NYC and Me: The Swinging Seventies

Clockwise from upper left: me at my drafting table in Maine, Ogunquit Playhouse, Royal Poinciana Playhouse, Jim, my taxi license, the GAA Firehouse dance, me on a set for the Actor's Unit. Center: me in 1978.

This sad summer of 2020 as my city slowly stumbles toward some kind of resolution to the nationwide pandemic only to be further disrupted by protests against racial injustice triggered by the brutal murder of a black man in Minnesota by a police officer, I felt powerless to do much more than bear witness and cheer on the young people from the sidelines. However recently my much younger dear friend Ian persuaded me to take part in a protest march. As I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge I took in the diverse crowd around me and felt the energy and righteousness of their faces as they chanted and held up their signs. Feeling very old, I envied their youth and knew that my old feet would be hurting the next day. I wonder if the 23 year old I was 47 years ago would be marching with them — in all honesty, probably not.

In my sorrow and anguish concerning my city’s current crisis, I find myself looking back and trying to remember who I was and why I stayed in New York even though the city had been a harsh mistress. The City was seductive, beautiful and the source of great joy, but also unforgiving, dirty and the location of much heartbreak. Most all of the dreams I had as a young man about what my New York life would be were consistently unrealized but I’m still here and that is the only dream come true I need now. During this forced shutdown of my social life I can take the time to reflect on my first decade in New York and the 23-year-old me who came to make his mark in the fall of 1973. There are very few people still in my life who knew me as a young man. I have only the faulty memories of an old man and boxes of old photos, papers and the stories I’ve told about my twenty-something self many times over the years that have become less detailed with each recollection. Looking through the ephemera I’ve kept and trying to organize it like I’ve learned to do from my time as a volunteer archivist at the LGBT Center has helped me be more objective in my recollections as I piece together a view of New York City from 1973 to around 1984 through the eyes of my younger self. 

My arrival and first year in New York was facilitated by a close friend, Bruce Martin who let me move in with him and his partner Rob. They had moved to the city a year or so before I did. They had a small spare room in their fourth floor walk-up on west 86th street. Bruce also helped me get a job working with him as a stagehand at the Kaufmann Concert Hall in the 92nd Street YMHA across town. I was very lucky that with very little effort on my part I had a job and a place to live. Also the summer theaters where I had worked and other friends from college who had moved there before me provided me with an instant social and professional network. At the time I was clueless as to how lucky I was to have all this when so many in the city were struggling.

The City was politically transitioning from Mayor John Lindsay to newly elected Abe Beame. The Lindsay administration had been plagued by all the political unrest of the 60s along with teachers strikes, sanitation strikes and police corruption. A huge financial crisis was about to come to a head brought on by “white flight” and the demise of small manufacturing businesses throughput the city. Adult “bookstores” and X-rated films took over Times Square. Central Park was a mess and dangerous after dark. The sidewalks were a mine field of dog shit. The poorer neighborhoods all over the city were pockmarked with empty buildings abandoned by their owners, left to squatters and junkies. The subways were filthy and so covered with graffiti inside and out that often you couldn’t see out the windows. I knew nothing of the city’s politics. I was moving too fast and had too many things to do to pay attention to politics. The glaring headlines on The Daily News and The NY Post weren’t about me. I would reach past them for a copy of Backstage or The Village Voice. Only the Arts & Entertainment section of the Sunday Times held my attention for very long. My world was all about the theater and enjoying the burgeoning gay social scene that exploded in the years just after the Stonewall riots of June 1969.

My first year living in the City was full of new experiences and cultural shocks that I assimilated hungrily. Working backstage at the Kaufmann Concert hall exposed me to music, dance and lectures that I would not have sought on my own. I learned what a “shabbas goy” was when I set up the sound and lights for an orthodox jewish high holy day service booked in the hall. I had to be at work early many Saturday and Sunday mornings when traveling children’s theater troupes were booked. Many of those mornings I would be badly hungover from a long Friday or Saturday night out having fun. 

My job at the 92nd Street Y had very flexible hours, often in the evening, that made it easy for me to pursue other things during the day. I found plenty of opportunities to work on various “showcase” theater productions and various odd theater tech jobs. There were empty commercial loft spaces all over Manhattan that were taken over by artists and little theater companies. The City was teaming with aspiring artists, actors and designers like myself who took advantage of the cheap housing available in the sketchy neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, Chelsea, Soho and Hell’s Kitchen. Actor’s Equity had very lax requirements for their members doing “showcase” productions which usually paid nothing or provided just subway fare. I designed several shows (which I also built and painted myself) in Chelsea in a former sweatshop at 682 6th Ave. I was thrilled when one of their shows got reviewed in the Village Voice with a favorable mention for my work. 

There was an abundance of creativity going on in the arts in the 70s and in retrospect I can see that I may have missed a lot of chances to network in the creative circles that might have made me a more successful player in the arts scene of the time. At the time there were so many choices dropped in front of me. It was all very random. There was no way of knowing if collaboration with a certain director or producer was going to lead to fame and fortune. I would occasionally seek out a job from an ad in Backstage, but most of my jobs came from referrals from friends or people I’d worked with in summer stock theaters.

In the years immediately after the Stonewall riots police harassment diminished significantly and gay activists were beginning to have an affect and a small amount of political recognition even though real political power and equal rights laws were years away. The Gay Activist Alliance was the first gay activist organization in the city to take up the tactics of the anti war movement with acts of civil disobedience and protests. I wish I could say I had gone to their old Soho firehouse headquarters for their political meetings, I didn’t. I only became aware of the GAA because of their Saturday night fund-raising dances. They were fantastic and so popular that you had to get there early or wait in a long line to get in. The energy and pure joy in that crowded firehouse filled with queer people celebrating their youth and freedom in a totally queer space is a sweet memory that I cherish. The GAA firehouse dances ended in 1974 after the building was damaged by arsonists. Many gay bars noticed a decline in their business on GAA dance nights. A segment of the business community, including some gay entrepreneurs also noticed and were realizing there was money to be made from this newly enfranchised community. I believe there is a direct connection from the popularity of the GAA firehouse dances to the countless gay clubs that sprang up over the next decade — queer spaces filled with shirtless young men in a joyous tribal dance immersed in a throbbing fog of sound.

Those first months as I was rushing through life like most twenty-somethings do, I had become a bit of a self-centered asshole toward my housemates who had helped me so much. I became a very squeaky third wheel in their household. I was told they would prefer to be living alone as a couple and I was kindly asked to find new living arrangements. I decided to return to a summer theater in Ohio, Kenley Players, where I had worked the summer before. In May 1974 I moved out of Bruce and Rob’s apartment, put my belongings in storage and returned to Ohio for the summer as a scenic painter. During the summer one of the set designers quit and I was given the unexpected opportunity to design the sets for three of the shows that season. Kind of like the classic show-biz story of the understudy stepping in for the star. The highlight of that summer for me was designing the set for “Oliver!” starring Vincent Price. I was able to expand my portfolio with big productions that included “star” names and I thought I was now on my way to becoming a big-time designer on my return to New York that fall. It turns out the New York world was not that impressed with my new portfolio.

