"Fagots Stay Out"

     Thirty years. More, thirty-two, almost. No family. No responsibilities beyond a job I loathed. Nothing to do after work but cruise down Santa Monica Boulevard in my 1963 Volvo P1800, maybe grab a few beers and a bowl of chili.
    A long time gone by, drop by drop. Yet it can can come surging back at the oddest times.
    For instance.
     Things were quiet on Wednesday, so rather than cab it back from lunch on North Michigan Avenue, I strolled the great boulevard. Kids were out in those jackets with the "=" equality sign on them—gay rights— raising money, or gathering signatures or whatever it is they do. I thought up a pithy line in case one came up to me—"You've already won, haven't you?"—but nobody approached me and I walked on, suddenly thinking of Barney's Beanery.
     If you lived in Los Angeles, as I did 32 years ago, you know the famous bar with the green and white striped awning, right where Santa Monica Boulevard veers southward, just before it intersects with La Cienega. Opened in 1927, Barney's was a dive with a past:  Charles Bukowski drank there. And Clark Gable. Erroll Flynn too. Clara Bow. Bob Dylan. Just about anybody who was anybody in LA. Janis Joplin ate her last meal here, supposedly. The Doors' Jim Morrison once urinated on the bar, and he and Joplin once got into a fist fight with each other here. 
     I knew of the place, vaguely, through a Tom Petty song, "Louisiana Rain," that has a line "Singing to the jukebox, in some all-night beanery." I'm not sure if Petty was referring to this specific all-night beanery (West Hollywood was not incorporated in 1982, so niceties like closing hours tended to be looser there).  But it was enough to get me inside, and I stayed for the chili and the late hours and the convenient pool tables. I liked to stand at the bar on a Friday, sip my beer, hope to meet somebody, maybe, toward that end, get some quarters and treat myself to a solitary game of pool. 
  So what's the connection between gay rights and this Los Angeles bar? When I frequented Barney's Beanery, in the early 1980s, their distinctive red matchbooks looked like this on the front—I didn't have to grab the image online, but just ducked down into the basement, where I have a big glass apothecary jar filled with dozens and dozens of the matches I once collected as little trophies of my travels and reminders of boisterous times. 
    Flip the matchbook over, however, and you find this.
    From the 1940s onward, Barney's had a sign reading "FAGOTS STAY OUT" in large letters behind the bar and, obviously, on their matches. The story was that in the 1940s there had been a police raid on homosexual acts in the bathrooms at Barney's, and the owner wanted to avoid that kind of thing. Times changed, and there had been protests, around 1970, but they didn't stick. We patrons didn't think much about it—I wasn't a faggot, so didn't mind, and what thought I gave to the matter was sort of a unspoken satisfaction, almost a pride. It was unusual, quirky. I remember thinking the slogan was part of the ambience, a sign that this was a genuine, authentic place, a tough dive that wasn't about to let itself be taken over by a bunch of pansies.
     I was 22. 
     Shortly after I moved back to Chicago, West Hollywood incorporated, and passed an anti-discrimination ordinance. Barney's Beanery took the sign down, and got new matches.     
     A sign of just how alien that idea is now, when I looked at the matches after all these years, I was struck more by the curious spelling—"fagots"—than the odiousness of the expression. It's a relic of times that are gone, thank God, and never coming back, nothing more. I think a lot of people are like that, still, today. Not so much they are haters as oblivious, which is why education like that being offered by the equality kids on Michigan Avenue is still important. Despite all our clear progress, we aren't as far away from "FAGOTS STAY OUT" as we like to think. You don't have to be a hater to be part of the problem, all you have to do is eat your chili and go with the flow.
     Before I returned the matchbook to its glass reliquary, I admired it and, for no particular reason, opened it up, and got a surprise. This: 

   So I must have met somebody there. Who was "Dina"? No idea. "312"—a Chicago number. Maybe I was still carrying the matches, trying to show off my worldliness, after I got back in Chicago. "Yup, just got back from LA." That sounds like my style. Maybe it was a Chicagoan I met one night in the bar at Barney's. Some things are too effaced by time to retrieve. It'll have to remain a mystery. Probably a good thing, too.

