"gone for good, with no goodbye kiss": whatever happened to Donny's Place?

With no notice, Donny’s, the leather bar whose existence was the inspiration for this newsletter, shuttered last September. I learned about it from a friend, G, who found the door locked one Sunday evening. G had crossed the Herron Avenue bridge not even looking for dick to suck but just hoping for a free hot dog. Instead he found two Post-It notes affixed at jaunty angles to the plexiglass reading, simply, “CLOSED” in all caps. On one of the notes someone had drawn a spare little sad face, just two dots for eyes and the gentle downward arc of a frown.

Donny’s has no real social media presence, only a Facebook page so sparse and out of date that it claims the bar is open right now, though the closure is now reflected on gaycities.com and in its Google profile (one review, five stars, no further comments). According to the Donny’s forum on Squirt.org, that change in Google’s records was made around December 11. On Squirt, at last, I found that my friend and I were not alone in our consternation; Daddies were watching, speculating, concerned, but nobody had any concrete information, just longing, confusion, curiosity, and grief. Here is my limited, subjective selection of comments from the message board since Donny’s closed in late September:

September 24: “Hey! The bar was closed tonight. Anybody know what’s up?”

October 9: Went there three Thursdays in a row, no joy. I’m of a mind that it’s gone for good, with no goodbye kiss. Are there any other bars along the lines of this place in Pittsburgh?”

October 14: “Stopped by Thursday night, no joy, and Club Pittsburgh just aint cutting it.”

October 16: “Going to stick to A4A and Rosey till we find out. You think that somebody there would give info on here, one way or another"

October 16: “Rosey Palm and her Five Sisters. Five knuckle shuffle…..jacking off”

October 21: “I remember them denying that it was up for sale when Donny owned it, then it was ‘sold’ and closed. The other possibility is delay due to upcoming elections."

October 24: “Not that I know of. I’d love it if there were [other places like Donny’s]...Just a man’s bar without all of the flash and the drama…”

December 2: “Recon report: no joy 12/1”

December 4: “Drove past Donny’s last night. Nothing.”

December 12: “I liked it back in the day when it was a leather bar and upstairs was a country western bar. I heard the building is not safe to open again but who knows?”

December 17: “It seems that most guys these days meet online instead of IRL (in real life) like we used to. I miss the old school meets like the leather bars, the Garden Theater, etc. But I guess we still have these cruise spots that are listed on this site.”

January 7: “Whoever is/ was running this place if they are associated with the real owner then you know they are as shadyas [sic] they come. No surprise thos [sic] place is history.”

Each time I reread these comments I feel more and more clearly that this clunky cruising website is also a slow-motion memorial service. It pains me and I am rapt to it. Men are cruising not even for sex but simply for information, and I am one of them, hungry as all the rest. (I think of Nan Goldin’s voiceover in Laura Poitras’ new documentary about Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, describing how she used the camera as a proxy for sex, how photography–the permission to look closely–is usually better than sex, anyway.)

So with the back room shuttered and not even the promise of sex to distract me I began to ask around about what had happened to Donny’s, searching the court dockets and the real estate listings for answers, sending dms and making strategic calls to phone numbers I found on the internet. Finally I had a conversation the contents of which I’ve been requested not to speak about before those more invested and more impacted choose to disclose. This gives–burdens? blesses?–me with another void to write around, another absence at the core of my desire, when all of my desire orbits around history–which is part of what I understand Leather to be. [1]

All this has gotten me thinking a lot about Nothing–what it means, what its mass and matter might be. What do I call the flyover country in the map of my erotic life? I have spent ten years trying to understand why so many people from my life in New York wrongly understood my move to West Virginia as a relocation to the middle of nowhere–which begs the question, why would nowhere have a middle at all, and if it did how could that center be anything other than a hole? I have also spent a decade learning from my friends in West Virginia how to notice and describe all the life that happens there, in what the mainstream culture believes to be only an absence.

The hole in the middle of nowhere: this reminds me that my first boyfriend, who was from Bulgaria, a poor and largely rural country in Southeastern Europe, liked to end our conversations about his country of origin’s political location relative to the Ottoman Empire and also to the European Union by noting that the term buggery, meaning anal sex, usually with a pejorative or illicit connotation, derived from a Medieval Latin term which labeled Bulgarians as heretics, so evidenced by their obscene sexual practices.

My lover got their tubes tied this week, which doesn’t register for most people as a gender-affirming surgery (the trap of earnest language! Gender is social, and in many cases sexual–that is, about who we want to fuck or to fuck us, except when it isn't), but the morning before the surgery we agreed that they are transitioning to full-time hole.

