Every aspect of the experience was meant to be memorable, so flamboyantly against the norm that patrons couldn’t help but tell all their friends. Dugan told the drag queens who worked at the club to get on the bar to dance and kick off all the drinks to the floor, and then he’d buy everyone a new drink. For Dugan, people asking one another “Did you hear what happened at the Bistro?” was the best form of advertising. This type of history, of long-ago parties and nightlife socializing, is almost impossible to document, but it survives in the memories of the people who put on the glitter and costumes, a flagrant transgression against what general public considered “decent” behavior. Keehnen set out to collect their anecdotes in what he calls a “mosaic of stories.” His book grew bigger than the story of the Bearded Lady: it became an homage to the many queer people lost in the epidemic in the years after the Bistro’s demise in 1982. “People like to think we don’t have a history,” Keehnen says. Much of it wasn’t recorded during the heat of the party, and then stories went unwritten as friends took care of each other through the AIDS crisis.
Many of the parties have long been forgotten.
