“As often as he comes into the Rushes, Endore still feels a clash of excitement and dread in anticipation of the sights, sounds, odours he knows will assault him. The astonishing array of cowboys, motorcyclists, construction workers, policemen, lumberjacks, military uniformed men will cluster intimately within the red darkness. Muted music will pulse into the rancid smoke. Laughter – that laughter – will crack mysteriously at the point of euphoria.”
This paper concerns the use of music at the Black Eagle, a gay leather bar located on Church Street in Toronto. I am interested in the role of music, and the relationship between music and sexuality within this space. The music at a leather bar plays an important role in creating an ambience that can sell many drinks to gay men, but the ambience called for is very specific. There are actually gay leather bars in several cities named the Black Eagle, with no business relationship to each other aside from resembling each other and having the same name. There is little advantage to being innovative or surprising. In The Pornographic Imagination, Susan Sontag says “pornography isn’t a form that can parody itself.” Porn works through the rearrangement of a pre-existing inventory of settings, stock characters, and activities into new configurations. Leather bars and the guys who go to them tend to borrow from the same historic, fictional, or pornographic representations: Tom of Finland, Cruising with Al Pacino, motorcycle gangs, the meat packing district of New York in the 70s, or the Castro district of San Francisco. Borrowing from this tradition is what makes communication, sexual negotiation, and navigation of all the roles, fetishes, and activities within the leather scene possible.
To get an idea of what music and ambience the Black Eagle in Toronto is going for, it is appropriate to look within this tradition as well, at The Leatherman’s Handbook II, written by Larry Townsend in 1983. This leather guide, originally written in the mid-Seventies and sold alongside pulp erotica at gay bookstores, was for a long time one of the only comprehensive guides to the leather scene in print, and has been very influential within it as well. Chapter 8 is a guide to setting the scene for a leather encounter. The chapter is organized according to the five senses, includes advice on decorating and furnishing a dungeon, and has a detailed section on appropriate music. He points out that music is particularly important near the beginning of a session, and that its primary purpose is to establish the mood, though it is possible that as the scene progresses the participants might become less aware of certain sounds. Music, and soundproofing, can be used to keep sounds outside the space from coming in, and sounds inside the space from coming out, creating a sense of privacy and eliminating distractions. The choice of music and manner of reproduction are also important: “While it should fill the void and occupy the neural receptors for sound, it should not intrude or distract” (192). Vocal music is bad, because participants can become distracted making out the lyrics. Familiar or popular music calls attention to itself as well, and can also remind people of times they’ve heard it outside of the space as well which is more distracting. Classical music can be distracting if it is not obscure, because it may remind participants of commercials or TV shows they’ve heard it in. Longer, slowly developing music is better than shorter music, because it allows a mood to build without being interrupted. The tastes of people in the space are important, so that genres of music they do not like can be avoided, but aren’t the only important consideration. Genres such as country music should still be avoided, even if people in the space like them, if they are too distracting. So far as the manner of reproduction, “A tape with a continuous loop is best. It may repeat itself before you can stop to change it, but it will never just leave you in silence” (193). Larry Townsend’s advice conforms to a consistent principle. Everything in the space should help the participants feel comfortable and in the right mindset for a leather scene, and there should be as little as possible that is uncomfortable or otherwise distracting.
The problem with writing about music at the Black Eagle is that events at the bar follow loose organizational principles. The role of music there is ambiguous, and complex enough that is resists description. I noticed the same issues with description in The Rushes by John Rechy, which he wrote in 1979 after writing City of Night. He attempts to describe the experience of going to a gay leather bar, in the meat Packing District of New York in the 70s, to a straight and gay readership. The book takes place over one night, and switches between the perspectives of multiple characters, generating a multiplicity of interpretations of the space, but the difficulty of describing the Rushes is apparent from its first description in the book. The sights, sounds, odours are experienced as an assault. Darkness is red. Music pulses into rancid smoke. Senses compete for the awareness of people in the bar. Gay guys, drugs, objects, and the ambience are in elaborate experiential and causational relationships to each other. The role of music in a leather bar is similar: aligning with, embedding itself in, or guiding the ambience and crowd. At the Black Eagle music is used to relax or intensify its sexual and crowd dynamic, exploiting music’s ability to affirm or dismantle individual identity.
