First Night at my First Dyke Bar

I have so many stories about dyke bars, except really they are stories about girls. Girls I met in bars and what happened when we left the bar. When we fell into bed or feeling or didn’t. But my first night at my first dyke bar is about the bar.

Of course, it’s also a story about girls—my best friend Jenny and me. It’s 1986 and we’re nineteen years old and have moved to Toronto from Nova Scotia. I’m not sophisticated. I’ve just had my first Caesar salad and thought it was the height of gourmet cuisine!

I’ve also discovered Thai food because I’m working as a bus girl at a Thai restaurant owned by a rich white woman who is in love with Thailand. I have to wear a uniform that is supposedly traditionally Thai and makes me look like a medieval court jester. When I complain, my co-workers tell me I should have been around for the elephant festival; an actual elephant was brought into the restaurant, and the male wait staff had to wear outfits that were like a giant diaper.

There is no discussion of cultural appropriation. There is lots of asking each other about where we’re from. We are all from somewhere: another part of Canada, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Korea, China. I work with waiters who grew up with servants before whatever communist revolution happened that brought them to Canada and jobs in the service industry. Some of the waiters are gay men. It is my first time hanging out with gay men – or more accurately, out gay men. There is one lesbian, the bartender, and I have a massive crush on her.

My first dyke crush. I’ve known for years I’m attracted to women but had no idea I could feel this oozing lust. Dee is small and compact, a quiet, efficient woman who looks like a boy. She’s into Lou Reed, writes these lovely, spare poems, and is a stoner who also bangs smack. Some of this she tells me; some of it the gay boys do. She’s close to a decade older than me and has a girlfriend. Nonetheless, I ask her what she thinks about non-monogamy and give her my high school poetry to read.

Despite my sexual fantasies about Dee, despite how intrigued I am by her, I don’t think I’m gay because I’m not “like Dee,” which is to say dykey, masculine. I think I’m bi. There was this novel I was into in high school, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and the female protagonist, Sissy Hankshaw, had giant thumbs and hitchhiked everywhere and had sex with men and women. I think I’m like her: adventurous.

In the spirit of adventure, not because I’m a lesbian, I go to my first dyke bar. I take Jenny, who also considers herself bisexual. Jenny is my best friend and I love her—a love that is worshipful and protective but without a shred of the desire I feel for Dee. I was attracted to Jenny when I first saw her in the tenth grade, but as we got to know each other, I realized there was something phony about her sexiness. Sex for her was part of a hustle—to get money, to get boys to fall in love with her and do whatever she wanted.

Jenny left home at the end of eleventh grade. She was too young to get welfare and didn’t want to drop out of high school and work—she had a killer grade point average and planned to attend university. So a couple times a month, she’d meet men at hotel bars and have sex for money. I was surprised but it never occurred to me to judge. “Do you like doing it?” I asked. She thought about it. “Once this guy gave me a back massage that felt nice.” But no, she didn’t like it.

After a guy gets rough with her, I convince her to work with me at my part-time telemarketing job selling newspaper subscriptions. She doesn’t last. Over the next few years, I try to sell her on work that doesn’t involve sex because I worry she will be beaten, killed. We are both on intimate terms with violence—I was raped when I was young, and she’s an incest survivor. But Jenny does not like regular hours, getting up early, working for minimum wage. While I work as a bus girl at the Thai restaurant, she works at a Strip-O-Gram company where her dances are passive-aggressive performance art intended to make the customer feel guilty and weird about wanting to fuck her.

The summer we are 19 neither of us have boyfriends or girlfriends. We dance together at a Goth club—she’s into Kate Bush and industrial music, I’m into Patti Smith and New Wave. We hang out late at night at coffee shops after my shift. We share a brownie, and she rolls her Drum cigarettes and smokes them, and we talk about nuclear disarmament and capitalism and having lesbian relationships. Jenny has fooled around with girls and even claims to have once had sex with a woman for money. She thinks I will like lesbian sex because I like being gone down on. We think lesbian relationships equal Great Cunnilingus + Someone Who Will Really Get Us. We’re not entirely wrong; we’re not entirely right.

One night we go to a dyke bar, Chez Moi. Despite the name, the place is not particularly chic or inviting. It is down an alley-like street and looks like a sports bar.

The bouncer scrutinizes us. “Do you girls know this is a gay bar?”

Jenny is wearing a crop top and a wide, flowing skirt that goes to her ankles—she’s beautiful with a Cupid’s bow mouth, beauty mark, hourglass figure, and black frizzy hair she can never decide what to do with. I’m the less pretty friend. I’m tall and skinny with long wavy brown hair, and I’m wearing a short yellow dress with sandals. We both have big 80s-style glasses.

I glare at the bouncer. “Yes, we know this is a gay bar!”

Inside, the music is Top 40 and cheesy dance hits that make us roll our eyes. I grab a beer and a booth. Jenny doesn’t drink and asks for a coffee. They don’t have coffee; hardly any bars do, but she always asks for it anyway before settling for nothing or water.

We talk. We gradually realize that the three women in a nearby booth are staring at us and snickering and making jokes. Everyone in the bar except us has short hair and is wearing pants. They fit the dyke stereotype, and I’m disappointed. I also feel self-conscious.

The three dykes in the booth making fun of us are butch, but I don’t know that word yet. They are arm wrestling with each other.

I have strong arms. At the restaurant we do French banquet style service, and I carry heavy trays of steaming food high above my head with one raised arm.

I stand up. Approach the table of women who have been laughing at us. Challenge them to an arm wrestle. Amused, they indicate the smallest woman.

I bring her arm down to the table in seconds.

Surprise ripples across the dykes’ faces.

Like a fairy tale, I’m directed to the next biggest woman at the table, the second Billy Goat Gruff. Jenny hovers over me.

It takes a little longer but I lower this woman’s arm to the table as well.

Women begin to gather around. No one else in the bar paid attention when the butches arm wrestled each other. Now everyone is paying attention. Something is clearly at stake, and I don’t know what it is.

The dykes don’t give me a break. I have to arm wrestle the third woman, the biggest and strongest of the bunch.

Thoughts I’ve been having my whole life flow through me like a river:

You think you know who I am but you’re wrong.

Don’t underestimate me.

The third match is slow and I’m sore. Women yell and shout and debate who’s going to win. My competitor and I tug each other’s arms back and forth, back and forth. Slowly, slowly I push her arm to a 45-degree angle, to a 20-degree angle, to zero.

I win. The bar erupts. Bottles of beer are banged on tables and counters. The women I’ve beaten look impressed. They ask me if I lift weights.

Jenny, who is quicker than me, pats my arm and says, “That’s my man.” She says it with irony but it isn’t taken that way. Instead the women look at me like they recognize me, like I’m one of them.

I appreciate their rueful, good-natured acceptance of defeat—it isn’t how a lot of men would behave. But I also think their behavior is sexist, ridiculous, that I’m nothing like them. I am right about the sexism, but they understand something about me I don’t yet understand about myself, namely that I am like them, that I’m a dyke.

In the next few months, I will kiss a girl. She and Jenny will hate each other at first sight and Jenny and I will stop being friends. I will become a dyke. Jenny will not become a dyke. I will have the exact same dynamic with the girl I kiss as I do with Jenny. But that’s later. That’s other bars; other girls.

This is my first night at my first dyke bar.