After the summer I returned to New York and took an apartment in the East Village east on 6th Street with an old friend from school, Gregg Marriner. The East Village in ‘74 was years away from becoming the trendy neighborhood it is today. In fact Gregg and I had initially intended to have an additional roommate, our dear friend Linda, but she didn’t feel comfortable with the east 6th street location between Avenues A and B and decided not to join us. To say that the block was a bit funky is an understatement. I wasn’t the worst block in “Alphabet City” but there was at least one abandoned building on the block occupied by crack addicts. I never felt threatened walking around the area, but I would find myself crossing town to the West Village most evenings when I was seeking entertainment. I didn’t stay long in the East 6th Street apartment, but the East Village would be my neighborhood for the next 42 years. 

The fall of 1974 into the winter of 1975 I worked a series of odd theater tech jobs and designed a few showcase productions. Many evenings I went prowling about the Village bars. There was a palpable fog of sexual tension and energy permeating the bars, streets, parks and other areas where gay men would gather in those days. A night out could be a silent game of hide and seek on the dark streets of the empty meat packing district or abandoned piers along the river for anonymous hook-ups. I was moderately intrigued by these places, but I didn’t find them as seductive as some my contemporaries. I didn’t become obsessed with sex as it seemed many gay men were then, but I did participate in the newly open sexuality of the 70s. I preferred to find my hook-ups in bars and more ordinary social situations. I wasn’t particularly outgoing or aggressive when I was out cruising the bars, but I was young and attractive enough yo have plenty of sex without much effort on my part. It was the 70s and the sexual revolution was peaking for gay men with a vengeance. We didn’t have Scruff or Grinder, but in the bars, on the streets, deserted piers and dark corners of public parks there were rituals and signals that were easy to interpret — a backward glance, a leather vest, a certain color hanker-chief in the back pocket of a tight pair of jeans — many variations depending on the place. If you were young and gay New York in the 70s was a smorgasbord of sex and not getting laid regularly would take more effort than being celibate.

The Ninth Circle was a particular favorite bar of mine at the time and a place I was most likely to find hook-ups. I went there alone on the night of my 25th birthday and got picked up by two guys who became the nucleus of a small circle of close friends that sustained me for the next five years or so. The group included some aspiring actors and a black woman who was the epitome of the pejorative “fag hag,” but we loved her. She had a voice that sounded a bit like Butterfly McQueen. One of them Jim Dozmati, became my boyfriend for a while. In the fall of 1975 I moved into a small walk-up apartment with Jim, who I had been seeing since January. He came to visit me in Ohio where I had returned to work that summer for a third season at Kenley Players. I asked Jim if I could stay with him when I returned to NYC. My roommate had moved us out the apartment on 6th street while I was away after it had been burglarized and I would be homeless when I returned to NYC. In retrospect I’m not sure if I was proposing we become a couple or just wanting a place to land while I looked for a place of my own. In any case we did become a couple and after several months I persuaded Jim to sign a lease with me on a one bedroom apartment at 170 Second Avenue in the East Village. Also I had decided to go back to school and took out loans to attend NYU’s Graduate Theater program for design. To pay the rent I got a taxi license and worked the night shift driving a cab for several months. The night shifts soon became too tiring, so I went back to taking odd carpentry and theater tech jobs to support myself.

In February 1976 My mother came to New York with two friends and I was able be a tour guide for them. They stayed in a hotel and I think I impressed them with my ability escort them around the city on the subway like the seasoned New Yorker I had become. I don’t recall introducing Jim to my mother at that time and if I referred to him I would call him my roommate. My mother still euphemistically referred to me as a “confirmed bachelor” to her friends and while in most aspects of my life I was not secretive about my sexual orientation, with my family there was a tacit understanding that it would not be discussed. At one point this year I do recall my parents did meet Jim when they went out of their way to stop by NYC while on one of their road trips somewhere to drop off some furniture they were giving me. They would have seen my one bedroom apartment with one bed and met my “roommate” then. No questions were asked.

The summer of 1976 was the beginning of a cycle that last for the next eight years working half the year outside of New York mostly for one theater producer, John Lane. He ran a summer stock theater in Ogunquit, Maine and in winter produced a season of plays in Palm Beach, Florida at the Royal Poinciana Playhouse. In retrospect I feel that I may have limited my chances of becoming a more successful designer in the New York theater world by working outside of the city so much. Nevertheless that’s the path I took. The first summer in Ogunquit I was a scenic painter. My closest friend Gregg was the lighting designer. I didn’t think much about leaving my boyfriend/roommate on his own for the summer. He had his job as gardener in the City and I had to go where my theater jobs took me and without much discussion I just left him on his own. The status of our relationship and what we meant to each other wasn’t discussed. I was too self-absorbed to notice if Jim was upset by my leaving him on his own for the summer. Also I was beginning to be concerned about Jim’s drinking. When he came to visit me in Oqunquit I was very upset that on the first night of his stay, after weeks of being apart he was too drunk have sex with me. There was bit of drama and I was petulant asshole. 

Other than Jim’s visit my summer was great. A lot of hard work and lot of hard playing. Ogunquit had a vibrant gay scene that coexisted with more traditional family oriented New England beach town vibe. It was a microcosm of all that’s picturesque in a New England fishing village and had attracted artists and tourists since the early 20th century. Where there are artists there are bound to be some gay people as well. Ogunquit wasn’t equivalent with Provincetown or Fire Island but many of its businesses were gay owned. I would spend every summer there (with one exception) for the next seven years. Working away from the City every summer prevented me from participating in any New York Gay Pride parades until 1986. I wasn’t connected to gay activism in any meaningful way partly because of my absence from the city for work so much and partly because working in the theater there was little need to be in the closet. I was protected from the kind of discrimination that was still prevalent in other occupations. In fact being gay in the theater could actually be beneficial as there were so many gay directors and producers. In fact in retrospect I can admit that there may have been a bit of casual flirting involved in some of the jobs I got. In my twenties I could express sympathy for someone who had to hide their sexuality in there work life, but it was not something I had experienced. My self-centered 26-year-old self remained only superficially aware of gay activism and politics.

I returned to New York in the fall of 1976, grateful to be home. I resumed classes at NYU, but it was a struggle financially and there was more personal drama with Jim. I was not mature enough to tolerate or help with his alcoholism. Before the end of the year John Lane offered me a job in Palm Beach not only as a scenic painter, but I would also design the set for two of the shows. The choice was to stay in gloomy cold New York with my alcoholic boyfriend, taking classes that were putting me in debt or spend the winter in sunny Florida designing and getting paid for it. I couldn’t pack my bags fast enough. 

