Written by:
Holly Dolezalek
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 17#2
Your hometown is your hometown, but there’s no city like an adopted city. I moved to Minneapolis almost 12 years ago, thinking I would stay a year and then move somewhere new. But there never seemed to be a better place to live. After almost 12 years here, I can tell you that there are three things you need to know about Minneapolis: the women, the water, and the winter.
Start With the Babes
As in other cities, gay bars in Minneapolis have a rough time because the GLBT community is so dispersed. Several bars – the Metro, Boom!, Over the Rainbow – have closed in the last few years, and there’s no women’s bar. Instead, there are monthly events that attract flocks of the gay ladies. Twilight is on the second Friday of each month, usually at the Kitty Cat Klub near the University, and so is Diva Riot, which is usually on the first Saturday. Similar, bigger events at larger venues usually happen around Pride, which is a solid festival with plenty of booths and a ton of related events.
Many women go to the Town House, a country bar in Minneapolis’s twin city St. Paul. They two-step, watch drag, and dance to club music (sometimes all on the same night), and then head to Blanche’s Piano Lounge in the back, where they listen to Lori Dokken, a well-known player and singer in the area with a fabulously relaxed and funny patter. She plays piano and sings songs that everybody knows, and she’s especially good about Elton John tunes and Beatles stuff.
For non-bar fun, the Uptown area is queer-friendly, if yuppified. Condos and chain restaurants have replaced some of the former inhabitants, but nobody looks twice at a same-sex couple holding hands. Many businesses are gay-owned, like Bryant-Lake Bowl, a restaurant and vintage bowling alley that hosts a lot of queer events in its small theatre space.
Gay or gay-friendly churches cluster near Uptown or not far away, like the Metropolitan Community Church, Spirit of the Lakes, St. Joan of Arc (a liberal Catholic church) and the Unitarian Universalist on Dupont Avenue. There are other less well-known churches that simply extend their sense of justice to all people instead of just the usual favorites, like Judson Church, a Baptist congregation that genuinely includes the gay folks without fear or favor.
If theatre is your church, this is the right place to worship. Fun fact: Minneapolis has more theater seats per capita than any other U.S. city, second only to New York City. Yes, that New York City. The internationally known Guthrie theater complex boasts three stages, not to mention a fantastic nighttime view of the Mississippi River and the Stone Arch Bridge. Our Fringe Festival is informally known as the most queer-friendly in the nation, and one hundred other companies round out our year-round theatrical stable.
If shopping is your church, then we’ve got your megachurch. Even the shopping-phobic will tell you that Mall of America’s 520 stores make it easy – if scary – to get your Christmas shopping done in one day. Every shoe store, clothing store, jewelry store, and goofball specialty store is here, sometimes more than once. It’s laid out in a circle on four floors, like a huge round layer cake of retail. It’s a spectacle, and a surpisingly gay-friendly one; since 1996, the mall has held an annual gay day called Camp Out, which benefits District 202 (a non-profit organization for GLBT youth).
All About the Water
Unlike on the California coast (the ocean) or the Colorado plains (the Rocky Mountains), the dominant natural feature in Minneapolis is all over. There’s a shoreline almost everywhere you go; the vast, half-mile-wide swath of the mighty Mississippi divides Minneapolis from St. Paul, and hundreds of lakes dot the urban landscape.
A river through a city is always romantic, but our country’s greatest river combines romance, history, industry, recreation and fiction. At the Stone Arch Bridge, which artistically spans the river near downtown and St. Anthony Falls, you can see why people came here generations ago. As the sailboats, canoes, kayaks, motorboats, and swimmers play in the water, you can see why they stay. And on a crisp fall afternoon, when the thousands of trees marching up the banks of the river are wearing their flame-colored September finest with a Midwest-blue sky as an accessory, you can see why they come back even if they leave.
The lakes, sprinkled like fallen pearls all over the metro area or clustered in chains of three or four, say a lot about how the city was planned. Parkways and walkways circle each one so you can drive or walk (or rollerblade!) around them easily, and most of them are public property. Athletes who want a three-mile run can circle Lake Calhoun, and lovers who want a romantic, woodsy stroll can join ducks and geese around Lake Harriet. An early-evening trip on Lake of the Isles in a kayak, as the turnbuckles on the masts of the docked sailboats make their accidental music
Yes, Sure, It’s Winter Here
Summer, the shortest and sweetest season here, is a long, crazy party of festivals and get-togethers. May Day kicks it all off with a parade and a giant puppet show in Powderhorn Park, the center of the lesbian-heavy neighborhood (some call it Dyke Heights) in south Minneapolis. All summer long, it’s a festival every weekend: Aquatennial, Taste of Minnesota, July 4, a dozen others, and then the big blowout at the end of the summer – the State Fair (mnstatefair.org). I can’t do it justice here. Butterheads, deep-fried pickles, and seed art. It has to be seen to be believed.
But after the State Fair, it’s a short march to winter. Long stretches when the temperature is 20 or 30 degrees below zero aren’t as common as they used to be (although they still are in parts of the state). But even if the winter isn’t quite the deep-freeze it used to be, it’s still a long haul. It starts to settle in around mid-November (the Halloween blizzard of 1991, where 28 inches fell in 3 days, is an extreme example) and some years it doesn’t really let up until May. The snow that falls stays around, and you get stir crazy around February.
But everyone seems oddly cheerful when the winter reaches its worst. It’s as though people are proud to show that they can tough it out. Normally taciturn Minnesotans – descendants of the Finns, Swedes and Norwegians who settled here generations ago – seem to welcome the opportunity to pull each other out of snowbanks. (This seems to be what they call “Minnesota nice.” Now, in my home state of Colorado, if it happens near our houses, we’ll invite you in and offer you a glass of wine to settle your nerves. Here, they might do the same – or they might not even make eye contact.)
Still, marathon shoveling and nearly seven months of cold can be dispiriting, and there’s no way to sugar-coat that. But it has its benefits. Spring here is not a season; it’s manna from heaven. I once heard a radio DJ seriously taking pity on people from San Diego or Jamaica because, he said, “They will never know the joy of digging out after a long, cold winter.” Having teared up at the kiss of 70-degree air on my winter-weary cheek, I could not agree more.
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