If Lovin’ You is Wrong

by Lee Lawton

I remember the first time I went to a gay bar. It was in 1972, and I went with two friends. We did quite a lot of research first, because not one of us had ever been to a gay bar before.

I was 24, Sharon was 36, and Joan was 41. Sharon and Joan had been together for about 6 years. I met Sharon at work.

When I met Sharon and later her partner Joan, they were just beginning to identify as being lesbian. I didn’t have a clue. I’d been living with a girlfriend for 5 years, and four of them had been sexual. It was the first time either of us had ever had sex, and we just made it up as we went along. We thought we had a special friendship, and that someday we’d each meet a nice guy and then get married. I’d never ever heard of the word lesbian until one evening when Sharon and Joan came over for dinner, and we drank a lot of beer, and Sharon said that she wondered if Mary and I were lesbian. Lesbian, thespian, we didn’t know the difference! So, Sharon and Joan began talk about what lesbians were. They were about a half step ahead of us then.

Joan was a great researcher. She got hold of some magazines from San Francisco, and then she somehow found out about The Habit, a tiny little bar on 7th Street in Phoenix, Arizona. Each of us drove by it a couple of times before we dared to go inside. Next door, was an indoor plant store. The entrance was small, and kind of run down. We decided we’d go and see what it was like.

We first went to the Habit on a weekday evening. We went at some ridiculously early hour, like 7:00 p.m. I’ll never forget the first person I saw in there. She was sitting at the corner of the L-shaped bar. I say “she”, but we really didn’t know whether she was a she or not, the first time we saw her. She was tall and slim, had short, dark hair. Her hard pack of Marlboros lay on the bar next to her Bud draft. It was still daylight outside, just dusk, when we opened the door and walked into the dim interior, mostly lit by neon lights behind the bar. She watched us as we walked by, trying to act like we did this every day. We sat on stools and ordered, and glanced at her out of the corners of our eyes. She was the only other person sitting at the bar. We didn’t stare or anything, but we did notice that she had a moustache. Maybe this wasn’t really a lesbian bar, after all!

That was the first of probably hundreds of visits to the Habit. The bar part of the place was rather small, with the L-shaped bar, and a few tables. There was another room, with the juke box, a small stage, a pool table, some tables and chairs, and a dance floor. The whole place was dim, and reeked of old booze and cigarette smoke. It was owned by an older, heterosexual couple, named Andy and Lucy. That couple was like parents to about half of the lesbian population of Phoenix, as we were to find out over the next few years. They were kind, generous, and looked out for us when the cops came to raid the place, as they did almost every weekend.

The weekend after our reconnaissance visit, we went back again on a Saturday night. The same mustached woman was sitting on the corner barstool. She smiled at us, said hello, and went back to sipping her beer. We felt like old hands, then, and when we sat at the bar, we sat with our backs to it, like everybody else sitting at the bar, looking out over the dance floor, and at all the lesbians strolling by, sitting at tables talking, couples slow dancing, and choosing songs on the jukebox, arms over each other’s shoulders. Women kissing each other—the first time any of us had ever seen that in “public”. I can’t begin to tell you how thrilling that was!

The favorite song that year seemed to be If Lovin’ You is Wrong, I Don’t Wanna Be Right. It was made just for us.