Beebo Brinker

“Does it ever happen that a nice girl is a Lesbian?” she asked him shyly.

“All the time,” he said, opening up the paper and gazing through the ball scores.

“Did you ever meet any?”

“I’ve met most of them,” he chuckled. “They’re just as friendly and pleasant as other girls. Why not?”

“But can’t you tell by looking at them that they’re—” She rubbed a hand over her mouth as if to warn herself not to speak the word, and then said it anyway: “—Lesbian?”

“You mean, do they all wear army boots and Levis?” Jack said with a smile. “Does Mona Petry look like a buck private?”

Beebo shook her head. “That’s why it’s so hard to believe she’s what you say she is.”

“Gay? Why hell, she’s slept with more girls than she has men. And let me tell you, that’s damn near enough girls to elect a lady president.”

Beebo laughed with him, and yet she felt a strange obsession with the whole idea. She half resented Jack’s merriment on the subject, although she was relieved that he displayed no contempt for Lesbians as a group. Only for Mona Petry. She was surprised to find herself wanting to defend Mona, whom she knew so little. And yet she trusted Jack’s judgment. Still, what a pity to think a girl that pretty was that hard.

Jack sipped his drink and picked up his cigarette, still with his eyes on the paper. “There are some nice little gay bars around the neighborhood,” he said. “We’ll have to take some of them in. Maybe this weekend, hm?” He didn’t look at her. His cigarette waggled between his lips as he talked.

“Is it all right to go there?” Beebo asked. “Don’t the police make raids on those places?”

“Now and then!” he conceded. “Of course, if you’d rather not …”

“Oh, I’d like to go,” she said, so quickly that he smiled into the newsprint. “But aren’t they just for men—the gay bars?”

“Men, girls, and everything in between,” he assured her.

“Do you ever go there, Jack?”

Again he was tempted to be honest with her, and still again he restrained himself. “I go when the mood is on me,” he said. Beebo became silent at once, as if she suspected she was trying to learn too much too fast. But she spent the remaining weekdays waiting impatiently for a tour of the bars with Jack.

Jack took her to three or four of his favorite places, and to one strictly Lesbian bar where they admitted only the faces they recognized, through a window in the door. Beebo followed him around quietly, watching, listening, almost breathing in the atmosphere. She said little, and most of what she did say was interrogatory.

Jack answered her calmly while he sipped one beer after another. He would order one for her and let her work at it, but he usually ended up finishing it himself. In every bar he was kept busy greeting people, trading jokes, laughing. Beebo trailed along in his wake, smiling and shaking hands with the strangers who were Jack’s friends, and promptly forgetting their names.

But not their faces. Toward the end of the evening she began to feel that she had seen more faces in one night than she had seen in a lifetime in Juniper Hill. And these faces seemed different to her: rare and beautiful, sharers of a special knowledge. They had bright eyes and young smiles, no matter how old they were.

“They make a big thing of keeping young down here,” Jack told her. “The men are worse than the girls. Nobody loves an old queen.”

It was almost one in the morning when they left the last co-ed bar and Jack asked if she was game for one more. “This one is just for Lesbians,” he said.

She nodded, and a few minutes later they were being admitted to a basement bar saturated with pink light, paneled with mirrors, and filled with girls. More girls, more sizes, types, and ages, than Beebo had ever seen collected together in one place. The place was called the Colophon and it was decorated with the emblems of various famous publishing houses.

Jack fought his way through the crush at the bar, absorbing a lot of pointed merriment directed at his masculinity.

“Sour grapes,” he cried good-naturedly and inspired a chorus of laughter and catcalls. Beebo, pushing in behind him, became aware suddenly that she was the object of mass curiosity. She could look over the heads of most of the girls and her height made her visible from all directions.

Abashed, she closed in on Jack, who was hollering an order to the bartender. “Maybe we ought to go. I—I mean—” She didn’t know how to explain herself to him. He was looking at her with a startled frown. “They don’t seem to like having a man in here,” she said lamely.

