wire through which the collision of generations, and the smallest ironies of American culture, are lit in neon. After all, she is describing a world in which pronouns, adjectives, and nouns have become an impenetrable wilderness of their own. I stopped writing down the descriptors, but before I quit they included: crust punks, sporties, baby butch, soft butch, queermosexuals, high femme, femme slut, stud/ femme, mascpresenting queer, gay-adjacent, andTERFS (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, who want none of the aforementioned). And these are a drop in the bucket. The most frequently used pronoun is they.Andwhenthey have a name that can be both a womans or a mans, there is no way of telling what we are dealing with. This, of course, is the pointa rebellion against the binary, the simplicity of the cisgender woman or manthe sort Edmund White described in States of Desire almost 25 years ago after his tour of the American homosexual. That book was mostly about gay white men. This one is about anything but. In Washington, Burton is not surprised when she learns the lesbian bar A League of Their Own is in the basement of a building that contains, on the top floor, a gay mens bar called Pitchers that is much more spacious and light-filled than its sister in the basement. I identify as a dyke, she tells her husband on a visit to New York, but my husband is trans, and Im interested in all queers who are not cis men, so maybe that might make me less a lesbian and more like an exceptual.Awhat?says Davin. An exceptual. Its a word I made up. Im attracted to everyone but cis men, get it? The cisgender gay man is obsolete. Queer is a word I can hardly type, much less warm toits a generational thingbut this repurposed slur has obviously replacedgayin the national conversation about homosexuality. When The New Yorker reviewed Andrew Sean Greers sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Less, Alexandra Schwartz began her essay by commiserating with the gay white male novelist whose assimilation has robbed him of any cultural interest. Even the prefixcis sounds ugly to my ears. There is something about the double sibilance of the prefix that brings to mind the word cesspool, and soon after that, the memory of a friends mother who used to tell her little boy, when sent to the bathroom to urinate, to make cissy. Yet cis merely means, according to Google, on this sideas opposed to trans, which means on the other side, as in transalpine, transmit, transfer, orbingo!transition. Burton deploys the new nomenclature with brio, however, though she never asks: What does this endless splintering of sexual identity mean? And could it be the reason for the dwindling number of lesbian bars? Its nice to hear the bar owners talk about making everyone feel safe and welcome. Anyone who felt they found paradise in their first bar will understand whyBurtons dedication reads: For anyone whos ever walked into a dyke bar and realized they were home.So, when Burton goes to a bar one night to see a show and a cold, grumpy dyke brushes her off with There are no performances on Monday night, these mundane words cut to both Burtons and the readers quick. We feel rebuffed, refused, excluded. And when, a few bars later, a different woman asks her to sit down at her table and introduces her to all her friends, the feeling is the opcertain when they walk in whether he will be welcomed or shunned. This is complicated by the fact that Burton is so femme that she worries other women will think shes part of a straight couple. For another, at 39shes middle-aged. She has, for example, a veterans hilarious familiarity with the songs that are popular in dyke bars on karaoke night, especially one by the Chicks (formerly the Dixie Chicks) called Goodbye Earl, about an abused woman who murders her husband. But she is also aware that the baby dykes in the bars have another playlist altogether. Middle age is the condition that has sent her on this journey, and age remains a factor that the bars do not erase. Despite all this, except for one night when she cannot summon the moxie to approach one more stranger, the voice of our intrepid heroine remains indomitable. Theres a reason her blog is called Effing Dykesthe f-word is strewn copiously throughout this book in all its permutations. Multiple exclamation points andALLCAPS complete the tone of anarchic rage. Sometimes, at the end of a visit that has not produced much that we havent already heard (variations on We want a place where everyone feels at home) or a pæan to the patio, Burton will end the chapter with a paragraph summing up what shes learned: a little homily with a positive conclusion. But that doesnt last long, and its soon overwhelmed by the tide of irritability and sarcasm that make this book so continuously funny that I found myself laughing for no discernible reason at the line I dont like jalapeños. The bar owners may all be alike in their welcoming good will, their sanity, and their desire to create a safe space for others (Im really good at de-escalating, says the owner of Slammers in Columbus, Ohio. I used to work in a womens prison), but Burton herself is, to say the least, a live electrical 28 TheG&LR MOBYDYKE An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America by Krista Burton Simon & Schuster 383 pages, $28.99 Physical Education The P.E. major casts her walker aside at 90. Its time then for a firmer stride. PT every other day. So much working out, youd think shes gay. She makes her gay son proud as a Mom. Soon shes in the pool again, fluttering her arms overhead, advancing feet first, like helike Ientered this world, her torso in a bathing suit green, her head in a bathing cap white as baby teeth. Same strokes now as at university, no longer with classmates, all evaporated but her. She touches the wall with her feet, smiles at the lap just completed, swims on. ALLENSMITH
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