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Gay bars did not open because the Chamber of Commerce thought such a bar would add another gathering place in a town that would benefit from the taxes and was. therefore, welcomed and supported.

Gay bars were not a choice. They were not simply an option. Gay bars were a basic necessity, and, at times, life saving. Because of various local laws, in many places, being Gay was illegal and people seemed to feel that they were called upon by those laws to harass Gay people. Unlike today, the bars were quite often in seedy areas that the “respectable” people would avoid. Isolation afforded built-in safety.

A few such safe spaces were established because even people’s private homes were open to raids if a neighbor filed a report, and lives would be ruined.

Although Gay people still found ways to find each other, usually in places to which polite society would not go, that meant being attacked was less likely not because people were accepting, but because they just did not go where the Gays went, unless it was for a bashing session. People gathered in salons and private locations, often by invitation only, like when Straights, unable to gather in bars and other public places because of age restrictions, gathered by the town dump for drinking and sex parties mainly because those who would disapprove would not go there, although they still would call the police to have these parties raided because as “secret” as they were, everyone knew the kids were at the town dump. However, while in these cases there would be fines, speeches, and threats to tell the parents, in the case of bar raids, regardless of age, there would be ruination of lives in the media that implied the activity that led to the raid was salacious in nature.

It was socially easier for men to begin opening more established places to meet, but being illegal, these were often run by organized crime who did not abide the law and saw the money Gays would spend there being unable to spend elsewhere as it was even illegal to serve a Gay person a drink in a bar or restaurant. People cannot be separated from their times, and as the attitude about men and women made it easier for Gay men to establish a semi-visible safe place, that’s how it was. Without all the present social media, meeting “Family” was not easy, and knowing who was ”Family” was also very difficult. Both men and women had to live in their age.

It might have been based on a bit of social misogyny, but attacking a gathering of men would meet with too much resistance in most minds as compared to a women’s gatherings as, according to the attitude at the time, women, being weaker, made for an easier target, and, again, attitudes toward gender were then not now.

Decades ago, a Lesbian friend wanted to take me to a women’s gathering, but was not able to as the women wanted total control over who came into their space and who was seen there. Their space, not mine. One night years later when things were more advanced and Gays and Lesbians more accepted in Long Beach CA, I went to the Lesbian Bar two blocks from my apartment because the significant other of my Teacher Assistant, June, at the Special Education summer school where I had been working was the musician that night, but I was turned away at the door by the bouncer because it was a women’s space. I may have been there to support a friend Plus-One, and I was eventually let in as my friend came to the door to get me, I knew I was an exception that still made other patrons uneasy. Only went to that bar if invited or with women.

In Oklahoma, you might have been able to just walk into a Gay men’s bar, but to get into some Lesbian bar, not all but some, you had to be buzzed in by the bouncer. You couldn’t just sashay in like the place was yours.

In New Bedford, when the men’s bar was closed due to a hatchet attack, the women’s bar was open to the men, but it was understood the men were guests and must respect the place, or they should have if they didn’t.

In the pre-Stonewall days, what bars did exist were often raided, so safe places were not necessarily truly safe.

We were not out on the streets in large numbers being Gay, so to attack us, people had to seek us out and a bar’s location might make that more difficult, that and the lack of anything to indicate a place was a Gay bar as that would have been the X on the treasure map. You had to know where the bars were with your options limited by not knowing where to look, and many of the more notorious places were known for their notoriety which for some was an obstacle. What you knew about Gay life was based on how wide the area of successful searches were possible in the days before the internet and many places had any publications that would publish any information back . There was no social media in the past.

You had a Damron Guide if you knew where to buy one, and that would usually be a city which limited information in rural areas.

In my youth, many bars had entrances out of sight of the general public, such as the one in Boston whose entrance was in the alley behind the Boston Public Library, while quite often people gathered at house parties. New York City had the Meat Rack area in the meat processing district because, being abandoned at night, men could make their assignations, the ones many wished they could have in their own homes with no fear or at least a nicer area with some degree of safety until the police or the unofficial guardians of morality seriously or just as a lark went to “beat up some Queers”.

