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I was sitting in a community meeting on the exploding gentrification of the city and what can be done to at least control it as preventing it is both impossible and suicidal for the city. I had seen gentrification happen in two previous locations and, although the city may change, the people involved might change, and the overall scheme might change, the methods and those types who use them for personal gain are the same.

The only real change is which backroom is used.

I was explaining this and reminding those present that I had traveled to all the places where I had lived in the last fifty years and I saw what had happened after I left, most of it for the better and not because of my leaving, and some places had very little of their character left and were simply cookie cutter places whose sole purpose was to make money for companies headquartered somewhere else from tourists who could see the same elsewhere.

I realized, as I was speaking, that if things were consistent, I have a good idea of what the present city will be like and that, regardless what I know will happen, and knowing it will happen to some degree in spite of what I might do, I am at the age that even as the beginning steps in the transformation are being taken, it will be years in the future before the actual work gets going full steam, and many more before it is completed, only to have the cycle begin again when what will be new will also become old and new plans and ways to profit from redoing the city are implemented..

It was clear that in this, and things like Gay Rights, I had done quite a bit to deal with this in the past because there was always the hope I would see some change, and I did in different places according to their position in the line of progress. Some had already arrived where others soon will be. However, presently, I see only a slow loss of progress due to confusing that for which we worked hard and gained with minor distractions that ensure what has been gained is going to be slowly lost.

If people paid more attention to safeguarding their rights as part of a continuum as opposed moving on to gain a new one as if gaining and protecting are not connected, young women would still have the rights their mothers had. But the right had been gained, so move along, only to panic when we see what the distraction allowed.

I am almost at the three-quarter century mark. There is very little chance I will have to live long in a future where I will continued to be denied my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness or lose what of them I had. I was 61 ears old when, as a Gay man, I go m human and civil rights. I have enjoyed hem as long as I have lived in Massachusetts for the past thirteen years, and even if I begin to lose them and return to life before I had them, I will be in my late eighties and happy just to know I opened my eyes that morning. 

I do not have to live with what is going to happen of we aren’t careful, and, although it might seem self-centered, just do no have it in me to work as hard as I used to knowing I will never see the results already having seen the results given back.

I have not only helped make lives better, but I have seen the story rewritten and some of the gains lost. What the future holds needs to be formed by those who will live in it longer than I. 

Last year at this time I was returning from a most humbling trip where my past was honored and I got to see the results of the hard work of people over the past many decades, most of whom are no longer here to see they had been correct and had done well.

This year I am using a similar trip to close it all up.

I intend to return to some past places, not like last year when I was returning to see what happened to everything, but returning to enjoy. Yes, I went to every bar on Broadway in Long Beach CA to see what happened in 30 years but now I can pick the bars I want to spend time in and enjoy the selection. The intense tourism has been done. It is time to savor the progress.

And, when I return, I will have withdrawn from all the committees, meetings, activities scheduled by others and only put in my two cents where old curmudgeons are wont to do knowing acceptance or rejection will have more effect on those to be here in the future.

As I return to no commitments, no committees, and/or no expectations, I will return totally retired other than my blog and those times I choose to take an action I feel is the correct one.

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The final room on the Edward Gorey House museum tour in Yarmouthport on Cape Cod was what Mr. Gorey referred to as the “Ball Room”, although nary a soiree was held there. 

He saw something artistic in the oddest things from those that were understandably collectable to things that only he could see the beauty in. Presently, much of what he collected has been cataloged to be thematically displayed each tourist season, but in his days things were put down somewhere and may or may not have ended up near something similar or was just one more thing in that category left haphazardly on a convenient empty place to remain there until after his death and the house was cleaned out.

The only area in the house in his day that came anywhere close to a theme had been his “Ball Room” into which he placed any ball of any size from a ball-bearing to one of those very large, woven rope balls used to keep old ship’s from knocking against the docks they were moored to that he found, purchased, or was gifted.

Since the house became a museum of his art and quirks, the room now holds some of his personal possessions and photos. Among the items were pictures of him with his nephew through the years that belie the idea that he killed the children in his stories because he hated them, a collection of his pens and sketch books and items that he always used while refusing to move up with the times like his old non-electric Royal typewriter and the rotary phone he used until his death in 2000.

When I led tours, I didn’t take up people’s time telling them about everything in every display, but, as I informed each group, would give them an idea of what each display case contained so that, once I gave them the general idea what they would be looking at, I would be set them free to wander to those things they were interested in looking at while I roamed around answering their questions based on her interests not what the docent script would limit them to. I ended my tours in the “Ball Room” where there was a station with crayons and stamps based on Gorey’s works to occupy the children while the parents took turns looking around.

