Voe Julia Applegate
===

Julia Applegate: *There** were some people who, it took them a while to come around to want to be interviewed. **There** were some people we asked in the front like a year ago and they said no, but then they've kind of came back to us in a year later and said, I'm ready. *

David Staley: *What was the reticence? *

Julia Applegate: *I think some of it was , many of the people we interviewed are 70 and older. And so that bar, because it * was *secret in lots of ways. I mean, it was one of those situations where it's right there standing in front of you, but people aren't seeing it.* *So hiding in plain sight kind of thing.* * * 

David Staley: I'm pleased to be joined today in the ASC Marketing and Communication Studio by Julia Applegate, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. She is a skilled trainer and experienced presenter who has designed curriculum, conducted Train the Trainer programs, and presented at local, state, national, and international conferences on public health, HIV AIDS, and gender and sexual orientation topics.

Julia Applegate, Welcome to Voices. 

Julia Applegate: Thanks so much for having me. 

David Staley: Well, we're here today to talk about the film that you're directing, Free Beer Tomorrow. And I'm ultimately going to ask you about the title, but tell us what's the subject of this film? 

Julia Applegate: So, the subject of the film really has almost nothing to do with beer, um, but it's about a bar that's located really close to Ohio State, like, less than a mile from where we're sitting right now, that was Ohio's longest running lesbian owned and operated bar. So, At the center of the film is this bar. So the bar is really the main subject. And then what we will learn through the film, it's a documentary, is the stories of patrons from across the four decades it was in operation.

David Staley: Tell us about some of these patrons. What were some of their stories? 

Julia Applegate: Oh my gosh. Oh, there are so many stories. So, starting with the owner of the bar, who was actually a classically trained musician who went to school at Bowling Green, came to Ohio State, got a job in Columbus and was actually trying to start a musical career as a composer and singer, pianist.

She needed a job. So while she was plying her trade up and down Cleveland Avenue, she also played the trumpet. This was in the early seventies. She had a hard time getting gigs as a woman, as a woman trumpeter specifically. And so she started working in this bar to raise some money and just pay her bills.

And That's one character. She goes on to buy the bar in 1980, so after she spent years playing music and doing other things, she ended up purchasing the bar when it came up for sale. So that's one person. you'll meet. Phil Gorman, who founded a group in town called the Mamazons. you're not going to know about any of these names.

things, but that was a collective of lesbian moms and it was formed to support other women who were in same sex relationships that were parents. So she put this group together probably in, I'm not exactly sure, maybe the mid 80s. But there were a lot of lesbian women who were parents either because they had left heterosexual relationships or because IVF became available.

David Staley: So in vitro fertilization, 

Julia Applegate: yeah, exactly. And there was a need to have a community around women who were specifically in same sex relationships and parents, she formed that group. So that's a smash up of Amazon's, which Bezos stole that term from the lesbians. But, um, so the mamazons let's see who else.

You'll learn about Nancy Lee, who was an African American bartender who worked at the bar for over a decade and really was such an important role model for black queer people in a space that was very diverse, but was white owned and operated. But Nancy was a black lesbian woman who was working class and butch.

And so many people talk about how important she was to their development as lesbians to just building community. Who else? You'll meet drag kings tap dancers. Gosh, what else? Former professors Rhonda Rivera, who was a distinguished professor here at Ohio State. She wrote the first legal briefs about HIV in the 80s.

So, I mean, it's all over the map. 

David Staley: A safe space, I assume. 

Julia Applegate: Yes. Largely, I mean. 

David Staley: I was going to safe? 

Julia Applegate: So it depends on safety from what and whom. So once you were in the space, you were safe as a lesbian in that space, unless there was police interference or heterosexual men, actually, there was a bar next door called the frosty mug.

And so the two bars were side by side. and we've heard people tell stories of watching men walk into the wrong bar and then get thrown out by the lesbians who are like you're trying to get to the frosty mug here, not to Jax or Summit Station. So for, women who were loving other women, it was a very safe space. There wasn't a big sign, , there weren't windows as you opened up the door and you go into this space and it was like a nirvana almost. 