People condemned Gay men because of the lengths that society forced them to go to find the same level of love and the expression of it that Heterosexuals so freely had.

For an oppressed minority, these bars, like the catacombs are believed to have been used, serve to build solidarity and community, and to promote education not only about self and community, but wider areas like politics and, yes, religion. But, unlike the catacombs that were left alone, Gay bars have been sites of violence and persecution from those who have forced Gay people to establish those safe places.

For safety and respect, one did not ask another for specific details but accepted only what was freely offered.

Over time, society changed enough for the bars to be less secret and. in some places, the seedy side of town left long abandoned became the areas with restaurants and upscale housing, resulting in the bars that had been seedy becoming a little more posh and more identifiable.

Back when Gay bars began to become more formal establishments, if the bar was not opened by a company or Straight businessman seeing a potential cash cow in an open field, they were opened by Gays and Lesbians who had enough money to take a chance. Some bars flourished and some died with the death of each removing one more safe place in a not completely safe environment. Some of these people had always lived their true selves while others, victims of tradition, had done all that they as humans were expected to do and only found after marriage that they were not the person in it. There were children and a divorced based on Sexual orientation did not erase familial relationships.

A time finally came when the first wave of bar owners had to call it quits and arrange for the bar to continue by establishing some sort of business arrangement if they didn’t just close or sell it while others had children to whom they could leave it and the bar could continue.

Some states limited the inheritances of Gay men and women, and as blood was thicker than water any bequeathing of a revenue source to a Gay person could be challenged with the intended heir getting nothing. I have seen it with homes and multi-acreage ranches.

This often resulted, if there were partners but one held the majority shares, in the ownership of the bar going to a straight sibling who, in turn, would leave the bar to their off-spring when the time came, or the original owner leaving their share to an offspring. The end result, not understanding the historical and communal nature of Gay bars, reduced many to just being bars.

When a bar closes, so does a safe place, and many still needing one, disappear as they only feel safe in the shadows.

Many of the offspring inheritors might have been familiar with their parents’ business but, assuming that their parents were simply running a bar, continue to do that, modeling it on just being a bar. 

Although over the years there were a few Gay bars that came and went, by the opening decade of this millennium, there were only two officially labeled Gay bars in the city, one Gay the other Lesbian, until a crazed individual entered the Men’s bar and attacked patrons with a hatchet. Obviously this bar closed, not only because of that attack itself, but because trauma prevented a lot of patrons from returning. 

In the 1980s, two women had opened a bar as a safe place for women.  Not far away, was the men’s safe place. Although there had been interaction between the men’s and women’s bars and their patrons in the past as neither bar was exclusive, their ambiance determining patronage, as the result of the hatchet attack on the men’s bar it was more formally opened to the refugees from the other bar. It was a space opened to men who, hopefully, would have respect of place and remember the men were guests. 

The two women were from the old days when everyone was assumed to be Straight until Satan made you Gay, and having been married, there were children who would inherit the bar if it lasted long enough to be sold or bequeathed.

The location of the bar, although ending up being in the shadow of an interstate that had scarred that area of town, was included in the city’s gentrification plan, and, being near an entrance and exit from that interstate, was ideal for apartments and related businesses and would one day be a revenue source of a different nature. The building was not well maintained and would call for a bit of renovation and repair if it were to continue.

Although there was a closeness between the GLBT Community and the bar owner’s children because of their mothers and their being very familiar with the clientele who were like aunts and uncles and having grown from the cute little children of the owners along with many in the Community who were their peers, when an offer was made for the property after one mother died and the other just wanted retirement, it was accepted by the adult children who now owned the business and the liquor license without much of a word to the clientele, eliminating whatever arrangement could be made to perhaps keep the bar alive.

Rumors became reality.

