In March, 2023, when I headed West on the USRail pass, I was hoping to visit the cities I used to live in and see if I could reconnect to people I knew back in the day but hadn’t seen in decades. To this end, when I arrived in Long Beach CA, I went to the LGBT Community Center assuming they would be the repository of the Gay History of Long Beach, and, having worked and known many of the movers and shakers back then, this would be the place to start. 

The people at the front desk of the umbrella LGBTQ Community Center, which should be aware of Community history, were unaware that from 1985-1996 their own city had a very well respected Gay Men’s Chorus that, among other things, had been the first non-Disney entity to be allowed by them to perform songs from Little Mermaid for which they gave approval at the opening performance which allowed us to continue that section of the show in later performances. Being under 30, the people at the reception desk had no idea that the chorus had existed and only knew of the one that took its place in another city when a large number of the members of the original chorus, who had been very active when it came to all the AIDS business of the time, succumbed to the virus and are now unknown. They were aware of the new chorus and assumed it had been the only one. 

I spoke with the young people at the desk and to the person in charge of the Center at the time who also had no knowledge of the chorus.

I next asked about the newspaper that had existed in the 1980s and which also faded away with AIDS. They only knew about a recently begun one that claims on its website to be the first such Gay paper in the city.

I was in the chorus. I drew cartoons for the newspaper. I know these existed and I recognized the erasure due either to a grotesque lack of interest in the Gay Community History in Long Beach, or, as was in my case with the revision and rewording had been expunged from the record because, with AIDS, a lot of the history of those days was unpleasant without glitter and it was just ordinary people dying not idols and myths.

I wrote to the Center’s leadership pointing out this hole in the Community’s history and was assured it would be looked into after the Pride Month activities were completed and there would be time. The matter died as the correspondence ceased.

And so it was that when I decided to take the train trip, I would go to the Center allowing for more time to follow up on this erasure.

The two people at the desk this time wee a young perdon and a middle aged woman who should know something of the Community’spast. Again neither hyad any knowledge of the paper or the chorus and, to be honest, showed little interest in either.

I asked to use one of the community room computers to look some things up that might be helpful, including links to the local newspaper that had advertised and reviewed the Gay Mens’ Chorus of Long Beach concerts and in whose social pages covered our doings. While I was doing my “research”, the people at the desk changed and when I reported back to the desk the teo new people showed much more interest than those the year before and those they had just replaced. They asked many questions, had connections made to things they had heard about that now made sense, and were quite surprised the information about the chorus was nonexistent. They gave me the name of a person to contact.

With this encouragement and when I was at the Silver Fox that evening waxing eloquent on Gay History to a group of interested people, I was further encouraged as one of the people with whom I was speaking was on the Board of the Center and a little disturbed that the chorus some of whose concerts he had attended seeks not to matter in the Community’s History.

With this need to restore history and in light of th reaction of those with whom I spoke tht night, I sent the director of thoe Center the following letter.

“Having been a member of the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus, upon moving to Long Beach it did not take much for a friend already there to have me audition with him for the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus, something he wanted to do, but not alone. From the fall of 1985 until the following spring, I was able to participate in major performances, the usual trial period of rehearsals and dress rehearsals before a person’s first actual appearance in a concert was waived for the very practical and very sad reason that in the mid 1980s membership in the chorus suffered some attrition from AIDS. I sang at Elizabeth Taylor’s AIDS Benefit at the Bonaventure Hotel, attended by anyone who was anyone in Hollywood. That would not have happened under better circumstances. I had only been there a short while.

     During the spring of 1986, the chorus director suggested we attend the first concert of the newly formed Gay Men’s Chorus of Long Beach. It was a small chorus perfroming in a small venue, but it was important to show solidarity with those willing to be public faces of the community and, at the time, a possible bright spot during some dark times. A walk around the corner from my apartment was a much more convenient trip than that from Long  Beach to West Hollywood for rehearsals and the more spread out distances on the days of concerts or one of the many funerals of members and friends of the chorus.