David Staley: What about the world outside the bar? In other words, why did this bar need to exist?

What was life like for most lesbians in Columbus in the 1980s? 

Julia Applegate: Yeah, I mean, so, Petie startedartending there in 1971, and the way she tells the story, the bar was a go go bar. And so, I can't find any pictures, no videos, no record of this bar, but we know that it was functioning as a go go bar.

And so, use your imagination to think about what that looked like. But when she started working there as an out, young lesbian, that opened up the knowledge that that was a safe space. So when she was behind the bar, people knew that it was safe in that space. It's a neighborhood bar, like lots of neighborhood bars.

Didn't have a huge clientele, but because Petey was an out lesbian serving other lesbians, because there was nowhere else to go, people started coming. And so for the business owner, it was good for the bottom line. And they were very supportive. But you gotta remember this is late 60s, early 70s, so lots of social change happening :feminism taking root, civil rights anti war protests, there was a really strong feeling of change in the air, and the outside world was still very homophobic, very patriarchal very sexist, very misogynist, very racist, and so those forces were all existing outside of the bar, and In the space itself, some of those issues still came up, but because of the common denominator of sexual orientation and the people that were in that space, by and large, were people who were outsiders.

That meant that everyone was keeping everybody else's secret, right? Because it wasn't safe outside of that space to be out. And surely there were people in the 70s and 80s who were, but there were a lot who weren't. And it was understood that once you walked in that bar, what happened there, it stayed there.

And people were very They were all at risk. They were all at risk, right? We've heard stories of people, this one woman in particular, who was 15 when she started going to the bar, and she lived on the north side of Columbus. She came out as a young woman. The way she tells it, she was pretty much a tomboy and she had older lesbians in her lives and they were too afraid to go to the bar because they didn't want to be seen there.

They were afraid it would affect their profession. Teachers or nurses, I don't know what their job was, but they would send her to the bar and give her money. And they would ask her to come back and tell them stories of what it was like in the bar. So there were people who were super brave and out.

There were people who were terrified. And there were people who were too afraid to go. And so all of that that's kind of what the atmosphere was like in the 70s. 

David Staley: Did you have any difficulty identifying people to interview? Or were there any, challenges about this? Or was, it relatively easy to find people and they were eager to participate in the film?

Julia Applegate: Well yes. To both, sort of. So I was a patron of the bar. So that gave me the knowledge of what that space was about. I wasn't an outsider coming to the story. And the story the idea of the film grew out of working to get a historical marker placed in front of the bar. So in the process of applying for that historical marker, we tracked down the owner and other patrons. And we were really trying to make sure that the text of the historical marker, the language on the marker, accurately reflected the experiences of people who went there.

So for these markers, you have to do a lot of research, and the researcher was not a patron. The researcher was a 21 year old intern that was a lesbian, but had never even been in a lesbian bar that lived in Wyoming. And so she found all the citations and things like that. And she wrote a sample text and then we took it to patrons and said, Hey, how does this read to you and , what needs to change? And then they worked it over several times and came back to us with the text that is now on the marker. so there was. It's a direct connection to patrons right out of the gate.

There were some people who, it took them a while to come around to want to be interviewed. There were some people we asked in the front like a year ago and they said no, but then they've kind of came back to us in a year later and said, I'm ready. 

David Staley: What was the reticence? Can you say, or?

Julia Applegate: I think some of it was again, many of the people we interviewed are 70 and older. And so that bar. Because it was sort of, it was secret in lots of ways. I mean, it was one of those situations where it's right there standing in front of you, but people aren't seeing it.

So hiding in plain sight kind of thing. But people even though they're retired they, think about their reputation and they're concerned about if their name is attached to this bar, then the assumption is they're a lesbian. And what does that mean for their legacy? Or what does that mean for the kids that they taught 35 years ago?

