In my final undergraduate year, I did an ethnographic study of a drag cabaret which ran out of a bar in the Gay Village near the university. I’ll blog about it more later, but at the moment all I want to say is that I was unusually lucky and was able to get two actual, grown-up, academic publications out of it.
Although the bar was pretty well-known, I anonymised it in the study by calling it The Fifty-Four.
Sometime later, I started seriously writing fiction. One of the types of fiction I write is a series of intermittent dark fantasy stories set in and around a Gay Village which is essentially a fictionalised version of the abovementioned Gay Village near the university.
In the first published story, “The Kindly Race,” I needed a name for a village bar that had a drag cabaret.
I called it The Fifty-Four.
Let’s just say it was my way of contributing to the debate of whether or not ethnography is just another kind of storytelling.
A Doctor Of Many Things 