Although some docents had known Edward Gorey and, so, had a deeper connect than I which resulted in a high degree of serious respect and were rather solemn in their approach, I was a little lighter, initially to the annoyance of the veteran docents, and joked with the tourists which lightened the mood and made questions easier to ask.

One day as my tour entered the “Ball Room” and I gave an all encompassing pan of the room with my hand, one child saw the rotary phone and went right to it. This happened often with many really young child seeing one for the first time and the routine that followed was a parent telling the child to dial home and merriment ensuing among everyone in the tour group as the kid would poke a finger into each hole with the correct number like pushing buttons until the parent showed how a rotary phone was dialed and why it was called dialing.

As far as the phone was concerned, the ancient Royal had its own moments, that was usually when the child would walk off to look at something not as old and, perhaps more colorful or hands on, like the stamps.

On one particular day a little boy  went to the phone and stared at it for a while until his mother, finishing what piece of art she had been looking at, walked over and did the usual phone/child routine and the child did exactly as directed to the predictable chuckles from those in the room. However, unlike the other children who would shrug and walk off, this one, seeing how long it took to dial home, asked how tough it was to get the police to come to a crime scene as it seemed to take an eternity to dial 9-1-1.

The mother, aware that a true explanation would involve a lesson on the evolution of phones from operators, to dial, to buttons, to the death of landlines, the beginning of auto-dial, and why there had been no 9-1-1 in rotary phone days, decided to go for the quick throw away and swift move on, and simply explained that in her childhood people were more relaxed, less rushed, and even someone breaking and entering your home tool it slow and meandering, choosing what they would take and the police would show up almost leisurely knowing the burglar was going to take his time as everyone back then did.

The smile of accomplishment on the face of the mother as she looked around the room expecting and getting approving smiles from the adults in the room vanished when the child asked the follow-up question about calling the fire department. The mother doubled down further explaining that it was not just people who were slower and more relaxed, but fire burned slower as well.

Satisfied that this had done the trick, as the mother slowly pushed the child ahead of her out of the “Ball Room” obviously escaping to hide that she had been bested by her child and could only offer a weak explanation, no one who remained behind heard what the child’s next question was, but the mother’s answer, which we did hear, was a defense of slow flames as we heard her say, “of course they were slower, remember a couple of years ago how long it took the house next door to burn down?”

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As we are entering Pride Month, the “who started the Stonewall Rebellion” competition will come up and it will, of course, include which color on the “progressive” Flag was responsible for starting things because the idea that the Community acted as a cohesive group, a COMMUNITY, didn’t and  had to be told what to do being unable to act as the people there actually did. There was no meeting, no planning, no discussions of who should do what. The people present reacted and acted as one.

 I had friends there that night and according to those in the bar itself, it just happened. The raid was not according to the arrangement with the precinct and as it was close to closing and people had been partying, for whatever personal reason, someone, or a group of someones reacted to something a police officer did and, as in many tense situations, a minor, random action caused the explosion. To many in the bar it was a spontaneous flash and it was on.

There were those in the bar and those on the street, and neither was aware of what was going on in the other location, until when the police closed the door with the patrons inside, Storme Leveray, who often sat outside the Inn in her Marlena Diertich finery to look after her boys, yelled to the crowd to do something. Sadly in recent years, her role has been reassigned to someone who was not even there.

In this “It was ME” era she is apparently not glitzy enough to be remembered and has been replaced with two people who in multiple interviews repeated that one was not there for the opening act and arrived later with the other admitting she had not been there the first night, returning the second because of the buzz on the street that it was not over by a long shot.

Storme may have been a power in the community, but she was not a brick and would have been too large for someone to pick up and throw. 

Because of the possibility of losing everything, your job, career, any professional certification, reputation, social acceptance, your life, and all you had worked for by being seen entering or exiting a Gay bar, which a weak excuse that you entered a random bar not knowing what it actually was might help, but if you were seen IN the bar socializing with a drink in hand, you would be defenseless.

I once had to assure one of the deputy superintendents of the school district in which I taught that my telling people I saw him in a Gay bar would be a self-confession and professional suicide, so he had nothing to worry about. I told no one. He needed to be there and all else was his dealing with himself in a public position in he Buckle of the Bible Belt. My activism covered him too.