Florida was successful for me professionally, but not otherwise. It was actually quite cold there the first month. When you're under a palm tree in an apartment with no heat, fifty degrees feels much colder than it should. Also I found Palm Beach oppressively pretentious and Florida in general a pastel colored cultural hodgepodge where people with varying degrees of success, live their tropical fantasy on a paved over swamp. I was never so happy to return to New York after that winter in Florida. It would be a new beginning. Over the winter my boyfriend/roommate had found someone new. I would keep the apartment and find a new roommate. These were my “snowbird” years. I would return to Ogunquit the next summer after three months of unemployment checks and odd jobs for cash. This time as set designer for the entire season. Then back to New York in the fall to more unemployment checks, only to head off to Palm Beach for the winter. My apartment in the East Village became my anchor to New York. All those many times in a cab from the airport crossing the Williamsburg Bridge I would look at the Manhattan skyline with a mixture of awe and gratitude that I could claim it as my home. Those years while in Maine, Florida and one summer in Lake Forest Illinois I would design over eighty productions. The few shows I designed in New York were all low budget off and off-off Broadway shows. 

There’s and an old song titled “There’s a Broken Heart for Every Light On Broadway.” This became true for me in 1980. The summer of 1979 I was hired by a director I had worked with in Palm Beach to design a four production season for the Academy Festival Theater in the affluent Lake Forest suburb of Chicago. One of these plays got picked up by New York producers for a run on Broadway. The director and producers both assured me that I would be hired along with the rest of the creative team for this production and I was ecstatic for several weeks that my name was going to finally be in a Broadway Playbill. My excitement didn’t last long and shortly before the first production meetings were to start I was informed without explanation that I would not work on the Broadway production after all. It was a huge disappointment and since the costume and lighting designers all were kept with the show. I never had a chance to find out from the director exactly why I was dropped. It was also a considerable blow to my confidence in myself and every job I had after that seemed like a step backward. I did four more summer stock seasons in Ogunquit and a few more productions in Palm Beach, but this path was seeming more like a career dead end for me. I didn’t achieve real success in the New York Theater, but I feel privileged to have been a part of it even on the fringes as I was. I feel I am a better and more interesting person for having tried and failed than never having tried at all.

I turned thirty in 1980 and the swinging seventies were winding down. As I was starting to have doubts about my career choices there were also signs of the looming dark times to come in my personal life as well. I had a few close friends and fell in and out of many casual intimate relationships that became progressively disappointing and often ended with a STD and a course of antibiotics. My evening jaunts to the Village became less rewarding, less frequent and each year more fraught with the first signs of the looming health crisis that would change everything. I have many fond memories of experiences that were so unique to New York in the 70s. I’m glad that even though the next decade of my NYC life would bring more heartbreak, it didn’t make me leave New York. 

The current health crisis in NYC in 2020 echos fears and emotions that began to challenge me and my community in the 1980s. This third decade of my life would change me and will be the subject of my next post.

NYC and Me: The Beginning

This spring of 2020 while the Covid-19 pandemic has shut down my city preventing me from doing most of the things I love about my life as a New Yorker, I have spent a lot of my time anxiously thinking about how the city will be changed when the pandemic is over. There is some comfort in reflecting on the resilience of the city throughout its history and its ability to overcome crises and be changed for the better. Having made it my home for the last 47 years I have lived through some of those crises and seen the city undergo drastic changes. With this post and others to follow I’m going to look back on my experiences of New York City and try to explain how I came to be here and why I’ll stay as long as I’m able.

I first visited New York as an adult my first year of college in 1969. At least I thought I was an adult at nineteen. It was spring break and for the next four years spring break meant a trip to New York for me. That first visit was the one I remember most. Those four days in the city were a kaleidoscope of sights, sounds and experiences that overwhelmed my still developing teenage brain. The unlimited opportunities that a New York life could offer for living an exciting and interesting life were a revelation. My desire to work in the theater would have lead me to New York, but this trip showed me many other aspects of urban life that I found very enticing, especially for a young gay man.

My roommate, Bruce Martin, (left)
and me in 1969

I came with my then college roommate, who would five years later pave the way for me to move to the city permanently when I moved in with him and his partner. We had the same first name so when we were together so I called him Bruce and he would refer to me as Monroe. Bruce was a couple of years older than me and had been a mentor to me that first year of college. What I leaned from his mentoring though had little to do with my college classes at Butler University’s Theater program in Indianapolis. He introduced me to the real world of gay culture which in 1969 Indianapolis was surprisingly vibrant but very much underground. I had certainly been aware of my sexuality before college, but only in a very fuzzy teenage way. My experiance of the gay bars in Indianapolis and that first visit to New York with my friend opened up a whole new world of urban gay culture that would along with my ambitions to work in the theater lead me to make New York City my home.

I have a letter that I wrote my parents dated March 13, 1969, asking them to send me some money for my trip to New York. I had cobbled together some extra cash ushering at the concert hall on campus and working backstage for the dance school’s recitals, but I wouldn’t get some paychecks in time for my trip. I asked them to advance me $72.98 for my plane ticket and emphasized how the trip was going to be an important addition to my theater education. I don’t recall if there was much resistance from them about my going on this trip, but in retrospect I know it was an important milestone for them toward accepting my need for independence. It was something that my parents (particularly my mother) had struggled with the summer before. See my post from Jan. 2016. They sent me the money and I set off on my first New York adventure.

I was nineteen and unaware of the many financial and political problems that the city was experiencing in 1969. The post-war boom was waning. The working class population that had grown around the manufacturing and shipping businesses and benefited from years of New York City’s extensive liberal public education and health services was decimated as those businesses declined. New York had been the vanguard of the labor movement that lifted wages and safety regulations for the whole country, but by the mid1960s the political winds were changing. The garment industry and other manufacturing businesses left for states with cheaper non-union labor. Many of the city’s liberal institutions that had helped narrow the opportunity gap between the rich and poor were losing public support. The tax base started to evaporate as the “white flight” to the suburbs left once thriving middle and working class neighborhoods to the next wave of immigrants. Native New Yorkers were becoming fearful of large swaths of the city. I only knew that New York was still where the most creative and interesting people working in the most glamorous business were and I wanted to be part of it.

New York can be intimidating for some. The noise, grittiness and constant motion of people and traffic in the manmade canyons could be overwhelming to an unsophisticated teenager who grew up in small towns and suburbs in the Midwest, but I was too mesmerized by all the fascinating new sights and sounds to be intimidated. It also helped that I was with my good friend and mentor who knew his way around. We stayed with a friend of Bruce’s who worked in the office of Broadway producer, David Merrick. His apartment was in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, then very not gentrified, but easy walking distance to the theater district. In 1969 it was called the “Dance Belt” because so many aspiring broadway dancers occupied the inexpensive apartments there. It was thrilling to be able to walk a few blocks from our host’s front door to the bright lights of Times Square. The city seemed filled with so many interesting people rushing off to do important things.