Or, so I think some of it was that. I think some of it was also feeling like, this was their neighborhood hangout. Like, this wasn't anyone walking into this place thinking they were making any kind of history or real impact on the world. so some of them are like, what, what, what could I possibly talk about?

David Staley: What do they talk about? 

Julia Applegate: Well, we sit them down and it's very organic. It's a conversation. We really just ask them to think about their first memory of the bar. Like, how do they arrive at Jack's? Who are you and how do you arrive here? And then It goes from there. So they talk about their first time at the bar.

Some people talk about sitting across from the bar cause there's a, ledge across the street. Whatever houses are there that I don't know if there's like a brick wall or something, but there's, been in a time where you could sit on this ledge in front of the bar. And so people would talk about.

You know, how they would drive around the bar several times before going in. And then maybe after they'd driven around and watched people go in and out, then they'd sit across the street and watch people go in and out. And then they'd finally get up the courage to go in. Or one woman talked about she was married to a man and she was questioning her sexuality.

And her husband was really, really awesome. And he said there's this bar up the street. I think you should check it out. I ended up there one night accidentally. I went to buy cigarettes, found out it was a, I don't even think he used the term lesbian, but a women's bar and I think you should go there and check it out and so he gave her his belt and his wallet and a shirt to wear and told her how to look going into the bar and so it's a lot of stories of first time how it felt to be in a space that felt safe, those kind of things. 

David Staley: Well, you've indicated some of this, and I assume people they're having, it's a bar, I assume people are having something to drink. What other sorts of activities? Is there 

political activity? Is there poetry readings? What sorts of things are everything, 

Julia Applegate: and that's what's made it so interesting.

It's served more like a community center de facto in a way. Yes, people sitting in booths organizing anti war protests or, there are so many groups that formed out of there: Women Against Rape, Women's Outreach for Women, Women's Action Collective, MAMAZONS, Buckeye Regional Anti Violence Organization, I mean, the list goes on and on.

There's philanthropy happening there. There were a lot of fundraisers for the FACES unit at Children's Hospital. That was the only place in Columbus that was serving women and children living with HIV. It was a place where the Columbus pace setters, the women's professional football team hung out.

softball. Oh my God, the number of people that talk about softball and, their teams all hung out at the bar, karaoke, billiards, dart leagues. I mean, I don't know, it just on and on and on. There was even a group of women who realized they needed to get sober and they met in the bar. So, stuff that you can't even make up, like how can you compute a bar being a safe place, the place that these women who were realizing they were drinking too much chose to go get sober?

David Staley: So I have to ask, why is the film called Free Beer Tomorrow? 

Julia Applegate: So Petie Brown, who owned the bar who bought the bar in 1980, and had been that bartender in the early 70s, when she bought it she has a really, I love her sense of humor.

It's just, it's kind of understated, but she did some refurbishing of the bar, and she purchased a neon sign that hung along the bar that said Free Beer Tomorrow. And, of course, The light never went off. And not everybody catches on to that the first time they're sitting at the bar. But when talking with her about, Hey, we're working on this project, we're going to have to name it something.

What do you think? It could be anything. It could be stories of lesbian bar history in Columbus, Ohio. It could be free beer tomorrow. It could be anything. And she's like, I really like free beer tomorrow. That was something she picked out for the bar. And it was a very memorable, memorable part of being there.

Because a lot of people sat at the bar it was one of those bars where you could go to by yourself and it didn't matter if you were by yourself because the bartender was someone who would talk to you. And so a lot of people would sit at the bar and that sign, you couldn't miss the sign.

David Staley: Have there been other films, are there other studies on lesbian bars? I assume this is a generalizable 

process? 

Julia Applegate: Yeah. Yeah. So during COVID, there were a group of young women that started a project called the lesbian bar project. And I don't know where they got their funding. I know they got some support from Jägermeister.