“As often as he comes into the Rushes, Endore still feels a clash of excitement and dread in anticipation of the sights, sounds, odours he knows will assault him …”
I was thinking of how the ambience of the Black Eagle is created when I began my research there on Tuesday night. There are seven people sitting at the bar area at the front: regulars, and a few people who have wandered in from Church Street. Domenic is the bartender for the night. He is in his late twenties, tall, handsome, excitable, and charismatic. He wears a scruffy, but carefully maintained beard. Before bartending at the eagle, he used to operate a gay leather bar in Montreal, which ultimately went out of business. Now, apart from bartending at the Black Eagle, he organizes and promotes his own events, models, and has done work in porn.
Domenic is not the only person involved in creating the ambience for the space. The management at the Black Eagle can decide on an architectural design for the space, choose an interior designer, select a lighting designer, choose deejays, tell the bartenders what to do during their shift, decide on an events schedule, decide to renovate the patio, have open sex area moved upstairs, ban sexual activity altogether, and decides how to brand and operate the bar generally. However, the bartenders, customers, and the management are not in full control of what can occur because the Black Eagle is also constrained invisibly by the laws and bylaws of the place it is built. Its design and manner of operation is coordinated to Toronto’s laws, and the same bar would be shut down if it opened in Montreal. In Toronto, sex can only occur in bars in areas they establish as a private space, similar legally to the inside of a washroom stall, and in which everyone in the space consents to anything they do within it. The legal attitude is libertarian: the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. Indecent exposure is still illegal, if it is non-consensual, but the Black Eagle has signs clearly posted at all the entries to sexual areas of the bar so that anyone in them has consents to seeing whatever they see by entering them. On nights where the Black Eagle establishes the entire bar as a sexual area, the bouncer informs everyone entering that they can expect to see sexual activity, and charges admission. Charging admission effectively makes the Black Eagle a private club for the night. In a different city, with different laws applying to sexuality, accessibility, alcohol, or other substances, the layout and manner of operation of a leather bar would have to align with those constraints.
Still, Domenic has made a few choices that affect the experience of the bar: the monitor that often plays porn behind the bar has been turned off, because he prefers when customers pay attention to him, so he can keep a conversation going. He has his laptop hooked up to the Black Eagle’s speaker system, and chooses music from his play list, one he accumulates to use when he bartends or at his events. He finds his music primarily through his online friends on Tumblr and other sites. If played continually, the list of songs would last several days. He takes the offhanded approach of letting iTunes choose tracks for him, occasionally skipping one. The vibe is relaxed and conversational, and the music choices coincide well with this mood. Though the music choices are mostly electronic, dance mixes, they are interesting ones, mostly by independent artists. The music choices are always unfamiliar, always unique, and well crafted. The effect is that each change from one track to the next one seems to become part of the conversation at the bar. The music is at a similar volume to the conversation, helping the effect, since a track change registers as clearly as a new person beginning to speak.
At 11:45 pm the song playing is one from the eighties, Enola Gay by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. The music is appropriate for the Black Eagle because of its focus on rhythms and electronic sounds. There is a vocal line, but it is above several autonomous layers of rhythms produced by an electronic drum kit and bass which is played as if it is a percussion instrument. The result is a track that fills the space well and allows the mind to drift between its different layers.
When the track changes at 12:05 am, to Take a Look Around, by The 2 Bears, the interest of people at the bar is piqued. No one except for the bartender is familiar with the song. It played at the ending credits to the pilot episode of Looking, an HBO series that began recently about gay life, dating, and relationships. Steve learned about the song through an online friend who identified it using the same Shazam app I have been using to identify songs. The conversation of people at the bar is redirected to Looking, the Internet, Shazam, and to the song itself, which is really very catchy, unique, and appealing. The track features a complex layering of vocal, acoustic, and electronic layers, forming a dense fabric under a vocal track.
While each of the songs that plays helps create an ambience for the space that is interesting, and immersive, the strategy of choosing songs from a play list is only appropriate for a night where the bar is unlikely to get many customers, such as on a Tuesday. The space is unlikely to be very sexual in any case. The sexual atmosphere at a gay bar is produced largely by the excitement of a building crowd dynamic, and the dissolution of boundaries between individuals within it. On a Tuesday night the goal is only to maintain an edgy atmosphere for the Black Eagle, and to sustain a conversation that keeps customers in the bar. Domenic uses music at the Black Eagle as a way to support this conversational and intellectual energy.
