While I was in San Francisco for the Queer History Conference last week, the conference organizers planned a social event in The Castro District, the city’s epicenter of LGBTQ+ life. As I was putting on my slacks and the dress shirt I packed, looking professional but still very queer, I had a change of heart. Instead, I opted for baggy jeans, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap. I wasn’t going to the event.  

I ventured to The Castro and meandered over to the Twin Peaks Tavern. I went there with one intention: I wanted to sit on the bar rail and have a conversation with a regular. Maybe a bartender, if they had been working there long enough. I suppose my true requisite was someone who could tell me about what it was like being queer in the city. I knew that I wanted to talk to the oldest person in the bar.  

I walked through the saloon-style door into what I thought looked a lot like the bar from Cheers. I’m not a drinker, nor do I attend many bars, so that was the best comparison I could muster up. To my right, there were a few small tables, and in the back corner, a set of stairs leading up to a small balcony. Tiffany-style, stained glass lamps and chandeliers decorated the space, which already had some ornate detailing in the wood paneling. It was small, but not cramped. There was a small group of exactly the kind of people that I imagined might frequent a place like this sitting in the corner by the stairs, and a younger lesbian couple in the corner by the door. I navigated towards the older gay crowd, sat at the bar, and waited to be served by the bartender.  

The bartender was a rather cold fellow, not unlike most of the other locals I interacted with in the city. My Canadian sensibilities were a little shocked. “What can I get you?” he asked, giving me an almost dirty, up-and-down glance. It’s a reaction I’ve been getting in a lot of queer spaces recently, ever since I began “passing” as a man. In jeans, a t-shirt, and a faded cap, I didn’t exactly look like a friend of Dorothy. I panicked and ordered a coffee, even though I had planned to order a gin and tonic. As I said, I’m not a drinker. That’s just what my partner would have ordered.  

The bartender all but tossed me my coffee and turned towards the group of older men to my right. I eavesdropped on their conversation for a while and learned pretty quickly that these guys were exactly who I came looking for. They were regulars, and friends for a while. They talked about their day-to-day lives — romance, their elderly parents, Pride plans, and retiring. I laughed to myself at some of their conversations. 

Oh wow, they changed the guy.

Yeah, that’s how calendars work.

The guys on these things just get younger and younger.

He’s easy on the eyes though, isn’t he?

Definitely easy on the eyes.

Don’t you wish they got more inventive with these things? Like the old John Waters scratch n’ sniff cards for ‘Polyester’. I’d love to get a whiff of him.

They erupted into laughter. Hell, I giggled too.

After maybe 30 minutes, another man joined and sat on my left. He ordered his drink and turned to me, right away:

I’ve been looking forward to this all week.

I smiled at him and performed my greatest act in masculinity:

Tell me about it.

I thought the conversation would end there, but it didn’t. His name was Mark. 62. Corporate lawyer. He had been a patron of the Twin Peaks Tavern for the last 2 decades. I saw my opening:

What’s changed in the last 20 years?

Suddenly, I had my oral historian’s hat on. Mark told me about the history of the bar, and how its demographic expanded beyond gay male patronage since he started coming. I was doing all the things I would have done if I was sitting in a recorded interview: nodded and made small, affirming sounds to communicate that I was listening; probed in places where I was curious. No judgment. No leading questions. My approach to the interaction felt similar to my approach to interviewing.  

Mark told me about his upbringing in Nevada, how he moved to San Francisco for law school, and how he got started in corporate law. He also told me about his first serious boyfriend, who fell in love with another man and moved to Florida with him after they broke up. He told me about being gay and aging, and how he hopes to spend his impending retirement. It wasn’t much of a conversation, in that, by the end of an hour and a half, I had said little about myself. It felt a lot like an oral history interview, just one that would be lost in time; unrecorded and unarchived. That felt like a shame, so I committed to remembering. 

That was, until Mark began to ask me about myself. What do I want to do with my career? Am I dating anyone? What do I want out of my life? Nobody I had interviewed for the Pussy Palace Oral History Project had ever flipped the script on me before. That’s the thing with oral history; narrators come to the interview with a script, thinking they know what you want to hear. And while interviewer and narrator are a part of the conversation together, sharing authority, the narrator doesn’t get to question you as rigorously. It was like Mark had snatched the oral historian hat right off my head and put it on his own.  

I was shocked. But what was more shocking was that I had answers to his lofty questions. Real answers! Answers that I had never allowed myself to admit when asked those same questions by colleagues, friends, or family. Maybe it was because I knew that I would never see him again. I’d like to keep those answers between Mark and I, for now. Or maybe it was because he had been so vulnerable with me; vulnerable about his regrets, the gaps in his understanding of the new queer world around him, his own uncertainty in life. Maybe I just found comfort in knowing that I could be 62, with just as many uncertainties as Mark, and still be alright.  

Mark took some money out of his wallet, put some bills on the table, downed his drink, and extended his hand:  

You have a good night, Elio. I’m glad we had this talk. Good luck with everything, not that you need it.

We didn’t exchange numbers or email addresses; Mark just swiveled out of his chair and left. Then, after a few minutes, so did I.  

On the bus ride back to my hotel, I thought about the bar. It’s known as the first gay bar with glass plated windows, where patrons could look out and the public could look in; seeing each other from two sides of the same little world. 50 years after that became the case at Twin Peaks Tavern, it was the same case between Mark and I. 

Thanks Mark, wherever you are.

Elio Colavito is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto, specializing in Sexual Diversity Studies. As a trans non-binary researcher, Elio’s passion lies in archiving and re-telling queer histories in Canada. Currently, Elio serves as the Co-Oral Historian for the Collaboratory’s Pussy Palace Oral History Project.