     When I joined the chorus it was still small enough that the pianist was also the conductor. As the chorus grew so did the need for these to be separate positions. Just prior to this happening the GMCLB was asked by the Los Angeles Chorus to assist them in singing at the 1986 exposition of the full AIDS Quilt at the Pauley Pavilion at UCLA attended, again, and participated in by many Hollywood personalities. Our task was to fill in the voices that might be lost to emotion, such as the moment the quilt dedicated to the recently deceased music director of the Los Angeles chorus was lowered from the rafters by accident or design, one among many, in front of the risers where the combined choruses stood with members overcome with grief.

Members of the GMCLB are present in the official video of the event and are clearly visible.

Until this time, all work, other than that of the accompanist/conductor, was shared work with each member contributing in all aspects of concert production and promotion. Performance spaces are expensive and getting the use of them can be competitive, so the accompanist made arrangements with the Ebell Club that in exchange for refurbishing the pipe organ in the theater at great saving to the organization and a potential money maker as organists would perhaps begin concerts there again, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Long beach haa standing arrangement for use of the rehearsal and performance space.

The arrangement was mutually beneficial. This would be in the Ebell clubs records.

As with any organization, especially where people and money are concerned, eventually a board had to be formed and its first task was to find a conductor. As the chorus was structured, the musical director would work with members of the board to design each show and members would have some input about upcoming concerts as it was a group structure that grew organically and not a situation of people joining an already existing and highly structured organization. Concerts were collaborative efforts.

The new conductor had ideas of his own as it would become clear over time. He seemed to be under the impression that everyone, board members and rank and file members, worked for him and, therefore had little input just as his soon to be Ex had structured the chorus he had founded and of which the GMCLB’s new conductor had been a member. This caused tensions as the chorus members were being treated like employees in a non union shop. The tension this created led to a parting of the ways which was another mutually beneficial arrangement as the conductor went off and began his own chorus of which he was in full control.

Like other such choruses at the time, the chorus sang at many funerals.

Every Friday night, as many members of the chorus as were able to show up would begin their Friday evenings at the Broadway on Broadway in Long beach, a piano bar where Eddie held court. The evening would begin with Eddie accompanying those members who showed up singing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Java Jive in four part harmony. Toasts would be made, those chorus members present would leave, and Eddie would return to his evening’s planned repertoire.

Eddie Passed away and, being a seemingly devout Baptist, had arranged for a very Baptist funeral complete with the usual hymns, the exceptions being the songs the Gay Man’s Chorus of Long Beach sang as his remains entered and then exited the church, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Java Jive respectively much to the surprise of the Baptists and a delight to the rest present.

When the conductor departed, the chorus returned to its roots, producing entertaining concerts with both light and serious elements as opposed the more formal black tie only concerts.

The Ebell theater could be more creatively used and was.

By 1990 a new member of the chorus who was employed in Disney’s music department and was one of the people responsible for arranging music for, among other things, Disney On Ice, wanted to show the company he would be as good with choral arranging as instrumental, struck a deal with his supervisors. As the movie had just been released and there was no four part arrangement for male voices, he was given the Disney blessing to produce such an arrangement of songs from the recently released Little Mermaid and have it performed for their approval, or disapproval as the case might be, by a male chorus which was to be the Gay Men’s Chorus of Long Beach.

On the night of the concert with the Disney portion opening the show and being easy to excise from future concerts that season if the Mouse did not approve, sitting in the front row, clearly visible as the curtains opened, were five men in similar suits, wearing their Mickey lapel pins. They approved as the arrangements were good and the chorus treatment of it respectful.

The chorus member had proven himself and the Long Beach Gay Men’s Chorus became the first non-Disney entity to perform music from Little Mermaid and retained the permission of the Mouse to perform whatever four part all male choral arrangement the chorus member and promoted Disney employee might create. Disney, of course, retained the rights to his work.

In subsequent concerts the chorus performed Carmina Burana, Les Miserables, Little Shop of Horrors with sets, props, costumes, and projected chorus generated art and featured a soloist from the San Francisco Opera for selections from the Student Prince.

Meanwhile the founder of the Orange County Choral was working separately with his own chorus during this time.

Also in 1985 upon moving to Southern California, I contacted the two men who ran the Gay Community newspaper hoping to be able to continue the political cartoon work I had been regularly doing in Boston for the Dorchester Community News and occasionally for Bay Windows. They took me on and for the next several years until health made continued publication difficult, I produced cartoons and other work for the publication. Although there were a number of informational resources during the opening years of AIDS, this paper was more localized and, therefore, more relevant to the Long Beach Gay Community.