Thursday, March 17th 2014
“… The astonishing array of cowboys, motorcyclists, construction workers, policemen, lumberjacks, military uniformed men …”
The first thing I notice when I come in is that the bartender tonight, a Japanese bear who looks like he is in his early fifties, has turned on the porn monitors throughout the bar, which shows two hairy bodybuilders, one in his fifties and the other in his late twenties, fucking each other on the concrete floor of a dungeon. The older top has a beard, tattoos emphasizing his upper arms, and wears a leather harness. His co-star has short, curly blonde hair, a beard, a hairy chest, and wears a jockstrap. The settings, porn stars, and fetishes depicted on the monitors at the Black Eagle vary, but are chosen to reflect the bar’s target demographics.
On its website, the Black Eagle is described as a bear and leather cruising bar. The two gay communities are distinct, and exist for different reasons from each other, but coexist at the Black Eagle easily. Both communities provide participants with a broad range of roles they can adopt as identities, and alternatives to those in the mainstream gay community: daddies, bears, cubs, otters, dominants, submissives, puppies, pigs, and others. There is an expanded sense of what kinds of relationships or sexual activities are valid, and what kinds of bodies can be attractive in both of these communities. Whereas in the mainstream gay community youth, whiteness, and fitness are ideals for attractiveness, bear and leather communities emphasize masculine traits that are attained by older ages, such as large muscles slowly developed at the gym, body hair, beards, and sexual experience. Demographically, most of the people who go to the Black Eagle are between thirty and sixty, whereas Woody’s, a mainstream gay bar two doors to the left of the Black Eagle, draws far more young people.
Eight customers sit on benches, or stand in the front area the bar, and the music chosen for the night also reflects the target demographic of the bar. It is a mix of songs, or remixes of songs, from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, though with the same electronic, rhythmic, and dance like background tracks as the music on Tuesday.
Apart from targeting the age demographic of customers at the bar, the bartender chooses many songs from the ‘canon’ of diva vocalists or pop singers who have won gay cachet, through campiness, sexiness, or connections to the gay community, such as ABBA, Lady Gaga, Elton John, or Kylie Monogue. The beauty, resilience, emotional expression, identity politics, and lyrical content of these artists resonate well with the experiences of many gay people. To further align with the age range of the customers, these songs are also taken from different time periods.
At 11:16 pm, the music playing is Pearls, by Sade. This song, a house music dance mix from 1992, goes through many transformations, having sparse sections with or without the vocalist, and with rhythmic details being added layer by layer to the background track. The lyrics are stated clearly, and meant to be heard and thought about as the song is listened to. They are about the resilience of a woman who survives by searching for pearls along the roadside, which movingly parallels the difficult experiences of many gay men, both growing up and coming out or looking for relationships within the gay scene.
While I am using Shazam to identify songs as they played, the customer sitting next to me tells me that the music is terrible, and recommends some dance mixes he knows on Youtube. Ambience, which is the experience of a space by someone in it, is necessarily subjective, and never totally within the control of anyone in the space. A bartender, artist, interior designer, or architect can only operate in probabilities, and predict the likely outcome a particular arrangement of components will have on a person, or a crowd.
The songs that played the rest of the night until when I left, around 12:15 am, continued in a pattern of pop music with female vocalists and dance background tracks: Robyn, Mary J. Blige, Britney Spears. Thursday night isn’t Saturday night, and there are less drink sales at stake in the successfulness of the Black Eagle’s ambience. The strategy of choosing music that alludes to the identity and experiences of people in the bar is meant to produce comfort, and conversation, rather than the kind of sexual atmosphere that would be called for at one of the Black Eagle’s large, sexual events. Customers are in the bar because it feels welcoming, they want to have a drink, and to talk to other customers. The music selection contributes to the welcoming effect through its haphazardness. It contradicts the seriousness and hyper-masculinity of the porn behind the bar. When an ambience is ambitious or complex, and dependent on the successful alignment of numerous components beyond any individual’s control, the effect on the people within it is tense. A well composed ambience makes everyone immersed in it feel like they have align themselves to it, which can be exhausting. A lively dance floor comes with an expectation to dance, and a Pussy Riot concert inspires its audience to become better feminists. When an ambience is more incoherent, the people in it feel less as if their behaviour can determine whether the ambience is successful or not.
Saturday, March 29th 2014
“ … men will cluster intimately within the red darkness. Muted music will pulse into the rancid smoke. Laughter – that laughter – will crack mysteriously at the point of euphoria.”