The owners decided the bar would close and they would have money to do whatever with be that investing, opening a business of higher quality at a better location, or just living the life as long as the money lasted.

Closing a Gay bar is not the simple closing of a business. It is a blow to Community as another safe place is lost.

Along with the usual condemnations and grousing that is useless but self-satisfying venting, some members of the Community approached the new owner to see if there was a way to save the bar and keep a safe space for Community.

With a lot of gentrification beginning, the new owner bought the building and the adjacent parking lot knowing full well that any plans to upgrade the lot and building to whatever he intended would only come about after every T was crossed and I dotted on any documents and all plans fit codes and land usage meaning that, although he could not immediately benefit, he at least owned the property now and would not have to pay whatever price was attached in the future while having land he could sell if his plans fell through. Aware any future price would be affected by the property’s condition, abandoned and empty as opposed housing people and a business, and knowing from experience that this process could take a minimum of three years, the new owner accepted the proposal made by people who saw what the loss of a Community safe place would mean, agreeing to let them use the building as the bar it had been knowing this was temporary, unless he included such a place in his future plans.

Unfortunately, the old owners took the time between agreement and final paperwork to sell or have removed items necessary for a bar. Who owned what and who had a right to sell anything besides the structure may have involved the old and news owners and not the Community, but now what was removed needed to be replaced and this was an additional expense to people doing a good thing and caused a delay of what the community could have. 

Further delays were caused by the condition of the building beyond what was visible. Patrons assumed some minor improvements that came when the children inherited the club were to make the place better for them, but these turned out to be cosmetic for raising the price of the property as was evidenced by discovering during renovations that anyone who approached the ice machine had a 50/50 chance of crashing through the rotting floorboards to the basement below.

At any rate, delays, the surprise additionally needed work, personal schedules as the people attempting to save the bar for the Community had day jobs, were to be expected, in spite of visible improvements to the building and the arrival of new equipment, the opening date kept getting pushed back..

In any Community there are those who are happy with what people do for them and those who make demands, criticizing anything that does not match their desires, not needs, and seem to think people are answerable to them and, rather than contribute, command. These people stepped forward with their opinions at any delays. 

The people saving the bar have enough pressure and anxiety to get this good thing done, they do not need people sitting back, observing, telling them what they should do and then using social media to express their disappointment if it is not done.

The old owners have expressed no intention of using the liquor license connected to the bar they no longer own elsewhere and, because they sold the building, using it there is out of the question. They have no need for it, but, perhaps, now seeing that there was support for the bar before they raced to unload the property and roll on top of the pile of cash on the bed, or that there was a way they could have improved the place and lived comfortably as ghost owners after hearing from someone how this could be done so they would later be able to sell the building at a higher price, something their pre-sale secrecy precluded, for spite, have chosen to prevent success for anyone else by refusing to sign over the liquor license which prevents the new bar opening as a source of anything beyond juice. 

If the former owners wanted to use their license to continue to make money there had been ways, but judging from interactions, they were the kids who eat all the M&Ms right away and then complain they have no more while demanding the kids who ate theirs slowly and still have some left share because that is what nice people are supposed to do. 

Sadly they have collaborators who should be acting better.

Gay or Straight, there are members of the Community with whom these people grew up, who have known them from childhood on, and may hang out with those with whom they are peers not just customers. Patrons refer to them as friends. This means that in the GLBT Community there are those who can use friendly persuasion or more pressure to get the liquor license signed over.

Sadly in every GLBT Community, and I base this on experience in at least seven of them not as a visitor but resident, there are the A-list Gays, the moneyed, white collar professionals, who,  while secretly donating to Gay causes that benefit them and gives them prestige within the Community, will support any thing and any politician that cements their position regardless of the affect on the Great Unwashed Gays, the rest of us. Membership is selective with a lot of judgment on the rest of the community to decide if someone is worthy of acceptance. They will most likely not acknowledge a rank and file Gay’s existence in public although they are, like you, a regular at the bar, because you are known to be Gay or are obviously Gay, and that is seen as threatening, or they are with another A-Lister and do not want it known they are friends with a lesser. If a lesser can add to their shine, however, they will take the lesser to be closer to a benefit.