Because of my affiliation with this paper, I was able to attend a press banquet at the Ambassador Hotel, one of its last such events, where I was able to tell Patty Duke that her performance in Miracle Worker, which I had seen on film in high school, got me interested in Special Education as a career.

It is a shame that the existence of the chorus, the newspaper, and those fine men who gave of their time to the community, many as the last thing they were well enough to do before they became the next funeral have been erased and replaced as if these men did not exist or were so easily erased and knowledge of their existence and their work nonexistent to future generation who are being denied a true account of their Communal History.

The chorus once had standing as some form of tax status, perhaps a 501 (c), and should be traceable, and concerts were covered in the Press Telegram. It may take a quick search on the internet but the time spent researching is a service to those men and a service to the future that has a right to its true history.

In these instances alone, I have seen myself erased in both, as a chorus member and a community political cartoonist whose work was known and who also was the cartoonist for the United Teacher, the newspaper of the Los Angeles Teachers Union (UTLA).

There has been entirely too much revision and rewriting of the past to make it more palpable for the youth when for those living and dealing with fighting against the conditions of the past it was anything but. When honored to have my art and legal papers related to my successful advocacy for the inclusion of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Oklahoma City Public Schools student policies catalogued at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmund, I was also quite shocked that in the official account of my work, taking out trigger words and making other edits to have the story of the advocacy and opposition less uncomfortable, the fact I had been fired for the advocacy and regained my job through a district court case upheld by the appellate court had been reduced to a mere series of strong discussions with the district embracing diversity in the end which it definitely did not in the real history.

When traveling the country I have found conscious acts that erase the real history and those who made it, replacing the people and facts with a mythic figure based on carefully chosen happy bits and selectively rejected unhappy ones in many cases replacing the real hero with a Dr. Frankenstein hybrid as real people who could serve as realistic role models are swept to the curb because, perhaps, they lack a sufficient amount of glitter.

These conversations were not in isolated places with certain opinions sought. Many came from casual conversations with strangers I would talk to in bars and in one case in a city I was in only because of a train cancellation due to dust storms in the desert, and too many older men would mention their feeling of being sent out to pasture by those who have come after them but lacking any respect for what they may have done or are, as has happened in my case few times.

It is unconscionable that an organization like the LGBT Center which has taken upon itself the task of ensuring the safety, wellbeing, education, and living conditions of the Community would deny the Community its true history.

I first broached this erasure in March of 2023 with the Center when I had traveled to Long Beach after the establishment of the Quigley Collection at UCO in Edmund OK and in follow up emails. I brought it up again in June of 2024. It had not been addressed during that time and the reaction to my inquiry at the Center was repeated surprise that such a chorus and paper existed showing there had been no interest in any restoration of the historical record.

Others used to erase us. Now it seems we erase ourselves for comfort.

These men deserve their place in the Community’s historical record.

The owner of Hot Stuff, having seen the ongoing erasure of history, the watering down the Broadway Strip’s real history, warts and all, and may be someone to work with as she expressed to me a desire to preserve the history of what was once a vibrant street. I lived there for a while and know the history is uneven but it is better to show the best and worst  of the place than a fiction.

I look forward to hearing of any progress.

The only ones who will preserve our real history is us, and we need to repair the damage.

Joseph Quigley

joequigley@gaywhalers.org

Quigley Institute for Non-Heterosexual Archival Archaeology

www.gaywhalers.org

History needs to be restored and these men remembered for who they were and what they did for a hurting community.

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It was the 1980s and by all reckoning, although many major cities had made strides in Gay Rights since Stonewall, California’s two major cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles were ahead of most of them. The state and these cities still had a ways to go, but at least there was forward motion in spite of the convenient excuse AIDS gave the Christian conservative right to work for our genocide in God’s name.

