Village Cigars, Greenwich, and Mourning Places I’ve Never Been

5 MINUTE READ

Yesterday, I was walking home from a long night at work. My job is in Noho but I live in Harlem, and I like to walk to the Christopher Street 1 train to get back uptown. I was on the phone with my dad when I opened Google to check for train delays. I saw the headline of a suggested article that literally stopped me dead in my tracks.

Village Cigars Has Closed After Decades on Christopher Street

I gasped and stumbled to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk. I skim the article with anxious eyes, mouth agape.

“Hello? What’s wrong?”

I didn’t realize that for a moment I’d probably scared my dad, and had completely stopped talking. I read him the headline, explaining that Village Cigars was a long-time cultural staple in Greenwich. After a long pause, I look up from my phone to realize I’m standing right across the street from this building. The one on the corner of 7th Avenue South, with its distinct triangle shape, red paint, and bright white lettering. My heart started to tremble, hoping it was all clickbait. But the lights are off and it’s dark. Too dark. Not “we’re closed, come back tomorrow” dark. Lifeless, vacant dark.

I’m a transplant New Yorker by way of Chicago who’s only been here 2 years. Why does this feel like a nightmare? Why am I in tears?

Being a person with an intersectional identity is a complex existence. While I can easily trace my Blackness to my blood relatives and see my experience in other people who look like me, the lineage and meaning of my identity as a high-femme dyke is a decoupage box of clumsily foraged treasures and bloody, violent tragedies. Coming into self-understanding as a queer person of this decade is a process of scavenging for proof of those who came before you and squeezing what little you find with shaking, white-knuckled fists.

When I read that headline, this photograph came to mind. Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson with a friend of hers at the Pride March of 1982. Marsha, just being Marsha, with the flowers she’d always wear in her hair, her fabulous jewelry, and the Village Cigars storefront framing her like a halo.

While the loss of trail-blazing community members will always be a harsh, gut-wrenching reality of the queer existence, the loss of community spaces, especially those that have hitherto stood the test of time, is equally devastating and immeasurable. Pride was a protest. It was a march. It was sometimes a riot. If only Village Cigars could speak. It’s borne witness long enough to tell the tale thousands of times over.

It’s taken a few moments of solitude to realize that among anger and sadness, what I’m ultimately experiencing is some level of grief.

When I moved here, I made it my business one afternoon to walk the streets of Greenwich. Foraging, as mentioned. After about an hour and a half of strolling, I was confused. Aside from the bars, now filled with yelling, cishet white folks and the Stonewall National Monument (where it’s a little creepy to sit), I was coming up empty.

I’d spent all this time learning about myself and my history. I saw the places they used to hang. I saw the gorgeous drag queens smiling with a cigarette between press-on nails, and read about butch dykes with slicked back hair and leather pants posted up outside bars. I watched ballroom folks vogue and dip to the backdrop of disco music and raucous laughter on the piers, their joy so palpably defiant through my headphones.

I’ve since been released to the real world from the bubble of laptop screens and books, expecting to see this history personified and still kicking. Instead, I found expensive boutique, café, boutique, scaffolding, café, really expensive boutique…

With every passing storefront, questions rang in my mind. What was was this before you got here? Where is what I saw? Why is it gone?

It clicked, only moments later, that though I’d read about the vibrance of queer history, I’d also read about those who would receive the call about a friend who had just passed. Stories of lovers who sat at the hospital bedside until their sweetheart’s last breaths. Bartenders who’d look up from mixing drinks to see an empty seat, realizing certain regulars—whose names they may never had known—would never return.

Everything I saw was real. Those people were real, the pain they endured was real, and the pure joy they found in their resistance was real. But violent, homophobic indifference to our deaths during the AIDs crisis would eventually shorten the shelf-life of the evidence. It was here; I’m not crazy. I’m just…late. I’m too late, and here come the tears. This feeling, this emptiness, is more than retroactive F.O.M.O. It’s latent mourning.

Even in the darkness of Village Cigars, in the vacancy of this iconic edifice, I feel like I can hear it.

I know what you’re looking for, kid. I know what you see. You just missed it. You just missed it, and I’m sorry.

Make no mistake, I lean more pragmatist than idealist. There is no part of me that longs for the return of police raids, rampant hate-crimes, or my expression of love being reduced to seedy alleyways or sweaty bathroom stalls. I recognize the privilege of being a Black, femme, lesbian twenty-something of this decade. Loud and fearless with an unapologetic love for myself, and a salacious appetite for those masc-of-center.

In the combined words of many queer veterans, with whom I enjoy the wonderful privilege of kinship, “the golden past is golden because it’s passed.” Yes, I know this. Deeply. But what am I supposed to do about the pain I feel for a period of time in which I never existed? When I listen to them reminisce about the ACT UP meetings within the previously-graffiti’d-but-now-painted-clean walls of The Center, or the gay shenanigans that used to occur on the Christopher Street pavement, I hope they know with absolute certainty that my heart is recording. I hope they know that through their memories, a young lesbian is desperately trying to maintain object permanence.

In culmination of my anger and the rest of these heavy feelings, I have only one remaining question:

After you’ve cleaned up this neighborhood and rid yourself of the undesireables, the dykes, the fags, and the degenerates who’ve woven the fabric of this neighborhood’s culture, what will you have left?

The leeches may feast now, sustaining themselves with watered-down, plaque-rendered retellings of experiences that don’t belong to them. But the bitter, eventual truth is that with the death of every edifice that once housed the spirit of a culture, everyone begins to starve.

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