So how does all of this relate to Donny’s’ closure? I am interested in finding what is generative and alive in nothingness, in absence, in refusal. I don’t want to feel that I have nothing to say just because I haven’t been sucking dick at the leather bar, nor do I want to assume that sucking dick is the most valuable or legitimating thing a person could be doing, a thought that embarrasses me as I write it out though I know I'm not remotely alone in being limited by this false belief. Nor do I want to betray the confidences of men who have trusted me with information they are not ready to share just because I want some facts to put down on this, my imperfect attempt at intimate history.

Also, I’ve been reading Sherronda L. Brown’s new book Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture, and as a result noticing habits of thought in myself that I don’t like, ways I manage insecurity or notions of my own legitimacy through perceptions of my desirability, measure queer belonging through sexual participation even though I have felt hurt and excluded when others have leveled these measurements against me. What if I didn’t need to quantify sex, and didn’t use it as a warping lens through which to assess my own worth and the legitimacy or intimacy of my relationships? I want a gay history that doesn’t demand sex and which includes the undesirable and the undesiring, the survivors, and all those who aren’t having sex for whatever reason. I want this for myself as well. In gay bar cultures, no sex often means no life, but if sex is the determiner of my aliveness then I put too much of myself in other people’s hands.

Which returns me to Nan Goldin. Never in the film does she proclaim her own sexuality; she just acts, and tells about it–falling briefly in love with a woman while living in a lesbian separatist camp in Provincetown, MA and working at a Portuguese hot dog stand, befriending Cookie Mueller and John Waters (regarding this period, Goldin notes that she felt out of place among the lesbians as someone who wore pearls to the beach, that she found jeans and flannels dull and missed the chiffons and bright colors of the queens she lived with the rest of the year in Cambridge, MA); photographing herself having sex with various boyfriends. She started taking pictures of the sex she was having, Goldin says, because she was asking friends to let her photograph them fucking, and she felt she owed them a parallel level of vulnerability from herself. But the sex is so clearly not the point. “The most important relationships of my life,” Goldin narrates, “have been with my friends.” So important that she made her own sex public to honor the risks her friends took in allowing themselves to be so seen.

Brown writes about entitlement to sex as anti-Blackness–"White supremacy itself is a sexual fantasy–preoccupied with power, violence, and domination"–and entitlement to sexual stories, or to secrets, is part of this same logic. In their talk "I Can't Wait for You to Die: A Community Archives Critique," Harrison Apple describes the culture of oral history as extractive, and details their own choice to stop recording conversations with elders, which they had come to understand to be a breach of the intimacy and trust which allowed them access in the first place.

I think what I mean to say is, I am remembering that some things simply must be left alone, and that I felt this absence needed to be acknowledged before I could go on writing. All histories are incomplete and no amount of gathering facts or stories or archival proof could make them otherwise. It is not mine to tell someone else's story, but it is mine to tell about the absence I encountered, how I grieve and desire it at once. (I ought to show how I fuck if I’m going to ask my friends to do the same.) It is mine share my relief that others were also wondering what happened to Donny's (which maybe you've been wondering too), to say that I still wish I could visit again, for the hot dogs as much as anything, and to admit that this void in the record (a hole with no glory) is one I simply cannot fill.

1. In his 2010 Master’s thesis on leather geographies, Scott Alan Hutka writes that “Leathersex is a term not easily defined and is viewed differently at different times by the individuals involved, and becomes blurred when the physical act of sex stops and the SM activity begins. Generally, it is an all-encompassing term pertaining to physical and sexual engagements and relationships that involve SM and other activities. Fundamentally, leathersex is a form of power exchange between people who perform dominant or submissive roles. A way to determine the definition is to accept each interacting person‟s definition and recognizing the power exchanged between them in intimate circumstances, and that any and all of the activities performed can be labeled as leathersex.” Hutka is by no means one of the culture’s respected chroniclers or theorists, but he quotes them–Gayle Rubin, Mark Thompson–and he writes about a world that he knows intimately as a participant. Furthermore Hutka's proximity, at Kent State, to Pittsburgh’s leather scene, and its location in the particular industrial ruin of the Rust Belt’s intersection with Appalachia, is exciting to me.

Look for more reports from the archives and from the sleaziest corners of Allegheny County in your inbox soon. Forthcoming topics include:

-What happened to The Outer Skin for the Inner You

-a local historical review of sweat-scented poppers

-Grindr and the empty present

-A review of Jeremy Atherton Lin's book Gay Bar

-Betty Martin's The Art of Receiving and Giving and the power of bottoming

-A brief leather history of Pittsburgh

-Donny’s chameleonlike business survival strategy

-Cruising documentaries + Yiddish history

As always, I invite you to send tips, opinions, criticisms, and nudes to me, Dade Lemanski, at dadelemanski@gmail.com.

SINKHOLE / GLORYHOLE is free but if you have the money and inclination to pay for it, that would be cool. You can tip me at @golus-goals on Venmo or $golusgoals on Cashapp if so desired.