A book of matches

     A couple weeks ago I rode my bike to the post office and mailed a matchbook to a man I've never met.
     But I'm getting ahead of myself.
     This story should really begin with Bookman's Alley, the marvelous used bookstore that Roger Carlson ran behind the Varsity Theater in Evanston. I started going there as a freshman at Northwestern, and stopped as a man in his 50s when Mr. Carlson finally retired.
     Mr. Carlson was a savvy businessman. His books were not cheap. And while he would sometimes, writing up a receipt, he would give me a 10 percent "Friend of the store" discount, he only gave me one free book in all that time.
     The book was "War! War! War" by "Cincinnatus," an anonymous anti-Semite who printed the book in October, 1940. The book blames Jews for all wars, for the Great Depression, and pretty much anything that ever went wrong anywhere.  It almost defies characterization, but I managed to pluck out a single sentence that can represent the entirety:

     Every unbiased student of history and foreign affairs knows that the new world war is not a war for Democracy, but a war to maintain the British-Jewish Empire, its tremendous wealth, its commercial supremacy and overlordship of the seven seas, and above all for the unconditional return of central Europe to Jewish control, even though it results in the destruction of millions of lives and the hopeless insolvency of all the civilized world.   

     Memory had Mr. Carlson giving it to me because he didn't want to make money from selling it. But that wasn't quite correct, I learned when I pulled the book down, for the first time, and discovered a pair of notes written on the little Bookman's Alley slips of paper he used as receipts. Dated Feb. 19, 2010, the message reads, in his distinctive all-caps handwriting: "30's AND 40's AMERICAN ANTI-SEMITISM; I'D RATHER YOU HAVE IT AS A HISTORY TEXT INSTEAD OF SELLING IT TO SOME A-HOLE WHO BUYS INTO IT. MR. C."
     That is an attitude one can't help but admire, but really there was no occasion to apply it in my own life.
      Until I got an email out of the blue, from a young man named Matthew in Los Angeles:

     I came across an old blog post of yours from 2014 regarding the "Fagots stay out" Barney's Beanery matchbook you have. Or, at least, Im hoping you still have it! I started collecting matchbooks through estate sales here in LA and, as a young gay man who lives right behind Barney's, I've become fascinated by the history of Barney's. Amazingly, very few people my age know this history but I've had a good time learning about it and spreading it to my friends. So, when I came across your blog post, I came to the conclusion I have to find those matches! I've been searching the internet but haven't found anyone else with them and then I realized I should just reach out to you. Do you still have those matches? If so, and if you're willing to sell them, I'd love to buy them from you. At this point it feels like they're an important part of West Hollywood history and I don't want that history to be lost! And, at least in my opinion, there's something fun about the idea of those matches going on a journey with you and now, a few decades later, returning to where it all began. If I'm able to buy them from you, my first stop with them in my pocket will be to Barney's for a beer and then after that I plan on displaying them in my apartment and telling everyone who comes over about them and their history. Let me know!"

      Of course I had the matches. I thought carefully about the situation, remembered "War! War! War!" and realized I would not be selling him my matches. I wrote back:

     Good to hear from you. Yes, I have those matches right here, in a little drawer in my roll top desk. As for selling them, no, I'm not interested in doing that. Their being a relic of baseless hatred, I don't think I should profit from them. But if the matches would mean something to you, then please send me your address, and I'll mail them to you, gratis. I've had them for more than 40 years. I think that's long enough.

  

     Actually, it was that last sentiment that was most important. I'm at an age when I'm surrounded by great masses of detritus, aka, crap. Files and furniture, notes and boxes, mugs, souvenirs, relics. I hate to include books, which are holy, but hundreds of books, most of which I'll never read. After I wrote the above, I went to walk the dog, and can't tell you how good I felt. The mixture of performing a small kindness plus the liberation of divestment was a real boost. Only a little thing, true: an old, used matchbook. But it's a start of the great give-away that will end with me being put, possessionless, into the ground.
     Matthew sent me his address, adding this: 

     "Wow Neil, that means a lot to me. In a way I think you doing that completes something of a moral arc for those matches, they've seen the worst and now the best side of humanity. Thank you." 

     Completing the moral arc — there's a good thought for today. I tucked the matches in an envelope and mailed them the next day. He received them a few days later. A very small thing, a drop of generosity. But each one of those those waters the world, and ourselves.