I was the cartoonist for the Gay newspaper in Long Beach, California as well as a member of the Gay Men’s Chorus of that same city, so when I became active in the teachers’ union, the interests of Gay teachers was a natural concern. My involvement in the Gay Community came to the attention of some of the union’s leadership and the effectiveness of my cartoons in educating  teachers and the general public about the need for and the reasons for a teacher strike showed I could meet goals. Although the union had a Gay and Lesbian Education Concerns subcommittee, like most subcommittees, it existed to exist and had no power or authority to act in the name of the union or participate in the activities of other full-standing committees beyond an assistance role.

One of the members of the executive board, a Gay teacher who would eventually move up the political ladder making a difference for Gay people as he moved toward the state legislature, asked if I would assume the long vacant chair position of this subcommittee as it might become more active with full standing committee status especially as, once the dirty work was done, there would be people who would want to chair it without having helped to create it because full standing committees come with power and position.

It was the end that counted.

We took steps to make this happen knowing there would be tremendous support from the board and rank and file membership and made it so.

As was usual then and continues now, such committees had co-chairs, male and female in most cases with specifically a Gay man and Lesbian in this case not for exclusion of others but because in the 1980s that was about the extent of gender understanding. There were certain benefits to being a full standing committee, one of which was a position on the executive board that was more than advisory but contributory. The others were being sanctioned to speak as a standing committee representing the union  and the power to seek funds for activities we could justify.

The establishment of the full standing committee took place toward the end of the academic year and just prior to the Pride Parade in Los Angeles that year, and, so, members of the committee asked for and received the union’s blessing to march in the Pride Parade officially representing the United Teachers of Los Angeles. With little time before permission to march and the parade, I made a banner at home identifying who we were, making sure the name of the committee was clear.

There were less than a dozen of us. For some, this was a crowning moment and perhaps one of the last memorable moments of their lives because of the times. As we rounded the bend on Santa Monica Boulevard just at Barney’s Beanery, the person acting as Emcee for the local cable access channel covering the parade lost his cool and asked if it were a serious entry when he read from the card in his hands that we were members of the Gay and Lesbian Education Committee of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, an entry that took him totally off guard and having him register his disbelief.

The spectators went nuts.

It was not a quiet debut. 

I was a celebrated one.

Some thirty one years later, having had as my only certain objective to attend the Pride Parade in Oklahoma City and then continue on to the West using an Amtrak Rail Pass to do some historical research and the reset of history, I was sitting sipping a beer in the Mine Shaft in Long Beach CA when the obvious lack of customers had another patron, the only other one on a hot Saturday afternoon, ask where everyone was. Apparently people were up in Los Angeles for all its Pride Parade activities as the Parade and Festival were the following day.

It had not been in my plans as I had no idea my timing was that good, but the following morning, I rose early and went up to L.A..  I was on the train from downtown L.A. to where I was hoping the Parade was staging, hoping I had the right train and wasn’t going to spend my day traveling the city only to read about what I missed in the newspapers the following day. I approached a proudly rainbowed fellow passenger and told him I was following him so he better know where he was going. He was a proud Transgender person about to be in his first ever Parade, so we had a nice conversation about parades and parted ways when we got to Highland Avenue and went in search of our groups to join the city’s largest Pride Parade. I am sure if I ever got to tell him about what happened after we parted, he would be happy to hear it. He was a character in the day’s stories and had a connection to much.

I got the number of the Teacher Union staging spot and was overwhelmed when I arrived  where, unlike the first parade, instead of a few people taking a deep breath as we did not know how teachers would be received in the parade, there was a large flatbed truck and a good fifty or more people of all ages, races, etc. that increased in size by the time the parade stepped off.

I introduced myself to the person who seemed to be in charge, but with the assembling confusion, she did not really hear the whole story but invited me to march with them as a former UTLA member. I had previously arranged to visit the union headquarters prior to my trip on that Monday via emails, not knowing about the parade, so the next morning on my visit all details got explained to this very person.

The theme of the float was “Banned Books”, and as part of that we were handed enlarged copies of the book covers of the most banned books in the United States at the time and I was randomly handed “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M Johnson.

Why this was a notable coincidence can be seen from this previous blog entry, https://www.quigleycartoon.com/?p=18963.

I surprised myself by making it through the whole parade, asked to keep my enlarged book cover, thanked the Union leadership for allowing me to march and close a circle while remembering those in the first group, and went back to my motel in Long Beach, and composed this letter to George Johnson.