They got some buy in from Lea DeLaria, she's a comedian and actress. She was in Orange is the New Black. Very out, very butch, dyke so she's in her 50s and she got behind this project. So the young women working on it they realized that with COVID, the remaining bars that existed in the country that were lesbian owned or lesbian centric were shrinking because of a number of factors, but they pulled together and went and filmed at some of the bars that were left and kind of did this whole campaign about the disappearance of lesbian bars.

So that's been four or five years ago now. But the data they shared was that in the eighties there were over 200 lesbian bars in the United States. By 2020 there were 27. And so a real alarming shrinkage of these spaces that were so important to so many people. 

David Staley: You had written to me, as we were setting up this interview, you had wrote something to the effect that, well, I'll quote it.

I hope this project will be an enduring contribution to the scant research on lesbian culture. Could you say a little more about that? I was actually a little surprised to read that. 

Julia Applegate: Yeah, well, I mean Even the way we talk about the community, you hear people say the gay community. And that terminology even is really appropriate for men who are having sex with other men.

It's, been used the same way human or mankind is used, right? To be generalizable for all those other letters in our acronym. And of course, there's research on lesbian things related to lesbians, but it's not as widespread. It's not as common. It seems and feels to many people in the lesbian community that the L is often left out or often more obscured right? That we talk about pride and when people think of pride, they think of gay men or I don't know, there's just this growing feeling that the invisibility of lesbians is a real problem. So, In terms of like, what can you read that you're going to get a sense of what lesbian culture is. I mean, it's been a while since I was a student, but when I was a student, I was reading Stone Butch Blues.

I was reading Bastard Out of Carolina. There were handfuls, right? But not, not massive quantities. I know at one time there was a lesbian culture or lesbian history class here at Ohio State, but that's a function of which professors happen to be here at any one given moment. We have the L Word that came out in the mid 2000s.

David Staley: The book, right? Yeah. 

Julia Applegate: Uh, The TV show. TV show. Yeah, the, I think it was HBO. That was very Los Angeles centric. And for lots of lesbians while we watched and consumed it ravenously, because we didn't have much else to consume, we didn't watch it and think, oh yeah, they nailed it.

They got our culture. They got white. upper class lesbian or Los Angeles lesbian culture. I think they did a pretty good job nailing that, but this is big country and there's a lot of lesbian culture in this country who, and the stories aren't told as widely, I think as, people are used to understanding gay male culture, 

David Staley: This project is actually more than a film, and I want to talk more about the film, but I was also very struck to learn that you and your team won an award, a grant, forty some thousand dollars, to study, well, the project is called Aging Well, Aging Together.

Could you say a little more about this? 

Julia Applegate: Sure, yeah. So I should just say a little bit about myself because that will help explain this a little bit more. I studied women's studies here at Ohio State when it was still called that in the mid 90s. I got a political science degree as an undergrad.

I studied history in German. But then I came out and my identity became the driving kind of force in my life. So my work has been public health related for most of my career. Specifically because I did not want to be in the closet and working around HIV was a way to be out and not feel afraid of my paycheck getting paid.

Because of my identity. So anyway, I've worked in public health for a really long time. And before I started this film project, I worked in the state health department, the local health department, and then with a nonprofit that was LGBTQ health related. And so I know from a public health lens, the health disparities that our community experiences.

So we're specifically lesbians are at higher rates for breast cancer. We smoke more, we tend to be more obese. There are a number of things. And one of the things that we are hearing in these interviews is that because of the loss of our spaces, that a lot of women who enjoyed large social networks, we weren't calling them that then, but large community in the 70s, 80s, 90s, even into the mid 2000s, they're now aging.

A lot of them are trying to age in place. They're isolated, they're lonely, they've lost their connection to community. And so because I had some relationships with some people in the public health department here, I saw this opportunity to apply for funding from Women in Philanthropy, and they're very progressive in terms of Projects they identify to support. As they say it, they really like to catch a rising star. So I feel really special that they thought that this project deserved their funding, especially because they said they'd like to get onto rising stars. But the money that they pitch in for us comes from individual women who donate to a pot and then they choose where the money goes based on these applications.