I attended a gathering of important Gay and Lesbian people in Los Angeles. I actually was one of them. I had status. I had a roommate (in the actual sense) who had been raised in poverty and I brought him along as this was a chance for networking both professionally and personally as well as having a good time. He had an exotic fashion sense and wore a simple outfit accordingly. He spent most of the gathering acting as the unofficial host, refilling people’s drinks and carrying around small plates of oeuvre d’ors, telling me when I suggested he just sit and relax that he felt more comfortable being busy. As we headed toward the car as we left, I was called over by a very prominent person in the Gay Community who expressed her disappointment I would bring someone who dressed like that (merely not in the majority fashion but a little muted flamboyance as it was him, or should I say “they”) and obviously, here she used a fancy term for poor, not of “our” caliber. It was made clear he was not to attend any future gatherings. In the car, before I said anything, he explained that the reason being host was comfortable was because someone had told him basically what I had been told. 

Even after he moved to his own place, I never attended another gathering of that particular group having no problem explaining exactly why when asked. And I was. 

I had status.

I won an award once that was a major award in another Community, and I had to attend a banquet I could never afford to attend and only did so because my award came with a ticket to the banquet for me and a plus-one guest. There were people there I knew of and had met, but with whom I did not traffic because such happened only by invite. My plus one was a friend with a disadvantaged past who I thought would like to be at one of these hoity-toity events at least once in his life. I was a “mere” teacher so, by A-List standards, not up to snuff, but I had done an important thing and that, like it or not, elevated me to someone good to know, but not enough to become a member. 

We dined, we danced, I accepted my award, and we enjoyed the evening.

Later in a bar, one of the attendees at the banquet and fellow award winner came up to me laughing. Neither my friend nor I knew the event was formal and had shown up wearing clothes we had bought for the occasion which made us standout as we went colorful among the penguins. I was there to accept an award from people who would not have otherwise even acknowledged me on the street, and my friend in many ways was not the Boston Brahmin they would have preferred.

Yet, there we were with me being the center of the attention of people who only saw my value if it was useful to them but had to appear as if it was so joyous to have Beacon Hill honor Roxbury. This person had heard the real opinions from those of his status standing at the urinal not knowing he loved that it drove his peers nuts. 

I know they are here, and I know they have the influence to make things happen, but perhaps they are safe at their salons. But, the community news them now and for some to do more than arrange for Bingo and say they have met our needs.

I know where I am now has its A-List. I have met some of them, and some of these people who can very easily go to their friends to have them transfer the license, find a way to make it happen by formal means or friendlier ones, or arrange a way around the obstacle without having to wait for it to expire and be lost need to step forward for the community. 

Pressure is free but it has to be exerted.

It is too bad that what from all appearances seems to be pointless obstruction or pettiness is preventing a community safe place the old owners may not need but could have supplied and could have  made money from if they acted smarter then instead of reacting petty now.

Where are the locals who should step up?

There are people who know they can make this happen.

I have seen them step up at other times in other places.

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I graduated from a small New England high school in 1968 and went on to a life that brought me to many places that, until Oklahoma, were all of my choosing. I wanted a house on a lake or near the ocean, a one time actual possibility, or in Japan as I had connections there, but reality had me opt for New Jersey, Northern California; New York, burb and city; Massachusetts, rural, urban, Cape Cod, and for a while next to a lake; Southern California, with the only non-choice being Oklahoma whose name I sang often in choruses and community shows but of which I knew nothing of except what I learned in the musical or had seen in the Glenn Ford film, Cimaron.