“George,

You might not remember me. I was the old guy in New Bedford who told you about your connection to Frederick Douglass when you spoke at the Lyceum.

If you were to google me in relation to Oklahoma City, you would see I advocated for inclusive language in school district policy that finally happened in 2009 with the addition of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”. It came at a cost, but it came.

Five years after I left the district, after seeing the language stick for two years and not wanting to become a focal point to distract from the students, and with none of the originally predicted horrors the first language addition was supposed to bring down upon us, the district added “gender expression” in 2018.

If there had been problems with the first two, why would the district add to them especially in light of the misrepresentations, false prophecies, and wild claims that were offered to prevent the inclusive language in the first place.

Sadly, when the state house in Oklahoma went after Trans students, for some odd reason, this was never brought up by advocates, state and national, to counter this move. They ignored this actual case study that showed inclusion neither created problems nor caused harm, choosing, instead, to use boilerplate, universally applicable arguments with no direct connection to the state whose capitol city’s school district had been inclusive for twelve years. They had their evidence right there in the capitol city.

For two years I wrote letters to the Gayly, the Community rag, the Daily Oklahoman, the major newspaper, and others asking why all the other stripes on the Progressive Flag are content to keep their rights while they are comfortable with the Trans students losing theirs while not fighting to get them restored.

The Oklahoma City Public Schools Class of 2022 was safe at school from the first grade to twelfth, first and only group to do so in that state. Now, some will have had rights for the majority of their time in the district, some for a smaller part of theirs, and, from now on, all the students who never had them but could have will be entering the schools.

Using a USRail pass, I traveled to OKC and found that, while the older members of the Community are bothered by this, the younger members seem to have not noticed or choose to ignore it because it is unpleasant, or if they do, think a big Pride Parade will change hearts and minds. Those with experience know it takes hard work.

The glitter is for the after party.

After your presentation in New Bedford, I got on the internet and wrote all about it, your Douglass connection, the information you artfully wove into stories so there was no lecture or preachiness about it, and the make-up of the audience. I taught English for 38 years on the Middle and High School levels, all grades, sometimes Special Education classes. In my haste, I used standard pronouns and, in spite of any of the substance of your talk and its importance, the only comments were about my disrespecting you by not honoring your pronoun preference, (apparently no room for error) which, although I am sorry for having done that, seems less disrespectful than ignoring your message entirely.

After Oklahoma City, having additional segments left on the pass, I traveled to Long Beach CA where I had lived too many years ago and found that the L.A. Pride Parade was the same weekend as my arrival, and this is the reason for the letter.

I taught in L.A. back in the mid-80s to mid-90s and was the chair of the teacher union’s subcommittee on Gay and Lesbian Education Issues (it was the vocabulary at the time) and got it accepted as a full standing committee which was a big deal then. Because we now had the Union’s blessing to officially represent it and had access to funds, I was one of the first 12 or so members of the United Teachers of Los Angeles who marched in the 1990 L.A. Pride Parade behind a banner I had handmade in my apartment since it was too short a time to get an official one printed in time.

When I saw I was in SoCal at the right time, I went to the parade as I read the union was going to be in it. This time, some 34 years later, there was a diverse crowd of people, a truck with the union banner for the teachers on one side and the state Federation of Workers AFL-CIO on the other, and parents with children, diversity, the old, and the young.

I spoke with the person in charge and explained who I was and why I would love to march since I was there by coincidence. It was like the closing of a circle.

Someone announced the theme of the “float” was “banned books”, and started handing out enlargements of the covers of banned books at random and when it came to me, I was handed “All Boys Aren’t Blue”.

So, here I was, 34 years after having been one of the first teachers to march officially in a Pride Parade in Los Angeles, representing the teachers’ union which had recently won in a huge strike, doing it again, this time carrying the book cover of a person I hope I added to by telling of the Douglass connection at the Lyceum, marching as a total unknown to most of the marchers while watching their joy doing what that first group started.

Too many in that first group did not live long after because of the times, so I marched for them, after having been told in OKC by some former students my being open and true to who I was as a teacher helped them and now some of their children by their acceptance of their true child. That was a brave group of people.