But it's just, I don't know, I'm a connector. So for me it was like we're talking to these women already. We're hearing about and seeing the way that they're, not all of them, but the way their social circles have shrunk, the way that many of them are isolated, their spaces are gone. Could we not then do a research study and then have proof, right, in quotation marks, of what I'm seeing, what we're seeing, what we're hearing, 

because then you have evidence, right?

And then if you have evidence, then you can do public health interventions based on that evidence. So that's really what it was about, like, let's get some evidence. Maybe we're wrong, you know, maybe only a third of them are socially isolated, but if they are, what would help them feel less isolated? And then, once we have that foundational research, then we can apply for NIH funded, National Institutes of Health funded studies that could be about developing interventions for lesbians across the whole country. 

I don't know, I don't know where it will go, but that was the intention. 

David Staley: And I should hasten to add, you have an advanced degree, a master's degree in public health. Yes. So this,

which I found very interesting as I was reading about your background you're a polymath, maybe we should call you a polymath.

Julia Applegate: Oh, I haven't heard that term before. 

David Staley: So I wanted to get back to the, film idea and ask you, well first of all, have you ever made a film before? Are you an old hat at this or? 

Julia Applegate: No, no, this is totally new territory for me. So I am from Appalachia and I say that because in Appalachia, oral storytelling, oral traditions are a big part of the Appalachian culture and my co producer in this project, director is also from Appalachia.

And so we've been friends for over 30 years and we're both storytellers. So we have that. We both were patrons of this bar, we both care about the bar, we both really love history, my partner made a film in 2004, I have a really good friend that made a film in, I don't know what year it was, but film is, a medium now that is accessible for people, and 

How do you mean?

Well, we can all make a film on our phones, we have the tools to do this in our back pockets every single day. You can edit so quickly now, and you can record so easily, and it's high quality, and it's not hard to capture sound. And so the medium itself, I mean, surely we're not using actual strips of film, right?

Or high, but you can get into a documentary story with a little bit of money and a good story. And this is a good story. So for me, it's really about preserving history through storytelling through a documentary film.. We're figuring out how to make a film. 

David Staley: So the ease of making a film is certainly part of this. Why not write a book? Why was this going to be a film as opposed to a book? Yeah. Which is also easy to publish. 

Julia Applegate: Yeah, I mean, I guess for me, What you get with a film, what, what we will have in the end is the audience will hear from the people who lived the experiences directly. I mean, of course we're going to edit, so they're not going to hear everything that that person told us.

But you're going to meet these people, right? And I don't know, I teach, I love history. When I'm teaching, I like to show documentaries. It's a way to get into whatever the story is. It's hard not to be able to connect to something when you're looking at whomever that is telling the story of whatever they did.

So I just really like the fact that you get to meet these people, like not in person, right? But you're as close as you can get is seeing them on screen. 

David Staley: You said that you engage in a lot of editing. What determined your choices? what's guiding your editing? 

Julia Applegate: Well, we're just beginning that. So that's a tricky question because we have got, oh god, we've probably got a hundred hours of interviews.

So you have to edit. Yes, oh yes, yes. But again, the beauty of the world we're living in right now is that we can take these interviews and we can turn them into podcasts. We can make a docu series. We can make a longer film, a shorter film. Really, until we run out of money and time and energy, we can do millions of different things with these recordings. So for the film, it's really thinking about the threads that appeared in the themes that reappeared in the film. So, some of those themes are activism and there's a really distinct difference between seventies and eighties activism and nineties and 2000 activism.

So there's that. There's philanthropy, there's social justice, there's sports, the way sports and that kind of community develops in the bar. So we're following the threads that have appeared. And in terms of how to cut it all together ask me that in three months, I don't know how we're going to figure it, whittle it all down, but ideally, we will include as many of the people that we interviewed as possible without it being just a talking heads thing.

