Key Details
- Read by: Sarah Beth Pfeifer reads rather than Burton, a real choice on a book whose appeal is one particular speaking voice.
- At its heart: queer geography, what assimilation costs, who counts as welcome
- Vibe: Loud and funny with something quietly grieving underneath
- Short version: Good company for twelve hours if you want reporting with jokes, not a history of the bars themselves.
Two hundred and six lesbian bars operated in America in 1987. A couple dozen are left. That subtraction is the engine of this audiobook, and Krista Burton spends twelve hours and thirteen minutes driving toward whatever remains, one windowless room at a time. The premise sounds like an elegy on paper, and the finished thing is closer to fieldwork with jokes in it.
Burton arrives here from Effing Dykes, the blog that built the readership, and the reporting instinct shows up in the itinerary rather than in any thesis paragraph. A first post-pandemic drag show at The Back Door in Bloomington, Indiana. Dildo races at Houston's Pearl Bar. A group serenade at Nashville's Lipstick Lounge, submitted to under protest, given a stated hatred of karaoke, and then enjoyed. A five-star posted on 24 June 2023 opens with the question Hannah Gadsby asked from a stage in 2017, where the quiet gays are supposed to go, and answers it by noting that quiet gays can read a book about loud gays going to bars. As a description of the pleasure on offer, that is close to exact.
Sitting underneath the itinerary is a second book, and it is the more interesting one. Burton came out to Mormon parents. She is recently married to a trans man who travels with her on this trip, and his presence keeps reopening the question the bars are themselves arguing about: who counts as welcome in a room built around a category that will not hold still. Nobody in these pages settles it, Burton least of all, and the refusal to settle it is why the book earns its length instead of just filling it.
Assimilation is the argument underneath, and Burton handles it without pretending to a conclusion. Wider acceptance is exactly why fewer people need a windowless room with a heavy door, and fewer people needing it is exactly why the rooms keep closing. Both halves of that sentence are true and they pull in opposite directions. What keeps the whole thing from collapsing into a shrug is that Burton puts the question to the people standing in front of her rather than theorizing at them, and the answers she collects do not agree with each other. A bartender in one city and a regular in another are describing different losses.
The Reading Goes to Pfeifer Instead of Burton
The reading goes to Sarah Beth Pfeifer, not to Burton, which is a real decision on a book whose whole appeal is one person's speaking voice. Twelve hours is a long stretch to hold a comic first-person rhythm, and the material makes it harder by pivoting without warning: a paragraph about a bathroom line in Houston sits three minutes away from a paragraph about a Mormon family learning something. What the assignment demands is a reader who can drop the register without announcing the drop. Give the sample the karaoke chapter and you will know within ten minutes whether it lands for you.
Episodic construction is the other thing that suits audio here. A five-star posted on 26 June 2023 describes picking the book up a chapter at a time, and the audio behaves the same way: every bar is a self-contained unit with its own crowd, its own house rules and its own reason for still being open. That response also values the book for showing how unlike each other these communities are, which is precisely what a road trip can demonstrate and an essay cannot.
Comparison helps set expectations. This belongs to the participatory tradition, where the writer books the trip and becomes a character inside it, rather than to the archival cultural history that the plain title might suggest. Burton is present in every scene, forms opinions in real time, gets tired, drinks too much, changes her mind about karaoke in public. Listeners who prefer an invisible author will be irritated inside the first hour. Listeners who came for the author get considerably more of her than the premise advertises, which on this particular book is the right trade to make.
None of Five Responses Mentions the Recording
Dissent on this listing amounts to a single three-star, posted on 20 December 2025, and it is short and unhappy: boring, poorly written, and headed for a donation box. Sixty-two ratings sit behind the 4.2 average, so five written responses are a thin sample of what people actually thought, and the one negative entry gives no examples. Take it as a warning about a specific risk rather than as a verdict. Burton's comic voice is a taste, and a taste that does not take will make twelve hours feel much longer than twelve hours.
Worth knowing before you buy: none of the five written responses says anything about the recording. Every judgment on the page is a judgment about the writing. That is common enough on a memoir listing, but it means the performance is genuinely untested here, and the sample is doing more work than usual.
Expectations need managing in one more direction. Anyone coming for a history of American lesbian bars will not find one. Burton reports the 1987 figure and the current figure and then goes looking at what is left, which is a journalism decision rather than a research one. No archive, no interviews with the owners who closed, no accounting of what killed each room. The book is a present-tense survey, and its evidence is what a person can see from a barstool.
Twelve Hours With a Voice You're Arguing With
Anyone who reads travel writing for the people rather than the places will do well here, as will listeners who want queer cultural criticism delivered without an academic register. No prior connection to these bars is required. Burton is specific enough about each room, the holiday lights strung up in June, the Britney-heavy playlists, the particular geometry of a space with no windows, that the appeal survives having never walked into one.
Skip it if the road-trip form annoys you, since the structure repeats by design and the momentum comes from accumulation rather than plot. Skip it if you want the question of who belongs in these spaces answered rather than turned over. And approach with care if the running comic register grates early, because it does not change, and twelve hours is a long time to spend with a voice you are arguing with.