I arrived in Oklahoma unannounced and as a complete surprise even to myself as I had never had that state at any time on my radar. As far as the Musical, I may have sung songs from it as part of some chorus’s repertoire over the years. The only plot point that sticks with me is that “Poor Judd is dead.”

The same year I graduated from my school in New England, up there in the North East, so did Elizabeth Ann Herring in Oklahoma where she began a life that involved moving to places she chose.

During my time in Oklahoma City I taught most of it at Elizabeth Herring’s Alma Mater with no knowledge of that and having no reason for that to be known. Thousands of students had graduated from there. I was dealing with the ones there when I was.

I was politically active and an openly Gay teacher, so, for a variety of reasons over all those years I had to work with the open mindedness of the politicians in power at the time or their bigotry. I had to deal with mayors, school board presidents, heads of corporations, and various other members of the ruling class who had reached their pinnacles and, peaking at the local level, had to settle for that fiefdom.

At the same time I had arrived in Oklahoma, Elizabeth l arrived in my state to become the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Two total strangers who did not know each other or of each other and whose lives had each oblivious of the other were in each other’s state.

As a result, during my years of political and Gay rights activism in Oklahoma City and because of its importance and having become quite the media item, I had to deal with the same people who had looked down on Elizabeth, their treatment possibly being the major reason she hightailed out of town, immediately leaving the state after graduating only to return for family visits. While she knew and dealt with someone as a high school student with aspirations and expectation, I was meeting and dealing with them in the area of Labor and Gay Rights thirty Years after graduation when they had reached their goals as mayor, corporate head of a business, school board president, and other leadership positions in state and local government.

In 2011 I returned to Massachusetts where Elizabeth still was, making it the first time we were physically in the same state at the same time although, in spite of the odd connection of Oklahoma, the city, the high school, and its prominent alumni, we each continued to be oblivious of the other.

I wanted to continue my political and Gay Rights activism and found there was to be a meeting at a neighbor’s house for those wanting to support an Elizabeth Warren for U.S. Senate. I was not familiar with Massachusetts politics although I did endure some ribbing by Oklahoma republicans when “Kennedy’s Seat” was won by a conservative Republican. if Oklahoma Republicans saw the irony in this, and as he was running again , this time for a six-year term not filling for his deceased predecessor’s remaining time in office. I had no choice but to learn about Scott Brown because all the friendly joking about the race for that seat and was familiar with his then opponent, I went to the meeting to see who wanted to take back that senate Seat.

The chair of the meeting gave some introductory remarks about the candidate and then handed out copies of a brief bio with it stating where the candidate was from, and among the information included was that she had been born in Oklahoma city and had graduate from North West Classen High school in 1968, NWC being the school at which I had taught before returning home.

She had been Elizabeth Herring in her school years and now I found that we knew the same people in different periods of time, and I could, if she so desired, let her know how they ended up.

I finally did get to, but very briefly and only a very abridged version.

I was able to tell her that they may have gotten to their local heights with the attendant fame, it has to really frost them that as they acted as if they were the pinnacle of what the city could produce while the waif became a nationally respected figure.

Perhaps when the commuter rail finally gets to New Bedford, I can head into the big city, drop in at her home, and fill in all the blanks.

She can supply the Pastel de nata, and I will bring the tea.

In her hectic life I am sure there was no time this connection crossed her mind even after I explained our North West Classen connection. A Silky connected to a Knight by the people in one’s youth and the adults in the other’s.

It’s that connection thing..

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I was in a casual conversation with some Gay elders reminiscing. It is what the old do.

It had begun when one of the oldest sitting at the bar turned from watching the dance floor back to his drink on the bar and simply stated that at our age we get to see what we had wished was part of our youth, worked so the future youth would have what we wanted, with success coming when we were too old to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

We were familiar with the new bar scene that had Heterosexual couples welcomed into the bars that came about as safe spaces from the attacks by their parents and grandparents, and this irony was softened somewhat by the expressed hope that they have respect of place and understood the history of the place and not assume the bar opened because someone had the idea for one and not the Community needing one.

