The Boy Mechanic
San Diego Los Angeles Cologne San Francisco Oakland Text Book
The Boy Mechanic ongoing multi-platform project The Boy Mechanic which documents the history of lesbian bars in cities and towns across the United States and Europe. To date, I have had the opportunity and resources to produce The Boy Mechanic locally in California in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and the East Bay and in Cologne, Germany.
Loss of architecture and the frailties of public memories have often been the motivation for photographic documentation of changing urban spaces; focusing on the lesbian bar reveals how sexuality and sexual identity inform larger narratives about public identity and social space. The Boy Mechanic aims to document and give authority to narrations of lesbian bar life, so often anonymous or mute, and now waning. Each city's character influences both the direction and methodology of the research, the type of art objects that I produce and how they are exhibited and distributed. Historically American bars have been a place to socialize and organize. The possibility of anonymity presented by the size and diversity of population in large cities like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco made them the destination for any self-defined homosexual in rural American for most of the 20th Century. In Europe the existence of the demi-monde in the 1920’s Paris made places like Le Monocle a lively place for lesbians to meet and although the interior was documented in Brassai’s infamous photographs, finding and producing a record of the location for the archive will help preserve our spatial histories.
Producing a visual record of the bars is by definition a cross generational project. Women who participated in the 40's bar scene are now in their 90's, those who were a part of the flourishing lesbian community in the 70's are now middle aged, and many of today's bar patrons are in their 20's. The aging population of those who owned and attended the bars in the early years makes the need to document and record their memories urgent. Today in many cities younger women do not feel the need for established bars and they engage in a moveable club culture text messaging those that are in their group to find out which bar will be that night's meeting place. Hence, if you are not already a part of the group it is difficult to casually enter without being pre-selected. The Boy Mechanic reasserts the importance of physical place in the context of a mobile, highly communications technology networked society.
Globalization erases the unique and exceptional histories that seemingly matter only to a few people. Local knowledge can be superseded by generic common knowledge. The bar scene is a local scene and although some of the narratives are similar from one city to another the characteristics of local individually owned businesses with specific histories differ depending on the era, the region, the local laws and customs and unique architectural histories. It is my desire with The Boy Mechanic to etch a local text and refuse to let it disappear from public memory. The project re-inscribes not only the reputations of these notorious places but the locations and addresses of their remains. Certainly the start of any urban clean up, with its resulting improvement of property values, begins with eliminating the places where deviant behavior flourishes. It is my intention by expanding the editions of The Boy Mechanic to show a psycho-geography of cities that refuses the logic of multinational capitalism's we-are-one commercialization.
The Boy Mechanic acknowleges that the history of individual bars is a conflicted and often contradictory narrative that is writing and re-writing itself. The documentation of the facades at these locations resists nostalgia because with a few exceptions they are not examples of architectural beauty but of banal commercial spaces. While state architecture writes its function on the outside, these bars speak their function when viewed from the inside. Silent and monumental in scale the photographs of the facades trace vernacular urban transformation with the haunting quality of an unreachable past. Changing strategies for different urban contexts, I employ a variety of media (video, text, and hand drawn maps) to produce a context to assist the viewer in reading the information that is implicit but not on the surface of the photographs. Documentary has long been associated with socially responsive art and although it's popularity in the American art context has had its ups and downs, there continues to be recognition of critical documentaries' role in providing content.
Work to Date
The Boy Mechanic was commissioned in 1996 by the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego for the exhibition “Re: Public; Listening to San Diego." For this initial phase of the project I conducted 30 hours of videotaped interviews with San Diego lesbian bar patrons who took me to current and former sites of the bars in that town. The result was a 30-minute video about the history of lesbian bars in San Diego.
In 2001 I was invited to show a work in the exhibition “<hers> Video as a Female Terrain”, which was part of the annual internationally acclaimed cultural arts event the Steirischer Herbst, at the Landesmusuem Joanneum, in Graz, Austria. The Boy Mechanic as seen in Graz was redesigned as a three-channel video projection installation documenting the history of the appearance and disappearance of lesbian bars in San Diego, California. As one of my local informants narrates her tour of bar sites of the past she says, “ Oh god, you know what, I don’t know where it was. [It has] been so built up here . . . It’s gone. Not even a trace. I think they must have torn down the building, because it was something else before it was a lesbian bar. I don’t even think there is a trace of it.” The video installation shows these former sites, then turns its attention to the bar scene of the present and portrays the success of two, seven-day-a-week bars, The Flame and Club Bombay. The juxtaposition of the past bar life with the thriving current scene in San Diego indicates the fragility, rather than the stability, of the latter.