The inside of the bar was so loud when I showed up to SIN, one of the Black Eagle’s most sexual and popular events, that I could no longer use Shazam to identify the music that played, and instead collected recordings using a microphone app. Even in ideal conditions Shazam would have been unable to identify the music, because on Saturday’s the bar hires a deejay to perform live, improvised dance mixes for the space. The deejay is immersed within the ambience, and the crowd, using music to guide the experience of people at the bar. The recordings I made documented background noise, the music, and conversations indiscriminately, all of which play against each other and are part of the ambience.
But a live deejay is also ideal for SIN precisely because they can counterbalance the familiarity of popular music samples they use with the new material they add to them, and carefully manage the appearances and disappearances of familiar material within their mixes. A frequent way deejays do this is by using only short samples from popular songs that repeat continually above a transforming background. The sample refers to experiences outside of the space, but the awareness of people in the bar is then pulled to the more interesting material being added in, to the deejay, to the space, and to the moment. The recording I started at 11:55 pm achieves a similar effect in a different way. It uses samples from both the Lady Gaga and Christina Auguilera versions of Do what you want with my body, pitting the stylizations of both artists against each other, above electronic rhythms which are derived from the song but mixed by the deejay. The songs heard individually are familiar, but the combination of them and the mix being created by the deejay redirect the attention of people at the bar to the moment and the space
As a rule, the music is always loud, the beat is methodical, and the rhythms and textures are layered, and in a slow, continual development. The people entering check who is in the bar, and the people in the bar check who is entering. People going to the Black Eagle expect a developing experience throughout the night, which can be shaped at any moment by a new person entering the space. The Black Eagle is a cruising bar, meaning a bar designed to facilitate gay guys meeting each other and potentially having sex. The space is a developing experience partially shaped by developing sexual possibilities. Sitting at the bar and having a drink is also a sexual experience, with the sexiness of the ambience, the porn on the walls, and the attractive bartenders. Interaction between a customer, the music, and the crowd, and the space is a sexually driven dynamic. The music helps customers remain awake, wander, and have a varied experience of the space while they are at the Black Eagle, so the can stay longer and go more frequently without becoming bored.
In the recording I made at 2:14 am, the music is so loud that it is distorted, and none of the conversations are possible to make out. The recording only catches the rhythm and overall texture of the music. The dominant characteristics to these are continual repetition and sustained transformation. Rhythms represented by different electronic drum sounds are added in or removed at regular intervals. Longer, more sustained effects are better than shorter ones because they do not interrupt a building mood. The effect reminds me of M.C. Escher’s eternally ascending staircase. Large changes to the background are prepared by a sustained, dynamic, build, activated by the deejay, that overtakes the rest of the texture, then at its loudest point disappears, leaving behind a new one.
The layout and music are also used to emphasize the experience of moving throughout the bar. Thresholds between spaces throughout the bar continue to be emphasized in a similar way to the entrance, with staircases, murals along hallways, and with changes to lighting and surface treatments between rooms. Music is used to emphasize the experience of moving throughout the space, and to make a space more sexual or conversational. The music is louder upstairs and at the back of the bar, where customers are often allowed dancing or having sex, and quieter at the front area or smoking patio, where customers socialize. The music is used to help immerse customers in the environment, and create a loosely structured but continually developing narrative for the night.
The ambience at the Black Eagle is changed from night to night, and carefully maintained by the Bartenders and owners of the space, in order to maximize the successfulness of its events. Music is aligned with other components of the space and ambience to make the dynamic more comfortable, through references to the experiences and identities of gay guys at the bar, or more sexual through avoiding references to identity or experiences outside of the bar in favour of the crowd and the moment. It is also fundamental to the use of music at a leather bar that it is embedded with other components to the space, competing and playing against them for the attention of customers at the bar, and while guiding the crowd dynamic. The use of music at the Black Eagle is more related to the organizational principles and politics of queer theory than to those of classical music. The primary use of music within the space is a supporting role in the social or sexual experiences of gay men, and the affirming of their identities and experiences. Far from being inconsequential, this allows music to become central and relevant to the transformative experiences and communities created within the Black Eagle.
Rechy, John. Rushes. New York: Grove, 1979. Print.
Sontag, Susan. “The Pornographic Imagination.” Styles of Radical Will. New York: Dell Pub., 1978. N. pag. Print.
Townsend, Larry. The Leatherman’s Handbook II. New York, NY: Carlyle Communications, 1989. Print.