Terminology came up as one of us had recently heard a term used for a gender variant that was a new term for something old, and he was a little embarrassed that someone had pointed out at the time that he needed to learn about his community if he did not want to be an obstruction to its betterment. However, he was knowledgeable of his Community, both local and wider as in his youth he and friends traveled much, lived in and experienced multiple communities, fighting for rights in each, and had simply asked the person using this new-to-him term what it meant. He had been in full support of that gender identity and had many friends over the years who fit into it, and continue to, but even as he was attempting to adopt all the new terms, he was not aware of the new term for what he was very informed about. The meaning of new term, although having the same meaning but just recently adopted as the now preferred term did not change the nature of that to which it applied, nor did the name change erase knowledge.

When you are in your seventies and eighties there is always the possibility that a term you knew for most of your life, at least the fifty or sixty years of it you spent as an adult, might slip out in conversation.

During my first year of teaching in Oklahoma City, I was slowly getting used to where I was as Oklahoma was proving to be unlike any place I had ever been. I was also living in a place for the first time where Jim Crow was built into a state constitution and most adults by the time I had gotten there had been raised on one side or the other of it.

A grandfather who had been raising his grandson had asked for a meeting with myself and the principal. He was in his late sixties, early seventies in the mid-1990s, so he had grown up with Jim Crow and in middle age tried as best his Oklahoma Baptist heart would let him to accept the new ways of integration throughout society. He dressed like someone who worked the land and had the Oklahoma twang that many locals deny they have. His grandson enjoyed school but there was this one “colored boy” who was picking on him. He didn’t want the “colored boy” punished, but hoped there was some way we could work to end it without his grandson facing retaliation.

At his first use of “colored boy” I had immediately glanced over at the principal, a dignified Black woman, who did not react in any manner, and after the meeting which ended with a positive plan, and with the grandfather out of the office, I asked the principal if she found his use of “colored boy” to be offensive.

A native Oklahoman, she reminded me that I was new there and there is history. The fact that a man his age used that term showed he had made an effort to change with the times in spite of his years living in the previous, and she would rather that term at this point in his growth than the one he could have used without any, the one she had grown up with.

Updated vocabulary does not erase the past for those who lived it.

I had just recounted how in Oklahoma City we had begun our student advocacy in 1997 using the term “Sexual Minority Youth” because we older Gays saw us go from simply Gay to GLBT and then all the subsequent additions, and knew from that there had to be as yet unnamed gender variants that will need to be included. We did not begin the advocacy with a restrictive term but one that not only included the known but could be broadened to include the, as yet, unknown.

At a community meeting I was berated by a young person who claimed I was failing in my advocacy that he did not seem to realize was voluntary, on my own time, and not a job so there were limitations. I had not included his identity in my remarks. When he declared it, I needed further clarification and found it was a new term replacing an old one which was automatically included in the blanket term that made sure it was not a limited Gay and Lesbian thing.

Because the original term, though blanket, was vague, members of the school district’s eventual Diversity in Education Committee needed specifics, So meetings often became lessons on what the known gender variants at the time were.

We eventually got “Sexual Orientation” and “Gender Identity” into school district policies, and, by suggesting that the words “or for any other reason, real or perceived” be included in the prohibitions of bullying, harassment, and discrimination, attempted to cover everybody, known and as yet unknown far beyond gender and Our Community.

A lament was expressed that in the old days we fought for the Community, known and unknown, without regard to the differences the present generation tries to divide the community into so that instead of unity we now have labels. We used to just go to bars and gatherings, interacting with whoever was there without requiring a resume or preferred vocabulary list. We did not like everyone we ran into, but that dislike was based on how a person presented themselves and how they acted. When you felt safe, community, and self everything followed. Resumes and preference lists were not needed before conversations would begin.

“Wanna dance?” would be answered with a yes or no, not a lecture or need for a defense or an explanation of intent.