Two simultaneous synchronized video projections juxtapose the exterior facades with the interior architecture’s sociology. The 10 minute interior/exterior loops alternate sound tracks and are bracketed by the third moving video of an interview with a former participant in the bar scene of the 1970’s. Speaking from her home office, in a one-minute interview, Diane Germaine describes how lesbians at the time felt about the politics of bar life. She concludes, “… that was one of our favorite things to say, 'Well, we can go somewhere. And make our space in somebody else’s space – public space and make it our space.' And all that…it was all about space. It was cool.” The installation includes high bar stools, several high bar tables, and a bar so that while watching the projections, viewers can sit on the stools and reference the experience a bar.
In 2002 I returned to San Diego and began producing an archive of large format photographs of the facades of current and former sites of lesbian bars. In November 2002 The Boy Mechanic was reconfigured for the exhibition “Hausordnungen” at the Stadthaus Ulm. For the installation in Ulm, I re-edited the video using a split screen to produce a partial effect like the multiple projections in a single channel piece, and I exhibited the large-scale photographs of bar facades from San Diego. In 2004 I again exhibited the large scale photos of the facades with the single channel video in a solo show at plattform in Berlin. For the plattform exhibition I published a set of ten postcards to memorialize and distribute the history of these bars. Postcards generally commemorate landmarks and shore up faulty public memory. In this case the printed traces of San Diego were distributed from the location of Berlin.
In 2004-2005 as a recipient of the City Of Los Angeles Fellowship, I began the research for the Los Angeles Edition. The vast geography and dense web of highways in Los Angeles demanded a different approach to both the research and the resulting exhibition. In 2005 COLA exhibited two large scale framed color photographs, a chalk board wall sized drawing of a map of Los Angeles annotated with bar site snapshots and anecdotal text, and a ten minute video loop of drive-by footage of the located bar sites. Following the initial exhibition of the project in 2005, I designed a website to serve as both a distribution point of the project and as a research tool that invites readers to contribute their knowledge. The website www.theboymechanic.com presents the overall project but specifically focuses on Los Angeles maps and narratives.
Additionally, I was invited to extend my research to include the history of lesbian bars in Cologne, Germany for the exhibition "The Eight Square: Gender, Life and Desire in the Arts since 1960" at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, 2006. For The Boy Mechanic/Cologne I produced a two-sided poster, which documented the sites of 17 former bars, and the 3 current lesbian bars both photographically and with narrative descriptions of my encounters with both current owners and past patrons of those places.
San Francisco's early and central role in development west coast lesbian urban culture, it's status as a destination for “sex and race tourism” and its concomitant reputation as a place where, sexually speaking, anything went make it an essential site for the archive. From the days of the Gold Rush and the Barbary Coast, right through World War II, San Francisco enjoyed a hundred-year halcyon summer, until police corruption and cold war paranoia effectively shut down gay and lesbian civil rights in the late 1940s. The homophile organizations headquartered in San Francisco have long been understood as central to what we now think of as “gay liberation”. The Boy Mechanic/San Francisco was shown in “California Files” at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in 2007 and included photographs and poem drawings. The wealth of historical documents in the Gay Lesbian Bi and Transgender History Archives in San Francisco allowed me to play with a list of over 30 names of lesbian frequented establishments which I combined into ink on paper hand drawn poem/lists. These drawings are exhibited along with the large-scale photos in The Boy Mechanic/San Francisco. Additionally, in 2017 I completed a video that interviewed a group of former patrons of the San Francisco bars an afternoon party. Two cameras rove through the party and revolve around the speakers as they assist each other in remembering the details and differences associated with the bar life of their youth.
In 2019, for the exhibition Queer California at the Oakland Museum, I photograph the sites of bars in the East Bay, including Oakland. These images are the most recent iterations of this ongoing archival project. Concurrent and to mark this important exhibition, I produced a 250 page book of The Boy Mechanic up to that date.
CONCLUSION
Beatriz Colomina argues that "The perception of space is not what space is but one of its representations; in this sense built space has no more authority than drawings, photographs, or descriptions" ("The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism." In Sexuality and Space, edited by Beatriz Colomina, Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). The Boy Mechanic focuses the video and still camera on both the changing vernacular architecture of the bars, and the patrons who used them. It will continue to interview women from different generations who frequented different bars or who may know bars from earlier periods to help in the collection of these anecdotal and intersecting histories.