(PT) is for Pool Table

Whether you’re new to using Mapping the Gay Guides or not, you’ll know that one of the most helpful ways to explore our dataset is using what we call “amenity features.” These amenity features can be found in the original Damron Address Books and were a letter coding system that helped the reader know a little bit more about a listed establishment. For example, a popular site (say, a busy bar) would often have a star next to the bar’s name (in place of a star, our team at Mapping the Gay Guides uses an asterisk *). If the listing was a place where one could find, say, a burger to chow down on, Damron would often include the letter “R,” denoting that the site was a restaurant. The amenity features often denote the kind of patrons to a site (whether African Americans frequented that site, or if the place is mostly for a younger or older clientele, for example). Sometimes the letters noted practical information—whether a site served coffee or was a place suitable for dancing.

While working with the first 15 years of data on the site, one amenity initially surprised our team—the designation “PT,” which Damron noted stood for “Pool Table.” Unlike some of the amenity features, this lettering seemed pretty straightforward; a “PT” meant that the site (most likely a bar) included a pool table. Simple as that. But historians should never be content with the obvious. It’s our job to sometimes question the so-called obvious and try to make sense of the meaning of what we sometimes take as “the given” in our work.

The fact that Damron felt the need to include a designation for pool tables tells us that it likely mattered at least somewhat to his readers (mostly white gay men). For a community often stereotyped as uninterested in sports, the designation PT shows that there was indeed a desire for many gay men to seek out a place to play a round of pool, whether as a competitive social activity or part of some wider athletic league experience. Damron included this information because it must’ve mattered to a significant chunk of his readership.

But Damron did not initially use PT in his first iterations of the guide. As you can see in Figure 1, PT- Pool Table was not one of the 12 amenity features listed and explained in the original 1965 guide. It’s important to remember that Damron Address Books were not static throughout their nearly 60-year run. They constantly change, not just in appearance (differing layouts, the addition of advertisements etc.) but also in the ways they classify businesses and locations. Even the lettering system changed substantially (for example, “G” for Girls is eventually replaced by “L” for Ladies).

Damron first included the PT label in the 1977 guide. As you can see from the 1977 explanation of listings (Figure 2), the explanation read “Pool Table (if you thought this meant something else, just remember—the two meanings are often synonymous).” Despite being a serious businessman and bar owner, Damron loved writing in an occasional cheeky style. It’s not entirely clear what the joke is referring to here, but it’s possible that Damron assumed readers might think PT stood for “Prick Tease,” a slang term for a person who leads another to mistakenly believe that they’ll be open to possible sexual interaction later (what the online Oxford dictionary says is “another term for cockteaser.”) I can’t confirm this, especially since that explanation doesn’t really make sense with Damron’s joke, but it’s a theory nonetheless.

In 1977, the first year that PT is listed as an amenity category, Damron listed 187 locations with pool tables. A huge number of those locations can be found in California, particularly in Southern California, but pool tables could be found in gay spaces like the Forum Club in Great Falls Montana, the Red Carpet in Pensacola, Florida, and the Tomato Café halfway across the Pacific Ocean on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii. By the 1980 guide published three years later, the number of pool table establishments nearly doubles to 334 sites, with pool tables found at the Cowboy Bar in Jackson, Wyoming to the Badlands Territory disco in Louisville, Kentucky.

You might already know from our methodology section that our Mapping the Gay Guides team doesn’t know a whole lot about how Damron came about listing places with certain letters. How did Damron know if a place was more for a younger crowd (YC) or if it was more of a “mixed” space (M)? How did Damron figure out that there were pool tables at 334 establishments in 1980?

I got to wondering what led Damron to add this designation in the 1977 guide, and so I did some archival digging. Sure enough, I found a reference to Damron’s pool table designation in a 1975 issue of California Scene, a popular gay magazine in the 1970s. The article notes that the Rusty Nail won an inter-bar pool tournament in Los Angeles in 1975, evidence of a competitive culture of billiards in gay bars in the late 1970s. As California Scene (Figure 3) described the game, “pool is now a must in many bars around the state. The famous Bob Damron Address Book is even making a special listing for this game of skill in the next edition.” Bingo! Even more helpful to our Mapping the Gay Guide team, we get some direct evidence of how Damron collected his PT data—he simply asked bar patrons if the bars they went to had pool tables. “Bar people should be sure to advise [Damron] by early January.”

To many gay men around the country in the late 1970s, it mattered whether a bar had a pool table. Perhaps the allure of the bars wasn’t just the booze, or the availability to find romantic or sexual companions, or simply a place to dance. To lots of gay men, gay bars offered spaces to shoot pool with people like themselves. But how to find those pool bars? Damron helped with that.