Jay E.
Yelp
It's amusing to read reviews and hear from acquaintances about the "creepiness" of the 19 Bar. It's as if the idea that a man might flirt with you at a gay dive bar is somehow as difficult to process as theories of dark matter and the multiverse. Yes, if you spend an evening in a gay dive, there's a chance a gay guy will - GASP - make eye contact with you. That's how all bars, hetero and homo, work. Get over yourself. Besides, my mother tells me I'm handsome all the time, and only one man has ever hit on me at this joint - and he might've only been trying to cut in front of me at the jukebox.
This is a bar with character and history. These can often be ineffable qualities, but you know it when you feel them. Good bars have auras. The moments you experience feel inevitable, built from the momentum of incalculable events over the years that give the inner workings of the place its own, magical logic. I felt that here.
I'm sure plenty of people have ducked into the19 bar for what they thought would be a novel experience, if not an outright freak show story they could relay to friends in the future. "Guess what I did this weekend... I WENT TO A GAY BAR." Well, be drawn by the spectacle if you must, but be won over by the soul.
First tip: go during a weeknight, or if you visit on a weekend hit the bar early. The line for drinks tends to stretch after 11 pm. The bartenders handle the bustle with grace and aplomb, but the wait can be significant due to the volume of customers at peak hours.
The drinks are very well priced, and the bartenders pour like they're throwing a heavy switch. I had myself a whiskey and split a pitcher of beer. I went with another straight dude and a woman, and none of us felt anything but welcome. Well, that and drunk by the second round.
I went on a Saturday night (yep, against my own advice), and I had a full experience: played a game of darts; spent half an hour refamiliarizing myself with the old school Pac Man game; struggled through a couple games of pool (try not to clog up the tables, people are waiting); sorted through the gay ass jukebox. When I say gay ass jukebox, I mean: AWESOME. Look, at the risk of being accused of generalizing and stereotyping, gay people know how to have fun better than straight people on the whole - unrestrained, unfiltered fun. I think there's something about a lifetime of persecution and living on the margins that frees a person up where you might think it would shut him down. The jukebox reflects that: a lot of upbeat music, dance music, 80s and 90s guilty pleasures. Fantastic.
I love evenings that begin or end at the 19 Bar, and evenings that begin or end in that area in general. The area has a very strange feel to it, a postapocalyptic vibe - it often feels to me like there's a limitless potential for adventure or mishap. In the afternoons and early evenings the sky is full of jumbo jets and the noxious smells of a city too busy to clean up after itself. Traffic is an endless cycle of Somali women in headwraps driving minivans. The highway runs through the heart of it all, and there's steel, hardness, the constant hum of noise pollution. The location looks surprisingly vibrant in the day, peculiarly bleak at night, overwhelming darkness interrupted here and there by pockets of unforgiving florescent light from doorways and street lamps that look one strong storm away from falling over. There was such a storm the other night, and the bars were packed because so many people had lost electricity. The 19 Bar was open because... well, because of course it was.
I went home from the bar with a woman who I initially assumed was a lesbian. We did what silly, drunken, confused people in their early 30s do, and the sad truth is she passed out in the middle of it. I can't remember her name, and I doubt she remembers mine. Her face tapered inward from below her eyes to beneath her cheeks, giving her the look of a light bulb with a tuft of hair glued on top. She was thin to the point of fragility. I don't usually go for brittle looking women; in general I like to feel that I am pressing into something when I have sex, like a key into a mold leaving a memory of itself for later replication.
Anyway, in the middle of the night I sat still in her bed while she slept and let myself be seized by the sounds in the Steven's Square neighborhood, carried away from my own thoughts at times, deeper into them at others. Whenever I crash in this hood I'm struck by the unique noise of nights here: a sort of lost and depressing spiritual, the sound of decay. An occasional animal-wail of lamentation or a deranged laugh cuts through the night. The world starts to feel like a decision I got wrong.
I went way off course with those last two paragraphs. Let me end this review now. See what the affordable pours of whiskey at the 19 Bar will do to you?