I have included a picture of my old Gay self and what I got to carry in the L.A. Pride Parade. There are so many threads connected in this picture.One might say this picture draws so many ends together and, so, I also carried it for my former students.

The picture:

And, George responded,

“Thank you so much! This is really beautiful. I’m so appreciative of this and you. 

G”.

What a way to close a circle.

That night, after composing and sending the letter, I told the gentlemen at the Silver Fox about the day’s adventure.

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I was 16 years old when my paternal Grandmother passed away. She was the first member of my family in my living consciousness to die. She had been born in the 1890s, came to adulthood during the First World War, raised a family during the Depression as a widow, and saw her boys go off to the Second World War. She was a true Boston Irish Catholic woman, wife, and mother of her times and lived her life as one just as all the women in her life did. She had lived through two World Wars and a “police action” or two, Korea and Vietnam, watched a bevy of presidents, a boatload of Popes, and a myriad of politicians come and go. She saw the invention of the automobile, airplane, rockets to space, the radio, movies, and television. She saw the eradication of what were once life threatening diseases, the creation of medical miracles and, when her husband, my grandfather and a member of the Boston Fire Department was killed by a motorist as he was on the back of the firetruck returning from a fire, she fought the department that claimed that as his company was returning from an extinguished fire, not heading toward or actively fighting one, he would not be considered killed while on duty and there would be no major compensation, she fought that so that now on duty is from the moment the alarm blares until the firefighters are back at the station. There was no more open space where, even while still working, a firefighter could be judged off duty when the truck could still report to another fire even as they returned from their most recent.

I thought when she died at seventy-four she had lived a rich, full, and long life, or at least the best her era offered to Boston Irish, Catholic women. I wondered if her death came as such a surprise she never had the time to look back on her life..

If nothing else, my grandmother left behind progeny who, along with their children are doing rather well, and her bettering the lives of firefighters who came after her husband, my grandfather, whom she would never meet or even know about, nor they her would be her legacy.

On my most recent birthday, I turned seventy-four.

Reaching my seventy-fourth year, I decided I needed to go back to places I had been, not like the previous year to have my papers and art archived at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, revisit old friends I had not seen in a while, and go to those places I had taught going back into my first classroom assignment, but to visit with no purpose other than to see and enjoy and, where pertinent, evaluate the effectiveness of the work others and I had done in the past and where that had led.

I also, in light of the rewritten history that had the Stonewall first begin with a nonexistent brick being tossed in the street by some one admittedly not present, a shot glass thrown by this same person inside the bar at the same time, witnessed doing so from the street according to the generation unfamiliar with the blind wall common in old Gay bars to keep people on the street from seeing who was inside, and now a Drag Queen, also invisible from the street, who threw her heels inside the bar, wanted to restore some real history that has either been erased or modified to not record history but create it. 

Being able to count among the attempt in Oklahoma City to erase me as a person, the erasure of at least three major events and organizations that were vital during the worst of times in the 1980s, and now the preferred rosy picture of what was anything but actual history which has removed real people in favor of glitter, I wanted to find out of what I was seeing was a local phenomenon, or was it more universal. Was it just my perception that history is being rewritten to address people’s need for fairy tales as they are more easily accepted no matter how unlike reality, or were others noticing this too. Was history, as I found it had in my own case, been reworded to make it more comfortable and in the process producing a work of fiction that denied the unpleasant reality of the times. There was nothing in any of the events during the advocacy for students that would even hint that the Oklahoma City Public Schools “embraced” diversity, especially as evidenced by a wrongful dismissal, a reinstatement by the courts, and the addition of inclusive language when the attempts to avois=d that failed. Yet, the story now is that they did “embrace” it because that is a nicer and a more warm and fuzzy story to wrap oneself in, and to support that story facts had to die and people’s roles, mine included, greatly diminished to keep the Binky at the ready.

The pimple popped when a young person, perhaps mid-twenties, heard a few of us elders at the bar recalling bygone days and what roles we played first in dealing with the oppression of our youth and then working to ensure ours would be the last generation of Gay people to have to deal with it. There had been successes both great and small, but the obvious lament was that now that we had won the rights, we were too old for many to apply to us, especially the freedom to be out, open, and true to who we are especially in the throes of our young love.