Again, the beauty of being part of this community is that people trusted us with their stories and with their ephemera so they opened up their photo books and showed us things. And so we have B roll, we have lots of video footage of things that took place in the bar. So we've got archival materials to draw from. So for me when the reviews come in, whether this is a good or bad thing, I don't know. But for me, what I want to do is create an end product that is watched by people who went to that space and they say they got it. they got it. That's what it was like.

And Siskel and Ebert, I don't know, whoever reviews this, I don't care if thumbs up or thumbs down, I would love to have their thumbs up, I would love this to go big, but at the end of the day, it's really for the people who hung out there. It's their time capsule. 

David Staley: Your first film, what are you learning?

What are you learning about filmmaking in this process? 

Julia Applegate: Oh, gosh We've got a videographer that's helping us, so I've learned about camera position and things like that. I've done some audio editing before, so I knew a lot about sound to begin with. because we haven't started editing yet, I feel like there's a lot to learn still about how we're going to edit. Not the technical, but more the storytelling aspect of it.

This is going to sound ironic, but I don't think of this as an experience in learning how to make a film. Like, for me, it's about historical preservation and community building and telling a story. And so the knowledge of film feels almost external in a way.

So That's sort of odd. We've hired an editor who 

has experience in documentary storytelling and things like that. So he's going to be able to provide some good cut skills, I think, because he won't be as invested as we are. So that'll be really helpful to us. But I don't know. I mean, aren't the best films, the films that like touch you, because they're just people's stories, whether they're fictional or, documentary style.

I mean, I think for me, it's just about storytelling. 

David Staley: I know you're early in the process. Can you see yourself doing another one in the future? 

Julia Applegate: Well, yes. And again, it's because of stories. I mean, there are so many stories that we. You know, we got the people that we interviewed by connecting the dots, and so there's a really, untold story about a group called the Lesbian Avengers that was formed in New York City, and there was a chapter here in Columbus, and five of the women that were part of the Lesbian Avengers were arrested at Pride in 1995, and we weren't even really calling it Pride then, but at the march, and I think there's a whole story about the Lesbian Avengers and what they were doing in terms of feminist and lesbian activism in the 1990s.

And I've been thinking about that, like, gosh, if we get good exposure and somehow people think that we're good at this then maybe that could be a subject to explore. There are also a couple of women that we interviewed who were, one of them was a historian or is a historian, the other one is a sociologist.

They were here at Ohio State. You might know them. Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor. So we went and know them both, yes. Yeah. So you know how amazing they are. 

Mm hmm. 

Just spending time with them and. I knew they were legends because I heard about them so much, but to like walk through their house and my God, they wrote the books and we don't know who they, I mean, generally, I don't think people outside of academia know who they are.

Like I watched the Polly Murray documentary. Are you familiar with that? So Polly Murray being looked at now as a non binary black activist, someone who laid the groundwork for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Well, Leila and Verta, they knew Polly. And when I think about, like, another film, we talk to them, we're like, God, we would love to follow you guys and just tell your story if you would let us.

And They're thinking about it. So we'll see. They were just fun too. Like we wanted to go spend more time with them. So I don't know. I don't know what will happen, but I'm open. 

David Staley: When and where can we see the film? 

Julia Applegate: So we will have a rough cut ready in October of 24. We'll do some public screening that will serve as an opportunity to see what we've done so far and as a fundraiser.

And that's really an important piece of this project because many of the people that we are interviewing are elders and there are two people who were part of this story who have passed away since we started. And so it's really important to me that we get even though it's going to be a rough draft, we get that in the public right now with people who are here right now so that they can come see what we've done. And then we will aim to finish in February ish in time hopefully to be able February 25. 25, yeah, February 25. Hopefully to be able to enter into some film festivals for a summer Pride celebrations in June of 25.

David Staley: There's a website, I believe, that people could go to. 

Julia Applegate: Yes, and believe it or not Free Beer Tomorrow costs like 10, 000 as a domain. So we bought watchfreebeertomorrow. So our domain is watchfreebeertomorrow. com. 

David Staley: Julia Applegate, thank you. 

Julia Applegate: Thank you, David.