pittsburgh sucks and i love it

The other week I published a brief profile of Real Luck Café, a gay bar commonly known as Lucky’s, in the Pride issue of the Pittsburgh City Paper. Lucky’s is the rare gay bar that’s also a real Rust Belt dive; it has a sticky floor, it stinks of cigarettes even when no one’s smoking, and on Saturday nights there’s a crockpot buffet table across from the vending machine that sells only cigarettes plus one row of Doritos at the top. Nude dancers perform atop the second-floor bar four nights a week. Even better, Lucky’s carries the name of deceased Pittsburgh after-hours gay nightlife icon Robert “Lucky” Johns[1], and it shares a wall with one of Pittsburgh’s biggest seafood-wholesaling-warehouse-demolition-to-luxury-residential-skyscraper-funded-by-NYC-based-developer-with-a-grant-from-the-state-of-Pennsylvania projects, and this shared wall appears to be slowing down progress on the project tremendously.

Obviously, I'm obsessed. The fact that Lucky's continues its gloriously sleazy operation surrounded by the pressures of gentrification in 2022 is, to paraphrase my important friend and leather associate[2] Emma, death metal that makes me want to live. As I worked on the article I found that I had far more to say about gay social spaces, sex, gentrification, Appalachia, ruin porn, race, and class than 500 commissioned words permitted. It became hard, then impossible, to convey how much this bar means and matters on a swiftly approaching deadline; the draft I submitted was twice as long as what my wonderful editor Lisa Cunningham had requested and Lisa, having asked me for a reported piece and not an editorial, got us to an acceptable word count and journalistic standard by taking all my opinions out.

A few days after the article went to print my cruising associate Jason Bailey, who manages the bathhouse Club Pittsburgh, and who hooked me up with some crucial sources for this feature on the McKeesport adult bookstore I wrote a few months ago, texted me saying that he wanted to read what had been cut from the article, and suggesting that I start a newsletter to share the raunchier details, hotter takes, and more curious archival finds from my research and reporting on grimy gay life in and around Pittsburgh. I kicked Jason's idea around in my head for a few days and then started writing this, the first edition of a newsletter which I'm calling SINKHOLE / GLORYHOLE, about infrastructural failure and faggot sex, broadly construed. Bill Shaner, a former reporter at Worcester Magazine, my shitty Massachusetts Rust Belt hometown’s equivalent of City Paper, writes a newsletter called Worcester Sucks and I Love It. Well, Pittsburgh also sucks and I also love it. I hope my qualifications as a trained historian and cocksucking transsexual convince you to keep reading:

A couple weeks ago, I was at my day (night) job, tending bar at a relatively new and very straight, very Instagrammable, ostensibly European pink neon cafe and lounge in East Liberty. East Liberty, for those who don’t know, was once the biggest Black business district in Pennsylvania and the third-largest business district in the state, after downtown Philadelphia and downtown Pittsburgh. Then urban redevelopment programs in the 1960s, the downturn of Pittsburgh’s industrial economy, anti-Black drug war and housing policies, and the like undermined the infrastructure of the neighborhood.[4] When I moved here five years ago, a major public housing project called Penn Plaza at the corner of Negley and Penn Avenues had just been knocked down despite years of protest from residents and community members; now, a mixed-use luxury residential building has been erected in its place, and Whole Foods intends to move into the ground-floor space, relocating from its current facility a few blocks away. What’s being called East Liberty’s revitalization is mostly the neighborhood’s conversion into a sanitized and suburbanized playground for employees of Google and Duolingo, both of which have offices in the neighborhood.

Many of these employees are my regulars, stopping in for coffee in the daytime and then again for drinks at night. The effeminate care work of tending a cocktail bar and attending to its patrons, providing them with entertainment and pleasure, is among faggotry's most palatable public forms; the other bartenders and I peddle our gifts mostly to straight people, and to gay people living straight lives, by which I mean if they don’t work for Duolingo or Google they likely work for Uber, or occasionally for Goldman Sachs. These customers frequently express to me how thrilled they are to find themselves feeling as though they're not in Pittsburgh, by which I think they mean they use my place of employment to take a break from the crushing constant feeling of the collapse of American empire, from the potent evidence of racial capitalism that is inescapable in this city.

During an idle moment on a recent slow and humid eighty-degree Wednesday evening behind the bar, just before the power went out midway through service [5], I got to talking about gay bars with my friend and fellow bartender Ben, who like me is a white Jewish faggot and former New Yorker, but who unlike me is not trans.

