Could the key to bridging societal divides be found inside your local karaoke bar?
This piece is from Noema Magazine. .
Whenever I’m spiraling about the state of the world, the survival mechanism in my brain tells me to get out of my head and into my body. For a long time, my preferred embodied experience was a night out at a strip-mall biker bar in small-town Texas where karaoke was emceed by a drag queen.
Outside, the bar was unremarkable. Inside, it teemed with the weirdest collection of people: a socioeconomic grab bag of college kids and yuppies, seniors and empty nesters, bikers and cowboys, liberals and conservatives, locals and visitors. That’s what I loved most about Crossroads — it was an “all kinds” kind of place.
Now defunct, it had all the hallmarks of a great southern dive bar: neon lights glowing green and blue; beer bottles lining the bar shelves, all cheap domestics; a perpetually sticky floor; oscillating fans mounted on the walls to keep the heat at bay. The place was tiny, a single room with a stage lifted two feet off the ground in a corner and the bar across the back wall. It had a handful of two-top tables scattered around, but mostly everything was swept to the edges so there was room for dancing and carrying on. It’s been 10 years since I was last there.
Beyonca Deleon, the drag queen who ran the karaoke machine, still remembers her first night there. “I looked out at the crowd and was like, ‘Holy shit, someone’s gonna die.’ Because you had bikers, rednecks, twinky little gays walking around, just all types,” recalls Deleon, who now identifies as a trans woman. Soon, though, she realized her fear was misplaced. “It was a come-as-you-are bar,” she says. “Nobody cared.”
Everyone I talk to who spent time at Crossroads remembers it the same way: a lovefest of humanity singing at the top of their lungs, a place that made you believe this American melting pot experiment could actually work.
Unfortunately, the bar couldn’t weather the pandemic; it shut down in 2021. But there is a lesson in its legacy. Today, at a time when we’re increasingly siloed by class, race, politics and algorithms, places like Crossroads perform a sacred service. They invite us to embrace something essential to our collective well-being: social friction.
Read the rest at Noema Magazine.