For that reason, Gay bars that hadn’t found an obscure enough location, a dark alley, a warehouse at night, had a blind wall at the entrance which was an L-shaped wall so that upon entering you faced one blank wall at which you had to turn to the right or left to go around before you were in the bar itself. 

There was one bar in Boston located behind the Public Library whose entrance was in the service alley. Upon entering the patron would walk down a featureless corridor turning to the left at the end and walking along the perpendicular wall until you entered the bar itself. The other end of the bar was on a major street, its facade blending in with the other buildings with big store windows and a street entrance, and was rendered safe by the sheets of plywood inside the windows so no one could see in or would have difficulty throwing something through the glass. Both further prevented by heavy curtains covering the plywood from inside. When things in the city became more open minded in the mid to late eighties, the bar closed for renovations and on the night of the big reveal, patrons entered through the alley and the blind wall as they always had. Most of the interior visible renovations were decorative with the old brick walls re-exposed, the lighting improved, and the cleanliness more obvious than before in the dim lights. When asked about the new look, the general impression was that instead of leather, levis, disco, and sweat, it could now be summed up as “Ferns and brass”. At the big moment, as people were gathered in the bar for the speeches, many standing in the area by the board and curtain-protected windows to be far from the entrance and have that measure of safety even if that was merely the extra time this afforded you to find escape before those attacking had crossed the room, after a dramatic musical introduction, the curtains covering the plywood fell to the floor and those in the shelter of the corner found themselves standing at the huge windows with a great view of the street from inside and a view of whoever was inside from the street. The reaction, although what one should have expected but was still rather comical, was the patrons in the bar acting like an amoeba on speed moving in a solid mass to the other side of the bar away from the windows.

Partons could be seen from the street, and at the time this was seen as threatening to those who had been Gay before the renovations which was everyone in the bar. 

There were bars, usually women’s bars that not only had the blind entrance but also required the patrons to be buzzed in to avoid the problems someone just walking in could cause the women who had to deal with the misogyny of the times with the added anti-Lesbian attitudes of many so as not to have yet another safe place made less so.

In most places, however, the blind wall was only as wide as was needed for a small bulletin board and the magazine rack for the local Gay Rag, but wide enough to keep the people on the street from seeing inside.

And that is why, while the debate rages as to the Rebellion’s beginning with one camp claiming a changing cast had thrown a brick, there were no loose bricks inside the bar, while the other side claims the people on the street started the Rebellion when someone they could not possibly see had thrown a shot glass inside the bar requiring that  the person who took that initiating action be both inside with a shot glass and outside with a brick at the same time.

We need to stop.

We need to give the competition over who we want to lionize a break  and take the time to read historical accounts by people at the time and not view things from modern times as if 1969 were the same as 2024. 

In 1969, Gay or Straight, Transgender was Christine Jorgenson, and a person known as a man to friends and the Community wearing a dress was a Drag Queen as there was little gender nuance at the time. We might be born Gay, but that does not mean we are born with all the knowledge necessary to understand all aspects of gender, and learned the proper names and terms by intuition as we may never hear any of that growing up. In 1969, outside of the informed few, society as a whole was an infant in the area of gender.

Remember, at this time we also began to learn that there were a lot more categories of children with special needs than what society had always known as deaf, dumb, and blind. In the late 70s I had an Autistic student in my Special Ed class and having the training I was the only one in the system who knew he was not what in those days was “retarded”, so I could address his needs not those of someone who did not exist. It was a battle then, but a very well addressed topic now. I was annoyed at the time because I was prevented from doing the right thing according to the moment and not things based on a well meaning lack of information based on the past, but, in retrospect have to admit, others were seeing things from their knowledge and experience base while I, having a Masters, had gone past that. 

If this were to happen now after all that has been learned about Special Needs in the time between then and now, the ignorance would be deliberate and harmful. It may have been harmful but that harm was not deliberate. 

In the past we were told our history by those who controlled it by having the voice to do so. They told society who we are and what we have done while taking upon themselves credit for what we accomplished so that we appeared to have contributed nothing positive to society and therefore deserve rejection.

Now we have our own voice but fight among ourselves to assign credit to individuals when a Community acted and to do so, rely on historical fiction 

With all the threats to our rights, getting involved in historically inaccurate, fractious discussions based on modern interpretations and description of past events while dismissing those who know there was a blind wall, is self defeating unless we are no longer a Community.

We were a Community and we acted as one.

Now, however, people want a spotlight that is bot deserved and in so doing chip away at Community and let those from without get some of their control back..

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