I saw real broadway musicals for the first time, 1776, Hello Dolly and Dear World. The night I saw Hello Dolly was especially memorable because it was a new production of the long-running show starring Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway that had recently opened. I don’t remember why, but I was alone one afternoon and walking around the theater district with no plans and as I walked by the St. James theater just before the matinee was about to start, a man offered to sell me a single ticket he was stuck with. I was in the third row, center orchestra seat which I think I paid him $14 for, very expensive. Ms. Bailey was spectacular. She was known to do a “third act” during the curtain call where she would banter with the audience and shake hands with everybody in the first rows. This day happened to be her birthday and the cast presented her with a cake and sang happy birthday. I felt very lucky to be there. Dear World, a musical adaptation of The Mad Woman of Chaillot, was not a great show and didn’t run very long, but Angela Lansbury was spectacular and I became a big fan.

In a letter to my parents after my trip I listed all the Broadway musicals I saw and the one play we saw, Boys in the Band. I pretentiously referred to it in my letter as “a very important and significant off-broadway play.” Reading my letter now I think I must have been dropping a hint (or a hairpin) about my queerness for them to discover. As Boys In the Band had received a lot press for it’s unabashed portrayal of gay men nationally, it’s possible my parents may have seen something about it, but they never mentioned anything if they did. I’m sure that I probably hesitated before including it in my letter. I was deeply in the closet about my sexuality where my family was concerned and I could easily have omitted seeing the play in my letter. Including it indicated how much the play affected me. Seeing the original cast of this play in New York was a revelation to nineteen-year-old me. Boys In the Band by contemporary standards is full of gay clichés stereotypes and tragedy, but in 1969 it was an unapologetic portrayal of a group of sophisticated gay men. It exposed the internalized self loathing that was very much a part of many gay people’s lives, but it also realistically portrayed the humor and strong friendships that were also part of our culture. This was us, warts and all. Seeing it so artfully displayed on the stage was strangely moving and empowering. Amongst the angst and sadness, there was a glimmer of hope that perhaps if more people actually see the humanity of these men and the world they created to protect themselves from a society that hates them, things could change for the better.

Greenwich Village was particularly fascinating to me and I often found myself shyly looking away when my curious stares were met with confident smirks from beautiful strangers on the street. We went to several gay bars in The Village. Our host was very generous in showing us around. I recall him taking us to a very small neighborhood place called Bricktop’s. I’m not sure if it was in his neighborhood or downtown in the Village, but I recall he was friendly with the staff and they were kind enough to cash a check for $50 that my grandmother had sent to me for my trip. It was very cozy place, different from the gay bars in Indianapolis that were hidden away on grungy side of town. The Bricktop must have been named after or possibly even owned by a jazz age performer, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, who I now know was the queen of “cafe society” in Paris from 1924-1938. I’ve been trying to find out more about this bar named for her that I visited in 1969, but I haven’t found any reference to it yet. However, I’ve I’m happy to learn of Bricktop’s fascinating life. She did move back to New York around 1964 and lived in Harlem until her death in 1984. I don’t recall if I was told of any of this at the time.

We went to a leather bar called the Tool Box which was also a very new experience for me — a bar with all men dressed in variations of bluejeans and leather where I felt very conspicuous. I must have looked like a frightened deer in my white hip-hugger bell bottoms surrounded by so many butch men with lots of facial hair. This inexperienced nineteen-year-old was not ready to fully embrace all the many intriguing facets of the culture I was being exposed to on this NYC visit, but I was certainly primed to make being part of this new world a goal.

After the theater one night we went to the Stonewall Inn bar in Greenwich Village. I wrote about this in an earlier post in 2016 when Stonewall was declared a national monument. I wish I remembered more details about that night, but of course I didn’t know that the Stonewall would become a symbol of gay activism after the protests that would occur there three months after my visit. I don’t recall having to sign my name in book on entering to maintain the pretense that it was a private club, but I must have. There were two large rooms inside divided by a brick wall, with a bar on one side and a dance floor on the other. There were some disco lights and a mirror ball, that didn’t illuminate enough to show anything that could be called decor. I don’t recall seeing any women or anyone dressed in drag. The crowd was almost entirely young, white and male — a new experience for me as the gay bars in Indianapolis had both men and women of various ages. No one asked me to dance and there seemed to be a protocol for "cruising" of which I was ignorant. The flashing lights created a confusing swirl of confident smirks, pouting lips and curious glances on beautiful faces which was mesmerizing but also very intimidating for me. My companions knew the protocol, left with companions for the night and I was on my own to figure things out for myself. I didn’t. I left alone. Outside the bar the sidewalk was crowded with more men smoking or posing against the wall. Under the bright streetlights they were even more intimidating. I had no idea how to get back to Hell’s Kitchen on the subway and took a cab.
 I didn’t know it at the time but the sophisticated gay culture that grew and thrived just under the surface of New York society in the post-war boom was about to change radically. The Stonewall rebellion that would galvanize a movement to bring this extensive underground society out into the open was just three months after my visit. I think that many younger people view gay culture as divided into two periods, pre and after Stonewall. The former being a shadowy world exploited by the mafia, rife with fear and self-loathing — the later, the beginning of activism, pride and gay culture being recognized as a valid component of American society. Certainly the Stonewall rebellion was a significant event, but there were protests, demonstrations and gay activist organizations before Stonewall. A lot of New York gay culture before Stonewall did exist in the shadows, but there were bars, restaurants, publications, arts institutions, performance venues and entire beach communities where gay people found each other and lived their lives and expressed themselves without shame. Gay men and women were deeply imbedded and influential in the New York’s art and culture institutions. I feel lucky I had a brief taste of this pre-Stonewall New York. This was the world I was setting my sights on joining, but by the time I moved to New York permanently things would change radically.

In 1969 I was unaware that this would be the beginning of a decades long arch of history that would see unbelievable changes in the city and the lives of its queer community. Working in the theater was relatively safe place for gay people and my sexuality may have been part of why I was drawn to it, certainly New York in 1969 beckoned me because of my sexuality. However I like to think, that even as clueless as I was, there was something I sensed about the city. Aside from all the practical reasons I decided to move New York, I feel that there were more ethereal reasons. Intangible voices obscured within the constant low rumble of city sounds telling me this is where you should be — voices that told me the party is about to start, don’t wait too long to get here.