I expressed to Ben my disappointment with a recent visit to Minneapolis’ eagleBOLT bar[6], where I’d hoped to excise some of the lingering straight vibes from a wedding I was in town to attend by making lurid eye contact with daddies in leather suspenders, only to find myself eating a hamburger alone amidst a sea of Chads with swishy wrists–not to discount the multiracial group of older men gossiping and exchanging massages at the far end of the bar–which prompted Ben to tell me about some of his wildest nights at the New York City Eagle, which opened in 1931 and from which all other leather bars called The Eagle–currently, about thirty operate worldwide–derive their name.

Midway through a story about one such debaucherous night at the Eagle involving an orgy in the bar itself, Ben cut himself off. “Oh my god,” he said. “Have you been to Lucky’s?”

Of course I told him about the article that was about to come out. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ben replied. There’s nowhere you can see nude dancers like that in New York, nowhere where patrons will just touch a dancer’s genitals on the bar and it’s fine. I was shocked! I had the wildest night of my life there recently.” There is little I find more gratifying than destabilizing New York’s position atop the hierarchy of American cultural relevance. Ben is my friend and a generous person, not chauvinistic, and, like me, he now lives in Pittsburgh, but nonetheless his big-city shock at Lucky’s glorious provincial obscenity pleased me[8].

Like I said, I’m not from New York City, a place I left for southern West Virginia when I was twenty-two. I’m from Worcester, Massachusetts and for most of the last decade I've been living in Appalachia, a choice which befuddled many people from my previous life in Manhattan, and provoked in more than a few acquaintances reactionary class-shaming bullshit about rednecks and hillbillies. Now I live in Pittsburgh, and those people are not my acquaintances any longer.

But I love New Yorkers because I love people to whom place matters deeply. Something I love about Appalachians is that they care about place just as much as New Yorkers, even though Appalachia is not as famous as New York City, or as well regarded in the mainstream. But Appalachian, like New Yorker, is a potent role for a person to inhabit regarding their position in the story of what America is supposed to be[9].

In the meantime, it’s worth saying that when I talk about Appalachia I’m not talking about that mythic white working class[9]. You know who these most insufferable New Yorkers are? White transplants to the city who believe their new proximity to Black and brown people makes them more interesting and authentic than their fellow white people. Why do I know so much about this? Because it’s a logic that traps me too if I’m not vigilant against it, and sometimes even then.

I once had a housemate in Western Massachusetts, a straight white Jewish computer scientist who is now married and a father. He had spent some years living in New York City and refused a summer internship at Duolingo because he couldn’t imagine a life in Pittsburgh, not even for a few months. No fine professional or respectable familial life, my old roommate believed, was to be had in this shitty crumbling Rust Belt city. But the atmosphere and clientele of my workplace illustrates how much that piece of Pittsburgh’s mythology, as a place of industrial failure and, subsequently, as evidence of the failure of the white American dream, has changed in the last few years; I moved out of the house I shared with that computer scientist in the summer of 2015.

When Ben noted to me the ways in which Lucky’s seediness marks it as an exceptional place which could only exist in Pittsburgh–a fact I mention with pride–I thought again about Nancy Pribich, the owner of Lucky’s, and her recent claim in response to a Google review that Lucky’s is “the oldest woman owned gay bar that still has a dance floor!!” As I mention in the City Paper article, Dr. Harrison Apple, a friend whose research specialty is Pittsburgh’s gay after-hours clubs, wrote to me to with a correction: they believe that Lucky’s “may be the oldest queer bar that is woman-owned featuring nude dancers in Pittsburgh, not the greater metro area.”

That kind of hyperbolic, provincial exceptionalism which Pribich exhibited is also typical of Pittsburgh more broadly but particularly, in my experience, of its queer institutions. My partner, who works in harm reduction, told me recently that they were talking with a friend who works at Central Outreach Wellness Center, the service-consolidating LGBTQ health clinic on the North Side, and that this friend claimed that COWC is the only health clinic anywhere in the United States that's offering Hepatitis-C treatment to patients who currently use needles to inject drugs.

