a sinkhole without a gloryhole is all trash and no pleasure

On a Sunday afternoon a couple weeks ago, I woke from a nap and blearily scrolled Instagram, like I do. What’s unusual is that I remember doing so, because while I was sleeping, my friend Kelly posted a photo to her stories in which she and her partner Dre shared a kiss in an empty parking lot. Behind them, the asphalt gave way suddenly to the earth: a crater ringed with rubble. I thought I recognized the purple trim on the low grey concrete building at the far edge of the lot. What if we kissed, Kelly had written, @ the adultmart sinkhole. I love the special transgression of romance in a place committed to anonymity and filth.

There are no longer any gloryholes at the McKnight Road Adultmart, which seems always to be hiring when I drive by, or at any other Adultmart store. In 2019 the company, which is based in Cleveland and has stores across Ohio plus four other Rust Belt states, closed all the gloryholes, arcades, and booths at the backs of its stores, in what seems to be an effort to appear more hygienic and respectable, and to appeal to a straighter and more middle-class crowd. The company’s current Twitter bio reads “Adultmart and its family of stores offer a clean, comfortable adult shopping experience for men, women and couples.” [1]

What’s a sinkhole without a gloryhole? All trash and no pleasure. But this newsletter is historical, not in the American sense of over and done with but in the Jewish sense of We were all at Sinai, in the Appalachian sense of deep time[2], in the academic sense of Elizabeth Freeman’s term erotohistoriography, which gives form to the idea that “the body is the site of historical encounter–in and across time, and that “it is possible to imagine historical consciousness in terms of pleasure.”[3] Which is to say that anywhere dicks have been sucked, they are being sucked even now, and you can feel it whether or not you remember with your mind. Call my mouth an archive.

Anyway, I found myself telling Kelly a rough version of all this via dm while I rubbed golden-hour sleep from my eyes and she told me I could send her instagram story to all of you, wonderful readers. During the nap which preceded our conversation I had dreamed I was at Donny’s Place, the sticky leather bar on Herron Avenue in Polish Hill with unnervingly soft floorboards, and that they were hiring bartenders even as they sank into the earth. “I’m just laughing,” she wrote “pictur[ing] the whole bar being swallowed a la titanic into the earth and you slinging drinks and they just slide down the bar to the regulars who pay no mind.”

Later that night, of course, I went to pay the bar a visit, which I hadn’t done since some queens strolling the basement had complained loudly about The Lesbians, meaning us, while I fisted my lover in a booth.

My lover and I are trans fags, and in my experience this kind of bullshit from a largely white largely cis gay leather scene is the norm, yet so are instances of lush and surprising pleasure and even intimacy. Once, a therapist twenty years my senior talked psychodynamic shop with me, then kissed me full on the mouth upstairs at the bar. Another transmasculine friend, when a daddy in the Donny’s basement asked to suck his cock, pointed to the Zach Ozma[4] pin adorning his jacket: “I love my sex change!!! I got the best one.” From what I hear the daddy nodded and went enthusiastically to town, which Ozma called “beautiful and the IDEAL use case.” Anyway, my lover and I ignored the commenters and finished our fuck.

The women I know who’ve spent time in the Donny’s basement are also trans–and some of them, it must be noted, are also fags; we have this in common–have reported both being told to leave for being women, and also being taught with great care and respect how to cruise, then attended to by daddies who called them sluts and sweet little cocksucking bitches with great reverence and delight.

The first time I went to Donny’s the bartender greeted me by calling me girl in the gay way, as he did everyone else ordering a cheap drink–the only kind available–until he clocked the titties which I’ve since had removed, and then, suddenly, I was cruelly a she. But on my most recent Donny’s visit, this same bartender told me a story about grief and an old lover, offered an anecdote about his high school French teacher, then talked a regular down from frustration about being ditched by a friend for a potential foursome in Irwin, before reaching across the bar to embrace me when it was time for to leave. I don’t know if he remembers our first encounter. Was it intimate human connection or medical transition removing me from the laser beam of faggot misogyny? I know either way it’s contingent, disappointing, imperfect, but I love going to Donny’s and I don’t exactly care.

These slights between gays are of course not minor at all; as fellow Worcester queer and brilliant brown crip femme writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha reminds us, the revolution starts at home. And differently pressing are exertions by maliciously negligent external powers. According to the transsexual rumor mill, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is trying to buy Donny’s and redevelop it. According to the Polish Hill Civic Association’s website, there is “proposed development near the busway station [...] at the Donny's Place site. The developer, Laurel Communities, proposes a 27 townhome project, but has faced strong opposition at community meetings.” Even if some of those townhomes were priced in an ostensibly, affordably way, there’s no chance they would offer, as Donny’s does, a Sunday night buffet of hot dogs fresh off the grill with fixings, free to anyone who buys a drink.

The body memory of all those cocks sucked and faces slapped wouldn’t vanish even if the bar itself were gone, but I don’t just want the memory of eating a hot dog, don’t just want the memory of sucking a dick. In her 2012 memoir The Gentrification of the Mind, Sarah Schulman describes how the in the waning of the AIDS crisis, as anti-retroviral drugs became available, queer life transmuted from something cheap, creative, collaborative, erotic, and rebellious into something respectable, conservative, and consumerist. Through that lens, romantic as it is, it’s particularly exciting to me to see a civic association so concerned about the survival of one of Pittsburgh’s few remaining irl cruising venues, and to see Donald Thinnes’ papers–all 26 boxes of records from the man for whom Donny’s is named, and who has been running the venue nearly continuously since 1973–placed in the Heinz History Center’s archives, along with loose posters and a plastic wine glass filled with what appears to be finely crushed coal.

The bar itself is something of a (living history?) museum [5] as well. Above the beer fridge is a bowl that belonged to a human puppy who died a couple years ago. Polish Hill poetry legend Rachel Ann Bovier’s ode to Donny’s is framed and propped on a shelf, illegible in the bar’s dim light. This past Sunday night I asked the bartender to hand it to me so I could have a closer look, and when I did the men surrounding me put down their phones and leaned in towards me to read it, some of them so close that I could feel the hairs on their arms against mine.

Tune in later this week for my first report from the Donald Thinnes collection at the Heinz History Center.  As always, I invite you to send tips, opinions, criticisms, and nudes to me, Dade Lemanski, at dadelemanski@gmail.com. More historically informed Rust Belt sodomy news arriving in your inbox soon.

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1. I kind of love the implication here that the third gender is Couples; the idea of marriage being a union of Two Souls in One Body is either deeply conservative or profoundly transcendent, depending on whether you ask the Christian Right or Breyer P-Orridge.
2. See the writing of Breece D’J Pancake, especially this line which ends the story “Trilobites”: “I walk, but I'm not scared. I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years,” and this essay by Appalachian literary scholar Thomas E. Douglass on Pancake's writing, West Virginia, place, and displacement: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40934964?read-now=1&seq=2
3. https://csgsnyu.org/a-brief-history-of-erotohistoriography-a-lecture-by-elizabeth-freeman/
4. Ozma is a queer interdisciplinary artist perhaps best known for co-editing the 2019 volume of iconic trans faggot Lou Sullivan’s journals, We Both Laughed in Pleasure.
5. With all the problematic elements, specifically elisions of racism and colonialism that such a term implies.