For the rest of my college years, I would spend every spring break in New York and with each visit it in those first years after Stonewall the city would seem more like my destiny. The years 1970-1973, were a major transition period both politically and culturally in New York. The city’s financial problems reached a peak, the rising visibility of gay activists inspired by Stonewall and the relaxing of obscenity laws converged to make New York much more gay friendly in a relatively short time. White flight opened up a lot of inexpensive apartments in declining neighborhoods. Many of those neighborhoods attracted large numbers of gay men and women who weren’t concerned about the public schools or living next door to people of color. After Stonewall police harassment of gay establishments declined and Greenwich Village became the center for many new bars and businesses that openly catered to gays. Much of Times Square and 42nd Street area was taken over by x-rated movies and bookstores, but many of them were for the queers. While there was still a lot queer sexuality happening in the dark of abandoned industrial buildings and run-down city parks, there was also a lot of it happening in daylight. The 1970 Chistopher Street Liberation Day Parade started with hundreds and grew to thousands by the time is reached Central Park. Every year after it grew exponentially in size and began its transformation from a protest to a celebration.

I moved permanently to the city in the fall of 1973. I was a self-center twenty-three year old mostly ignorant of the challenges and sacrifices of all activists inspired by the Stonewall riots that had created the fabulous new gay New York that welcomed me. I only knew that I was finally ready to start my life. Everything was possible in New York and it was going to be fabulous.

I Weep for My City

Sitting on bench in Central Park’s Conservatory Gardens on a beautiful spring day I look up as the sun filters through the apple blossoms and my eyes fill with tears as I weep for my city. I weep because this city will recover from this pandemic, but I know it will be forever changed by it. Just as it was changed by economic crisis 47 years ago when I first arrived. In 1973 the city’s tax base was depleted by “white flight” to the suburbs and its infrastructure was in shambles. Subway cars were covered in graffiti that was horrible and at the same time beautiful. Central Park’s landscapes and nineteenth century structures were crumbling from neglect, but they were still beautiful. The trees and flowers still bloomed every spring and New Yorkers still gathered there by the thousands every summer. The city recovered from that crisis and was better. There were more economic booms and busts, blackouts, epidemics of crack cocaine use that caused massive crime and incarceration, the AIDS epidemic that decimated my community, terrorist attacks, and hurricanes. I’ve seen my city survive and recover from these things and in each case be forever changed. Survival and change is and has always been an indelible part of New York’s DNA. It is the magnificent invalid always dying, always being reborn or reinvented. A city of contradictions as unfathomed wealth exists around the corner from unforgiving poverty. Sun kissed pink apple blossoms thrive three blocks away from Mt. Sinai Hospital’s emergency department as healthcare professionals struggle to care for the sick and dying in unanticipated numbers. What will my city be like when this is over? It will be forever changed but I don’t know how. I weep for the city that I know so well and for the city forever changed that I don’t yet know. 

The Conservatory Gardens, Central Park

Indeed the whole country will be changed by this pandemic. My hope is that the changes will be for the better and New York will be the catalyst for Americans everywhere to reevaluate the cultural and economic inequities that have left all of us so unprepared for this pandemic. Many of the movements that changed how this country viewed public healthcare, workplace safety and the value of labor started in New York City. Many of these movements were reactions to great tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that was a major factor in the labor movement’s success in getting governments to set basic workplace safety standards. While many of the efforts regarding public health, education and safety began in the private sector, the local and state governments in New York became leaders in taking responsibility for these issues. The idea that government has a responsibility to be a force for the “public good” sprang from the slums and sweatshops of New York. Now again this pandemic has shown us that while we have made a lot of progress in our quest for maintaining the “public good” for all, there are still vast inequities that have left us all vulnerable in unforeseen ways. My city is once again the epicenter of our national tragedy and I struggle to be optimistic about the future.

Will the workers who we have long taken for granted who are now “essential” and have no healthcare, childcare and sick leave continue to show up for their minimum wage jobs? Will all those healthcare worker “heroes” be placated by the nightly applause and shouts of support from apartment windows? Will the thousands of small family run businesses and restaurants that have always been such a special aspect of city life be replaced by soulless corporate franchises? Will we finally be ready to face the consequences of the systemic racism that still plagues our country and find solutions? Will we look away as Amazon and Walmart monopolize our retail and food distribution with their fulfillment centers becoming twenty-first century sweatshops? Will all the titans of finance and industry who have fled their gilded towers to their country homes during this crisis return to resume their lives of privilege and continue to be oblivious of their culpability in this? Will things change for the better?

This city has been the source of great joy and great sorrow for me. It is the place where many of my dreams have been shattered and my heart has been broken many times, but I’m always drawn back to it. Every time I return to New York that first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline from the plane or train window reassures me that I am coming home. Whatever happens I do know that I will be a New Yorker as long as I’m able.

Now that I have ceased most all of the usual activities of my city life I’m forced into a lot self reflection and meditation, which lately has mostly revolved around memories of my life in New York City. My apprehension about how my city is going to be forever changed by this crisis has triggered many memories of the changes I’ve witnessed in my 47 years here and the circumstance that brought me here. Now that I’m an old man living the last chapters of my story, I’m going to use this venue to explore some of those memories with more regular posts to this blog.

Saying Goodbye to Mom

How to you say goodbye to your mother when it seems likely that it may be the last time you see her? It was something I couldn't stop thinking about last week as I prepared to go visit her and all the days there until it was time for me to go. 

My mom is 97 and since last February living with my older brother Larry and his wife Sally. After 3 years in an assisted living facility where a stroke and several injuries requiring long stays in rehab with remarkable recoveries it became clear that she needed more care. Larry and Sally rearranged their home in the hills of eastern Kentucky and along with the help of local hospice care are providing our mom with a sunny room for her last days. She can only sit in a chair for brief periods and spends most of her time in bed sleeping. She seemed to drift between strange dreams and odd memories to moments of awareness that she will not be recovering this time. At these moments she makes her wishes plain with statement “I don’t want to do this anymore, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

There are no words that can express how grateful I am to Larry and Sally for what they are doing for our mom. That she will have the loving hands of family caring for her in her final days is an amazing gift. They practice the tenets of their christian faith more selflessly than anybody I know. They have built a little eden on the side of a hill with terraced gardens overlooking pastures of grazing cows and horses. It’s a beautiful peaceful place far removed from the world I inhabit in New York, but very fitting for our mom’s final stop — surrounded by gardens like the gardens she always had wherever she made a home.

So after several days of quiet walks in the garden, great meals and forthright discussions about the practical matters of end of life care, it was coming near the time to say goodbye and I was fearful I wouldn’t be able to say the right thing. I was afraid I would’t be able to make my mom understand how much I loved her and appreciated everything that she did for me. I have recently been going through family albums and doing genealogy research in order to write a family history. When I got to my immediate family history I gained a renewed appreciation for my mother. A child of the Great Depression, she was the ultimate care-giver beginning when she was a teenager having to care for her grandmother. She became a wife and mother during WWII, raised three sons, moved her household seven times, cared for her parents in their final days, cared for her elderly aunt in her final days and cared for her husband for nine years as he succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. Even though my brothers and I have taken different paths in life and become very different men, we will always be a family of brothers because of our mom and her unconditional support and love. 