I had lived around the country and was aware of the unequal recognition of those rights depending on the state and that the Equality Act was passed in Massachusetts in 1989, so this young person had no idea what times had been like and what it was we fought against, with some places remaining in the past to varying degrees. The young person was adamant that, had the present old people fought harder in the past, we would have had the rights sooner. Instead, we left the hard work for others to do.

You’re welcome.

As that conversation became more of a lecture on history coming from the young delivered to those who lived those past years and, as it seems to be a required point to make even if not really jermain, the inactivity of Boomers was roundly criticized as being the biggest obstacle to progress as we sat back and did nothing, waiting to snatch credit from those who acted. Being June, the offered proof that there were no Boomers at the Stonewall Inn, other than the police, was that most of the people in the pictures taken that night were young and many in their late teens and early twenties.

In 1969, I was 19. they seemed to think we were never young or that people in pictures never age beyond what is seen in the picture. Those people were then what they insist now are the obstructing Boomers. 

I purchased one of those Amtrak USRail passes again and decided to first head to Oklahoma City to attend Pride there. If I am on my grandmother’s schedule, this could be my last one there.  From there I intended to head to the West Coast making side trips out there and on my way back East.

I intended to talk with anyone willing to talk so that I could assess the state of affairs away from the locals who may only be judging the world from a local standpoint and not universally. I wanted to see if the erasure of history, its replacement with nice but false stories with the people who should be in the stories, also replaced with more acceptable and closely identified with chosen heroes, not organic ones.

In straight line mileage my trip covered 6678 miles which does not take into account that trains do not travel on straight tracks but wavy, curving ones, so there is more mileage in reality. I spent time in seven cities that had large Gay populations, Gay being my preferred umbrella term. Along the way I spoke with many people of differing ages etc. and, regardless of their sexual orientation, as it was June and the trains  passed many flags along the way in many towns, large and small, needless to say, Pride was a topic of conversations and I heard the most progressive to most conservative comments and opinions, and rather than engage in a useless discussion, I mostly collected the attitudes and comments of the people I met. In the observation deck of one train I sat next to a group of young twenty-something skaters who had a discussion about Trans people based on a total lack of information, and chose not to engage as it would produce no results and would be a disservice to the other passengers because of possible exuberance disturbing those who were there to take in the scenery peacefully , one old man vs four dudes. Most times in the places I stayed I had conversations with older Gays, Lesbians, and Trans people to see if my perceptions were mine alone or were the thoughts of Gay, Lesbian, and Trans elders.

I intend to write a series of blogs based on those conversations I had with real people not blogs, texts, or tiktoks and, where applicable in a summation of events relevant, mentioned.

Some may disagree with what people said, but if people are thinking that, it must be taken into consideration. 

I will be honest as well. Someone may attempt to say I am wrong in my conclusions because they read something, saw a tiktok, or had a friend who said, but with 6678 miles under my belt, having spent days in 7 major cities with Gay populations, and talking to anyone in a bar who wanted to talk, and there were a surprising number who opened up when I mentioned the Quigley Institute for Non-Heterosexual Archival Archaeology and its purpose in setting the record straight. Huge numbers of people and events have been erased for a more pastel version of history and those being erased are still around. 

No fight in the OKC school district to get inclusive language because it was “embraced” by the district in its largess is a nice story with few triggers, but it denies real history to the furure.

So there will be a degree of snobbery when it comes to potential lectures to tell me I am wrong and do not understand, as what I have concluded is based on actual conversations with real people, some of them hurt by the present trend to exclude, erase, and take away their accomplishments and assign them to new heroes because of the effort it takes to look at actual history and not a small group of friends whether real contact friends or social media ones.

If you want to debate my conclusions you will need to first travel 6678 miles, stay in 7 cities, go to every bar in them that you can find, and talk to random locals. What you cannot do is tell me what your friend said, or what some “influencer” says ( That whole Bud Lite fiasco could have been avoided if they did not see Pride as spending money.) I don’t care what they feel or echo. I spoke to PEOPLE of all ages in different cities face to face.

You might be tempted to present articles and studies, but these are based on interviews with a variety of people in a variety of places, and, being similarly based, are the same as my research and no better, just different.

Might sound like a privileged attitude but I earned the privilege.

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