That is simply not true, but the idea that it could be handily illuminates the ways in which Pittsburgh's queer community--such that "queer community" is at all a useful term--is often disconnected from broader cultural and social trends. The gay neoliberal future sucks, and Dan Savage has said plenty of fatphobic, biphobic, and otherwise bullshit things in public, but it's also as if his It Gets Better campaign never really made it down the Allegheny River, for better and worse. As Joseph Osmundson writes in his new book Virology: Essays for the Dead, the Living, and the Small Things in Between, José Esteban Muñoz identified "that because queer people may choose not to have biological children, queers are 'within the dominant culture, a people without a future.'" Osmundson, a queer virologist, describes how quarantine and Covid-19 have forced many people to put the present on hold as well. For those with no future and also no present, he asks, why bother to live, and how? "Queer people have been training for this moment--to sacrifice, in the face of a virus, to care for one another, and yet never to lose sight of pleasure, even when both the present and the future seem impossible. It is too much to ask of us. What choice do we have but to do it?" It doesn't get better, but it does keep happening, and so we have to figure out how to live through it and with it anyways.

In my experience, Pittsburgh's provinciality is what makes it an exceptionally fruitful place for a freak to cultivate a life, and yet many of those factors which allow a seedy erotic gay and transsexual life to flourish here are the same ones which make this city, riddled with infrastructural problems, a profoundly difficult place to live for people who are queer, trans, poor, Black, drug users, homeless, or otherwise outside of eligibility for the fantasy of a largely eroded American dream. Tech companies recruiting new employees to Pittsburgh repeat on billboards that this city is rated as the most livable in America, even though it's also, statistically, the worst place in the country for Black women to make a life[10].

Gentrification is antithetical to pleasure, but classism and fatphobia and anti-Blackness and all that bullshit lives in the city’s grodiest erotic scenes too. What thrills me about studying (and having an) erotic life in Pittsburgh is that to many people, including to people who live here, it’s unimaginable, and that an erotic queer or transsexual life is a kind of joy that’s mostly not contingent on money, except when it is. A friend who grew up here and moved away once told me they understood Pittsburgh’s emotional weather to be codependent, murky as the river and heavy as the smoggy skies, undermining to any attempts at sex and play, curiosity and intimacy. That has not been my experience here, except when it has.

On occasion the unimaginable transpires and it’s terror, disaster, death, but other times outside of imagination lies what is actually possible, often surprising and honestly desired. Desire, of course, is messy, sticky, sometimes difficult to admit out loud or under the bright lights of a corporate tech job–easier to locate, Samuel Delany might suggest, in a dark porn theater, where much negotiation happens outside of spoken language–though all of Pittsburgh’s adult cinemas have been closed or converted into nonprofit-managed arts venues, and there are more and more tech jobs available in  this city each day. But for now, I think, there’s room to be disgusting in Pittsburgh because the city isn’t yet so expensive that only the cleanest, shiniest, most professional and respectable members of society can survive here. And this humid, polluted, congested, sinkholed city makes their wealthy, respectable lives difficult, though it can make things difficult for the rest of us here too. Poverty sucks, simply. It’s not some beautiful romantic thing. Neither, thank god, keynihore, is it beautiful and romantic in any simple way to be alive and gay in this shitty city. But it's interesting. That, to me, is something that matters, something worth writing down and paying attention to.

SINKHOLE / GLORYHOLE is free but if you have the money and inclination to pay for it, that would be cool. 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.

1. Who I learned about from my friend Dr. Harrison Apple of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project and especially Lucky's After Dark
2. credit to Davey Davis (itsdavid.substack.com / @k8bushofficial) for this phrasing
3. For more see Pittsburgh filmmaker Chris Ivey’s documentary East of Liberty: https://eastofliberty.com/
4. Customers kept drinking until it was too dark to see inside the bar, and even then we had to kick some of them out so we could close.
5. Which, to be fair, is a merger of the formerly adjacent Eagle and Bolt bar; the Eagle catered to an older, more leather-oriented crowd while the Bolt’s clientele was younger, seeking dance parties and a video lounge.
6. Incidentally, the Pittsburgh Eagle is not a gay bar but rather the publishing company under which the Pittsburgh City Paper operates.
7. At that same Minneapolis wedding a white man in his early thirties wearing a natty blue suit and a Panama hat told me he was from New York as we were doing tedious small talk. “You mean the city?” I asked. He blustered, “Of course,” then admitted he’d grown up in Illinois.
8. For more, check out Elizabeth Catte’s brilliant and brief book What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia.
9. Regarding New York City and Appalachia, there’s more to say than I have time for presently about urban and rural dynamics, class and whiteness, Jews and migration, colonization and what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery; stay tuned, dear readers, for future editions of this newsletter.
10. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-23/pittsburgh-is-not-a-livable-city-for-black-women