My family tends to favor quiet stoicism rather than big displays of emotion when facing tragedy and loss. Now that I’m facing my mother’s mortality as well as my own, I find that I’m embarrassingly prone to crying like a baby at the most trivial expressions of sentimentality, even if it's just in a movie or TV show. So I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to Mom without blubbering uncontrollably. When I went into her room she looked at me sadly and talked again of not knowing what to do. I told her that I knew she would get through this. I reminded her of all the tough things she got through before and she was still strong enough to figure this out too. She relaxed a bit and said, “I had a good life.” I told her I loved her because I was a beneficiary of that good life. She smiled for the first time since I’d been there and said, “Kiss me so I can feel your mustache tickle.”  So I did and I knew she understood how I felt. By now the tears were coming and I couldn’t speak. I saw the determination and strength in her eyes and still smiling she dismissed me saying, “OK, carry on.”

A Witness to History

Last month I attended a tour of New York’s City Hall along with some of my fellow Friends of Governors Island volunteers. It was led by a volunteer docent and who really knew her stuff and gave a great tour of this marvelous New York Landmark that has served the city well for 205 years. 

Walking through stately old buildings like this filled with statues, portraits and furnishings from the past always conjures up a connection to historic people and events that almost makes me believe in the supernatural. There is a presence that I can feel in unexplainable ways as though the thoughts and deeds of all who passed through are somehow absorbed by the marble and pigment and transmitted back as some kind of energy. This day these feelings were particularly strong for me, particularly when we went into the city council chamber and stood in the visitors gallery. Thoughts of the last time I was in that gallery 31 years ago swept over me. I had to walk away from the group and discreetly keep my composure as memories of the day that I was a witness to a historic moment here swirled through my head mingling with our guides historic narrative. Standing in that gallery all the emotion and drama that I was a very small part of so many years ago came flooding back in startling detail because I was back where it all happened.

In March of 1986 after 12 years of debate, 17 years after the Stonewall Riots, the New York City Council was going to vote on adding sexual orientation to the city’s non-discrimination law and it had a good chance of passing. I was with a group of activists that had spent the night before in City Hall park in a vigil in support of the law. We were also there all night so we could be the first in line to get passes to be in the gallery for the council’s vote the next afternoon. We were successful and able to fill the gallery and had plans to silently protest the council members who would speak and vote against the bill. There was also a plan for a non-violent protest from the gallery if the vote did not go our way.

I was new to this type of activism and felt a bit unworthy to be amongst so many people with much more experience and bonafides to be there than I. Up to this point I had never been much of an activist when it came to politics and gay rights issues. As a gay man, I certainly had strong very liberal, pro gay rights opinions, but personally I had not experienced a lot of the discrimination and fearfulness that other gay men had. I worked in the theater and lived in New York where it was fairly easy to be open about your sexuality. By the time I arrived in 1973. A new exciting period of freedom of sexual expression had rapidly grown in New York since the closet door was blown open by Stonewall in 1969. I was one of the many young men who dove headfirst into the party without much thought about those who had struggled and suffered for years before or those that still suffered outside of the gay enclaves of New York and San Francisco. I just took for granted that the music would never stop — that the party would never end. In my twenties I wasn’t a bad person, but I was too stupid, self-centered and having too much fun to allow the political struggles of the time to be more than peripheral to my personal life. Then two Harveys woke me up.

It was a film “The Times of Harvey Milk,” a documentary narrated by Harvey Fierstein. I went to an early screening of the film with an old friend who had been the set designer for Harvey Fierstein’s play “Torch Song.” Coming out of the theater I could barely see because tears were still streaming down my face. I’m a sucker for cheap sentiment and cry easily at even the most maudlin films, but I was genuinely moved very deeply by this film. I had been properly saddened and horrified by Harvey Milk’s assassination when it happened in 1978, but this film laid out the story in a way that awakened a deeper understanding and appreciation for the sacrifices that Harvey Milk and other men and women like him had made.

Coming out of the theater I was confronted by an eager young man with a clipboard. He told me he was working for the campaign of David Rothenberg who was going to be the first openly gay man to run for city council. Would I like help by volunteering for the campaign? I did not hesitate and put my name address and phone number on his form. Soon after I was spending many evenings at the campaign office stuffing envelopes and making phone calls to voters. I met a lot of really great people and acquired a new sense of pride in myself for being part of something that might make difference for the greater good. Passing out flyers and registering voters wasn’t going to change the world, but it was a small part of something that would. David Rothenberg’s campaign was not successful, but it did make a difference. He came very close to winning and paved the way for the many openly gay members of our city and state government who were successful in subsequent years. Working on this campaign introduced me to a lot of politically savvy people, organizations involved in gay civil rights and local political clubs — which in turn led to my attendance at meetings, rallies and demonstrations that would not have been on my radar before then. The vigil in City Hall Park was one of them.

I hadn’t intended to spend all night in the park, but I got caught up by the enthusiasm of the crowd I was with. I was not working a regular job at that time and there was nowhere I had to be the next day, so after we did our thing chanting and waving our signs for the eleven o’clock news cameras I decided to stay on overnight with the core group of stalwarts who wanted to be in the council chamber the next day for the vote. It was a chilly March evening. Blankets appeared from somewhere and we huddled together on the sidewalk in the park trying to keep warm and sleep a bit. It was not comfortable and I didn’t get any sleep, but there was laughter and giggles all around. The necessary huddling for warmth amongst strangers in some cases turned into cuddles and strangers became special friends of common cause and shared adversity. 

That’s how I came to be in the visitors gallery of New York’s city council chamber that day. I had never been in City Hall before and to be there for a reason to see the council in action was a new and exciting experience for me. Watching the formalities of an important council vote was quite an education. Once they got to the vote we were there to witness it was to be a roll call vote and most council members gave a little speech before casting their vote. The common wisdom was that we had enough support for the bill to pass but it was not sure thing and it would be close. We cheered every yea vote and the speaker would pound his gavel for quiet. When ultra-conservative council member Noach Deer was called, we stood up silently and turned our backs as he spoke. He was the most vocal and hateful opponent of the bill. During hearings about the bill his supporters from the orthodox jewish community he represented had stood and turned their backs during the testimony of people supporting the bill and we were giving him a taste of his own medicine. It felt so good to literally stand against this bigoted man in this historic room.