Jack began to laugh. “You want me to go, honey? Okay. Just give me two bits to see a movie.”

She gasped. “That’s not what I meant!” she objected. “I don’t want to be in here alone!”

“Why not?” He reached between two girls at the bar to grab his beer. “You’ll make out. I might cramp your style.”

“Jack, damn it, if you go, I go.”

“Okay, pal, I won’t ditch you,” he said, glimpsing her anxious face. “Relax. We’ll have one more and then cut out.”

She had had quite a bit of beer already, even with Jack finishing them for her. But she couldn’t stand there with all those eyes on her and do nothing. Better to drink a beer than gape back at the gapers. She poured some into her glass and drank it. And then drained the glass and poured some more.

Jack took her elbow. “I see some friends over there,” he said, guiding her toward a table near the back. There were introductions all around, but to Beebo, things seemed different. The other bars had been all male or mixed. In this one, Jack Mann and the two bartenders, and a small scattering of “Johns,” were the only men in a big room solidly packed with women. It excited Beebo intensely—all that femininity. She was silent, studying the girls at the table while Jack talked with them. When she shook hands with them, a new feeling gripped her. For the first time in her life she was proud of her size, proud of her strength, even proud of her oddly boyish face. She could see interest, even admiration on the faces of many of the girls. She was not used to that kind of reaction in people, and it exhilarated her. But she didn’t talk much, only answering direct questions when she had to; smiling at them when they smiled at her; looking away in confusion when one or another tried to stare her down.

They had been there half an hour when somebody came over from another table and asked her to dance. Beebo turned around, her stomach in a knot. “Are they dancing?” she asked.

“Sure,” said the girl. “By the jukebox.”

Beebo had heard music without looking to see where it came from. She got up from the table and went to the back room, realizing as she stood up how much beer she had drunk. At the back of the crowd surrounding the dance floor, there was room to stand and watch.

The music was rhythmic and popular. The floor was jammed with a mass of couples … a mass of girls, dancing, arms locked around each other, bodies pressed close and warm. Their cheeks were touching. Quick light kisses were exchanged. And they were all girls, every one of them: young and lovely and infatuated with each other. They touched one another with gentle caresses, they kissed, they smiled and laughed and whispered while they turned and moved together.

There was no shame, no shock, no self-consciousness about it at all. They were enjoying themselves. They were having fun in the most natural way imaginable. They were all in love, or so it seemed. They were—what did Jack call it?—gay.

Beebo watched them for less than a minute, all told; but a minute that was transfixed like a living picture in her mind for the rest of her life. She was startled by it, afraid of it. And yet so passionately moved that she caught her breath and held it till her heart began to pound in protest. Her fists closed hard with the nails biting into her palms and she was obsessed momentarily by the desire to grab the girl nearest her and kiss her.

At that point she murmured, “Oh, God!” and turned to flee. She felt the way she had in childhood dreams when she was being chased by some vague terrible menace, and she had to move slowly and tortuously, with great effort, as through a wall of water, while the monster gained on her from behind.

She caught Jack’s shoulders in her big hands and squeezed them hard. “Let’s go, let’s go,” she said urgently.

He looked at her as if she had lost her senses. “I just ordered another round,” he said.

“Jack, please!” She pulled him to his feet.

“Jesus, can’t you wait a little while, honey?” he said, and triggered an outburst of merriment at the table. But she meant it, and he was not too high to see her panic. He picked his jacket off the back of his chair, apologizing to his friends. “When she wants it, she wants it now,” he grinned, shrugging.

“Who are you kidding?” they laughed.

Beebo was already pushing her way to the exit and Jack had a battle to catch her. He found her waiting for him outside by the door.

“Hey,” he said, and put a friendly hand on her shoulder as they started to walk toward his apartment. “What happened?”

“I don’t want to go back there, Jack,” she blurted.

“What’s the matter with it? Too much fun?”

“It was awful,” she said, not even knowing why she said it.

“You liked the other places.”