Review: "Moby Dyke" by Krista Burton

Moby Dyke by Krista Burton
Published June 2023 via Simon & Schuster
★★★★

A woman walks into a lesbian bar...and another, and another, until she's made it to all twenty that she can find remaining in the US.

I wasn't sure whether I wanted to read this, because although Burton describes lesbian bars as crucial to her experience of queer community as a young and newly out lesbian, that's just...never been my scene. I've been in a very small handful of lesbian bars, and a number of non-queer bars that is large only in proportion to the number of lesbian bars I've been to, and when I was younger my queer community was centered more around, like, book clubs. (This will surprise literally nobody who has ever met me.) But then I realised that Burton was the writer of Effing Dykes back in the day, and holy moly let me at that book. I kept Effing Dykes in my blog feed for years after it went dormant, because you never knew! She could post again! And I didn't want to miss it just because I was fool enough to unsubscribe!

So Moby Dyke does not disappoint, partly because it's both entertaining and thoughtful on its own but also partly because part of me is still stuck ten years ago, double-checking links in vain hope of updates. Burton spent the better part of a year juggling her weekends and PTO in order to traverse the country, visiting dyke bar after dyke bar and asking: why are there so few of them left? How does the community feel in an era when being queer is more accepted, but also in a not-quite-post-pandemic time? And what does it mean, in this day and age, for a bar to be a lesbian bar in the first place?

Burton doesn't play favorites, but I'd be curious to know which bar she most wished were in her neighborhood (and why)—and also whether they started to run together for her by the end. (They did for me, but since I was 90% in it for the conversations and commentary anyway, I can't say that I was bothered. I might have minded more had I been planning to relocate to a specific town in the US based on proximity to a good lesbian bar and was using this book as my sole reference, but that's not me, and...I don't think that's going to be very many people.) I'd also desperately like to know why there were apparently no lesbian bars in Provincetown, because you cannot tell me that P-Town has lost its status as the lesbian San Francisco or I will slowly melt into a puddle of grief.

Please go buy this book so that the publisher will give Burton a contract to write another book. I don't know what it's going to be about, but I want to read it.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.