The other dramatic moment came when council member Wendall Foster representing a district in the Bronx was called. He was also conservative ordained minister of a largely black congregation and it was assumed he would be a nay vote. I remember him looking around the room and saying in spite of his personal misgivings, he had to believe in the truth of the Thomas Jefferson quote painted on the ceiling of the chamber. There was an audible gasp in the room as he continued in his best pulpit voice, ''In the spirit of Christ I must love my homosexual brothers and sisters, even though I don't understand them. They frighten me. They intimidate me. Yet, I have to live with myself. I vote yea.’’ The gallery went crazy with cheers and applause and it took the speaker several minutes of gavel pounding to quiet things down. Those counting the votes realized that Foster’s vote assured that the bill would certainly pass as a majority of the votes yet to be called were solid yes votes. As that realization swept on whispers through the gallery incredulous smiles broke out all around. Every yea vote after that prompted cheers but was a bit anticlimactic after Foster’s surprise vote. By the end what had started as a determined solemn example of democracy in action turned into a celebration. As we left the chamber there reporters and cameras. People were crying and hugging. Someone with a microphone asked me how I felt about what just happened but I was a blubbering mess with tears streaming down my face hardly able to speak. Being exhausted from lack off sleep and exhilarated from the roller coaster of emotions and real life drama I’d just been a part off left me totally unprepared to respond to reporters questions.  That would not be the last time I was involved in a demonstration, but it was the last time I would be speechless when faced with a reporters microphone.

That day was one I’ll never forget but being back in the place where it happened brought back a lot more detailed memories and allowed me to quietly relive the joyous exhilaration that comes from being a small part of something bigger than yourself — a witness to history. Thank you Harvey Milk, Harvey Fierstein, David Rothenberg and the many countless others who led the way for me to be there.

I Never Would Have Believed…

The Stonewall bar form Christopher Street Park

The older I get, the more often I find my conversations include the phrase “Forty (or ten, twenty, thirty) years ago I never would have believed that today I’m…” I suppose this is a quite natural phenomenon of aging. Things change. What was once unusual is common. Life takes us places and provides us with experiences that we couldn’t have imagined in our naive youth. Our personal history converges in circles of unexpected complexity. The convergence of retrospectively unbelievable circumstances was quite multilayered for me personally this past weekend. Let me explain.

Twenty years ago I never would have believed that the president of my country would include the Stonewall riots along with the civil rights movement as examples of American history to acknowledge and take pride in as President Obama in did in his second inaugural address. This is the government that fifty years ago carried out policies that systematically rooted out, shamed and fired gay people from it’s agencies as unfit to serve their country. Now the president was acknowledging an event considered a major turning point in the movement to change those policies. I thought I could never be prouder of this president. 

Ten years ago I never would have thought it possible that the President of the United States would declare Christopher Street Park and the area around it a national monument. For almost half a century this area has been a rallying cry and gathering place for LGBT people to protest, mourn and celebrate. What happened here in June of 1969 was not big news much beyond the neighborhood at the time. Most of the people who decided to fight back against the police who raided a gay bar run by the mafia that night remain anonymous to history. They would not have believed that their angry reaction to the indignities they suffered at the hands of the police that night would be the spark to ignite and unite a movement that would create positive change in so many lives many years later. This is history that always mattered to me as it has come to matter to LGBT people around the world. As a community we have always honored all those who had the courage to speak up and fight back that night. Now that history is not honored just by my community. It’s honored by my country as well. President Obama’s list of accomplishments in support of LGBT people is so extraordinary that this almost seems like just icing on the cake, but I think over time it will have just as significant effect on our community as marriage equality and ending sexual orientation discrimination in the military.

Park rangers prepare for their talk about the Stonewall riots.

Ten years ago I never would have believed that I would be standing in Christopher Street Park  listening to a National Park Ranger talk about the Stonewall riots and the early 20th century history of the oppression of LGBT people in our country. A small diverse group of people listened as he spoke just as they would have to a park ranger at Ellis Island, Federal Hall or any other historic monument or park overseen by the National Park Service. In the group were many young men and women, some presumably gay for whom the Stonewall Riots are distant history from long before they were born. That they and many generations after them will be able to come here to learn about and celebrate this history is amazing. The government agency that just a few years ago would have denied employment or fired any employees that were found to be gay, now is charged with preserving and interpreting the history of the LGBT equal rights movement for park visitors at a National Monument! LGBT folks who just a generation ago were marginalized by their government as second class citizens without equal treatment under the law — whose open expression of their sexuality could get them arrested, beaten up or ostracized by their families — can now come here and feel part of the American experience as previous generations never could have dreamed of. This is huge and made me more deeply proud to be an American than I ever have before.  

Six years ago I never would have that thought that I would know so much about what a national monument is and how important they are because of my experience as a volunteer with the National Park Service (NPS) at another of New York City’s national monuments, Governor’s Island. When I started volunteering for the NPS on Governors Island it was just something useful to do with my time as a retiree. I had a modest interest in history, but it was mostly an opportunity to be outdoors in a pleasant place and have interaction with other people which is something you miss when you retire from going to an office everyday. Over the last five years that I have been doing it however it has become much more to me. I have become more interested in the history of my city and country and what it reveals about our present. The more I learn, the more I want to know more and I’ve discovered that the best way learn new stuff is to share what you know with others. I found I really enjoyed interacting with visitors to the park and answering their questions. When I started leading tours of Castle Williams and Fort Jay just as the park rangers do it was especially gratifying. When I had a very engaged group who asked questions that I could answer I felt useful and appreciated in a very special way. I understand why many of the park rangers seem to enjoy their jobs so much. Now I’m excited about our newest National Monument, Stonewall, because in the future I may be able to expand my NPS volunteering in a new direction and be part of how this important place and history is preserved and presented. The possibility of someday standing in Christopher Street Park wearing my NPS volunteer badge and telling visitors about the early history of the LGBT movement and the Stonewall riots is a very exciting prospect for me to contemplate. The Park Service has made a great start but is just beginning to figure out how they can best interpret this history for the public and I intend to be involved as much as I can.

Lastly, forty-seven years ago when I was languishing the summer away in my parents house recovering from hepatitis that had caused me to leave school, I never would have believed it if someone told me I would discover the possible source of my illness forty years later from reading a history book. The summer of 1969 it was a total mystery how I had come down with a case of non-infectious hepatitis that is usually the result of poor sanitation or hygiene. There were no other cases at my school and I was always pretty careful about my personal hygiene so I didn’t think it was because of insufficient hand washing as my mother seemed to think. In any case it wasn’t serious and I never felt sick. I just had to stay home for many weeks and suffer extreme boredom until my yellow jaundiced eyes returned to normal. Many years later (probably around 2005) while reading Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter, I read his description of the Stonewall bar and how there was no running water behind the bar and how they washed the glasses by swishing them around in a tub of dirty water. He went on to note that there had been an outbreak of hepatitis among some of the regulars that spring that may have been caused by that filthy water. A lightbulb lit up in my head as I read this. In April of 1969 I was at the Stonewall and I had several drinks there. I had come to New York with my best friend on spring break from college. I was nineteen and thrilled to be in New York on a Saturday night in one of the hottest gay clubs. I had worked several odd jobs to earn enough for the plane fare to New York. I have a letter that my mother had saved that I wrote to her at the time describing everything I did on that trip — well not everything. I didn’t mention going the Stonewall even though that was certainly one of the highlights of my visit. I had been to gay bars before, but the gay bars in Indianapolis at that time were small and unsophisticated compared to the places we went to in New York. The Stonewall had two dance floors and was packed with well-dressed handsome young men enjoying themselves fearlessly. Or so it seemed to me at the time. I was too naive to know that the music could stop abruptly at any time if the police decided that it was time to put the faggots in their place. It had happened before and it could have happened the night I was there. I remember being kind of overwhelmed by the scene at the Stonewall that night. As excited as I was to be there, I was too shy and unsure of myself to strike up a conversation with any of the sophisticated men surrounding me. The friends I had come with were not so shy and I ended up taking a taxi alone back to the apartment where we were staying. My only souvenir from a night at the legendary and future historic Stonewall would to be a nasty microbe that would turn the whites of my eyes yellow three months later. This past weekend I told this story to a group of strangers and two park rangers in The Stonewall National Monument. 

