gay bar serves as the geographic linchpin for all sorts of queer experience. Lacking such vital space, would North Dakotan gays be forced, as it were, into some neo-closeted existence calling “staying home”? These questions (and the unmistakably inviting glances of a corn-fed Midwestern boy) initiated a rather enlightening series of conversations with the still lingering and increasingly vocal A&F posse. Some decent herb from California broke the proverbial ice. How, I nonchalantly asked, did everyone feel about the closing of North Dakota’s only gay bar? “It’s not a big deal,” exclaimed Nathan from under his bro-ish baseball cap whilst passing a half-smoked bowl to the right (wrong!): “There are plenty of other places to go.” Josh, clearly beyond my paltry seven-beer inebriation ceiling, sluggishly recalled the licentious fun of Pride weekend in Minneapolis the week prior and gave a running critique of the newest bars on Hennepin Avenue. The 700-mile roundtrip down Interstate 94 did not seem to bother the other posse members as they nodded in general agreement at Nathan and Josh’s contention that the closing of a “lame-ass” gay bar in Fargo meant nothing to their queer subjectivity. It was an unexpected response to my nagging questions. Surely they would prefer a “place of their own”—a local space for local people where urban residents mix with rural folks and the endearing idiosyncrasies of North Dakotan personality and perspective are reckoned with queer sensibility, something seemingly impossible to replicate in downtown Minneapolis. Certain bars, I was assured, served that purpose just fine, offering a location to hook up. So I joined the A&F crowd as it moved to a “mixed” bar of the kind that had apparently rendered the I-Beam obsolete. Walking up the dank, narrow stairwell of an old hotel building in downtown Fargo offered me some hope that not all was lost. Sufficiently small but lacking that je-ne-sais-quoi feeling of the quintessential gay bar, there was almost instantaneous disappointment at the general homogeneity of the patrons themselves. No queens, no butch-femme duos; rather, a mixture of middle-class tastes accented with the random presence of a proud Mary: the place was a repository for progressive suburbanites enlightened by recent queer forays into mainstream culture. In the end, though, it seemed the Irish bar with a promising façade and a disappointing interior seemed to fit these A&F-wearing guys quite well. Who needs drag queens or lesbians or same-sex canoodling in the era of MySpace.com and Manhunt.net? Still, the qualitative change I observed one night in Fargo raises important questions for the intellectual homo in us all. When same-sex public affection is broadly frowned upon, when the possibility of serendipitous meeting is taken away, when the fabulousness of local gender bending loses its sparkle, do we not lose a sense of ourselves? Is our relative freedom to dance with whomever we want, make out with whomever we like, or sport size eleven heels all in full view of a (un)consenting public diminished by the unavailability of a place and space to call our own? The virtue of political struggle stems, in part, from the quality of collective engagement between similarly and dissimilarly positioned social actors. The spaces of these engagements—the sites of possibility spatially and architecturally delineated through our individual and collective reckonings of modern life—invariably inform the quality and efficacy of our social and political struggles. Without the spatial potentiality of the gay bar, is queer political struggle simply another causality of mainstreamed homosexuality? Does the ambivalence towards the closing of the I-Beam in Fargo signal a new and enlightened qualitative shift in the spaces and places of gay life or a mollification of queer social practices? Such questions tend to swirl in the narcotically softened mind from time to time, their persistence often fading with the attendant buzz. But, in some instances, such thoughts touch on the essence of a life, on the importance that our built environments may have on our perception of what is acceptable and what is necessary in an often hostile social milieu. Pondering these alterations in the fabric of gay life may help to highlight the future polemics that promise to befuddle our insistence on social equality. Maybe the unknown destination of that fantastic drag queen signifies a much broader direction than any single Ford pickup can illustrate—a metaphorically tempting question to ponder, after another Bud Lite. Jason Narlock teaches in the Dept. of American Studies at King’s College, University of London.