More Innocent Times

Obviously my little brother Mark found this hilarious

I found this childhood photo of me while going through family albums at my mother’s house last year. I’m around eight years old and dressed up like a girl. This wasn’t just playing “dress-up” as we used to call it in 1958. This was what we would view now as full on drag with lipstick, pearls and a ponytail made out of lock of hair my mother had saved (more on that later). My mother had dressed me for the entertainment at the monthly meeting for the cub scout troop to which I belonged. I wish I could tell you that I lip-synched to Patti Page’s big hit that year “How Much is That Doggy in the Window?” and brought the house down, but alas no. Apparently the Boy Scouts of America in 1958 in their publication sent to leaders outlining possible programs for troop meetings, suggested that it would be hilarious for all the den mothers to dress their sons as girls and have a “Funny Fashion Show.” That’s the reason that the “dress” I’m wearing in the photo is actually a burlap feed sack. “Sack” dresses were a fashion statement in 1958. I don’t remember what the other boys/girls were wearing except for the one member of my den who refused to where a dress. They put him in capri pants.

"Sack" dresses were a thing in 1958

Seeing this photo made made me laugh and brought back a lot of long forgotten memories. I was also very surprised to find this photo because I thought that I had destroyed them all when I was old enough to be embarrassed by them at 13 or 14. I remember being quite determined to get rid of all the photos from that day ripping them up and throwing them in the trash. Now I’m glad I missed one and that I can share it with friends and fans who know that playing “dress-up” is something I came back to have some fun with much later in life. In the photo it looks like I was having fun back then as well.

Seeing this photo also made me think about all the issues surrounding gender identity and children which is perplexing many parents these days in ways that would have been unthinkable in 1958. It’s hard to imagine that the Boys Scouts of America we know today suggesting to den mothers all over the country that it would fun to dress their young sons up as girls and parade them around in public for everyones amusement without a second thought about what kind of irreparable damage it my do to their fragile prepubescent minds. Yet that is what they did. 

I was curious to verify that this wasn’t just some outlier den mother in Michigan that came up this idea, but that it was actually something that came from the BSA headquarters. Thanks to the miracle of the internet I found a newspaper article from around that time with pictures–from Salt Lake City Utah no less. I can only presume that many of the “girls” in the picture are just a decade away from being called by the LDS to do their missionary work in crisp white shirts and ties.

From the Salt Lake Telegram, 1957

The 50’s was a more innocent time and I’m sure that there were many parents, particularly fathers, who wouldn’t let their young sons participate in such an emasculating thing. However it did happen and cub scouts all over the country were cross-dressers for a day just for fun without any judgement or concerns from adults about what the experience might mean to their development into well adjusted young men. Perhaps there were some who were psychologically damaged by it and grew up to be wife-beaters or bullies to compensate for the for the shame of knowing they once were forced to wear gender inappropriate attire. Perhaps some of those boys even grew up to be secret cross-dressers living double lives remembering the day it all started in the cub scouts – the day they discovered the feel of silk and chiffon against their skin made them happy. Certainly some grew up to be homosexuals. I know of at least one who did. However I can also say with certainty that the fact that I had some fun in a dress at the age of eight didn’t make me gay. I played dress-up a lot when I was a kid. In my closet there was a box of old clothes that was there for us to play with and we did. We put on old hats, shoes, ties and yes, dresses. We pretended to be people we were not. It’s what kids did and I presume still do when they play. Then you get older and you put little kid things aside to please your parents and fit in with your peers. Certainly back then any boy beyond a certain age who continued to choose girlie things to play with over boy things was going to have problems in most families. 

Certainly if I had continued putting on dresses and lipstick after the age of nine or ten there would have been concern from my parents, but by puberty I was “normal” enough to be embarrassed by reminders of my childish behavior as a little kid, especially the pictures of me dressed like a girl. However, in retrospect I think my parents didn’t pressure me too much to conform to hardline gender specific behaviors and interests. In my family, as the middle child who was considered the more “creative” of my siblings, I was allowed to stray a bit outside the boundaries of normal gender specific interests. I played with cars, trucks and toy guns but I also had a puppet theater. I liked music and performing and both my parents encouraged me. I learned how to use tools from my dad and my mom taught me how to use a sewing machine. Dad would take my brothers and me to the movies to see many of the action-adventure movies of the 50’s and 60’s like “Ben-Hur” and “The Buccaneer.” Very much “guy” movies, but he also bought sheet music of songs he liked for me to learn how to play on the piano. Mom took me to see shows and concerts. I learned many skills from both my parents that have served me well in life for which I will always be grateful..

My grandmother Edith as a young girl

I can only imagine what new challenges are brought to the parenting game today with all the gender and sexual identity issues being being more openly discussed and dealt with publicly by young people, adults and children. However while I look at all the old photos of me and my brothers and cousins as kids, I think that maybe back then in more innocent times, there were fewer things for parents to worry about. I wouldn’t suggest that things were better when I was growing up. However, I think one lesson that 21st century parents might take from their mid-20th century predecessors is to relax a bit and try not to obsess too much over the consequences on their kids for everything they do as parents. Parents today would probably cringe at much of what their grandparents did as parents, but a substantial number us survived without too much permanent damage. Children are pretty resilient and will probably deal with a whole bunch of really crazy stuff that we haven’t even thought off yet. So if your eight-year-old son wants to put on a dress and lip-synch to Lady Gaga don’t discourage him (unless of course he’s got no talent). He will move on to other things tomorrow or maybe he won’t, but either way, he’ll probably survive just as most of those little boys that the BSA encouraged to dress like girls in 1958 did. I’m pretty certain that most of them grew up to be respectable adults Sure one or two of them may have grown up to be drag queens, but so what? Today it’s a viable career choice.

About the ponytail I was wearing in the photo: It was a long lock of hair that my mother had saved from when her mother cut her hair. It was a long substantial amount of hair and I assume that my grandmother saved when she gave up the Gibson Girl look of her youth. It matched my hair color perfectly and I used again ten years later when I needed a ponytail for a period play I was in my senior year of high school.