One person among us, referring to the meaning of the original pride flag, pointed out that, while the new one was supposed to be more inclusive than ethereal concepts like Life, Healing, Nature, and Art applicable to everyone in the Community, the new one left out Native Americans, Asian, and Pacific Islanders as the only colors identifying minorities are Black and Brown, neither of which is representative of these people.

The major topic as we sipped our drinks, if one has to be chosen, was that in the old days we were fighting for community and that included members unknown even to ourselves.

Considering where we are today as opposed to where we were, many Gay elders are proud of their work and wish some who are now gone could see where their spark led to even if they are only remembered by the dwindling numbers who knew them.

Collective sighs from the few elders nursing their drinks in a Gay bar like Veterans at the VFW.

There were some younger people nearby, the oldest being, at best, perhaps some thirty years younger than the youngest of the old guys, who upon hearing one of us say that when we had fought for the Community back in the early days, we had fought for everyone in whatever battle we were involved in, minority rights, labor rights, and Gay rights, there had been no “except you” in our experiences, rather than give us our moment and without knowing our pasts, angrily informed us that not everybody felt helped and hearing people say that they helped everyone makes some feel like they are a no one because they aren’t included in “everyone”.

Doing the math, these people had not been alive back then only having come on the scene in the last twenty-five years at most, so, unless they could be labelled savants they cannot speak authoritatively about a past that was not theirs. They assumed to speak for those of whom they had no knowledge.

Again, an attempt was made through semantics to lesson the accomplishments of others and insulting to those with documented proof that they had done just that with it being up to the person to utilize the help provided. An attempt at victim-hood where it is totally irrelevant, apparently because, rather than accept the attempt was made, we should reject it all in favor of some purity requirement.

All or nothing.

You did not have me personally in mind, so you have failed us all.

Despite there being an ethnic mix in this group of elders in a heavily immigrant populated town, we were told that being White Gay men, our privilege spared us from reality of the past so that while we may want to be seen as having been equally oppressed and in the fight, we actually had it easy in the past compared to others and really weren’t.

We then had all our attitudes, the ones they told us had been ours in our youth, and their affects on our actions going back before they were born laid out before us with explanations why they were wrong and had produced nothing. They were correct. These would have been detrimental if we had actually adhered to them and truly were ineffective as we did not hold those attitudes and so they had no influence. Although we may have fought for everyone from Stonewall on, they informed us that the only true motivation of the Gay white male activists was not to be there for everyone, but to control progress to insure the dominance of the patriarchy making us guilty of collaborative oppression.

You’re welcome.

I came to the moment of acceptance of self and allowing myself to be who I was regardless of the opinions and well intentioned bad advice and let myself be myself just as AIDS hit big time. Although spared myself, I did live those years with people who weren’t. In 1985 a San Francisco newspaper printed a ten page Sunday supplement including the pictures and names of seven hundred men who had died in that city. That was one city.

Because of union membership, regardless of race, I got insurance. Whether or not it would help in the case of HIV/AIDS was uncertain, though. In some cases insurance helped if you could get it, and there were still enough impediments for minorities to get basic coverage. Because some were more likely to have insurance in some form, those who had it went to their doctors and faced whatever happened, and it was too often uninformed, but there were also those for whom going to a doctor meant the emergency room. The majority of pictures may be of white men whose circumstances brought recognition, but it was not a privilege to die ignored because of a politically useful virus.

Regardless what controlled the availability of photos it was not privilege to be included. All you got was your picture in a newspaper that you would never see while others would learn of your private life posthumously when you could not control the gossip, while some made good on bets they had made about your orientation.

This, having been seen, was an ever present consideration for all affected as equality and equity were major components of what was fought for in the fight against AIDS and its attendant bigotry.

I am aware of a Gay White Male who, realizing a privilege of another kind, used it for the sake of others.

This individual was not a native of the state in which he was living. He spent the first forty-five years of his life in various other places, the present location only being the latest. Therefore, his presence there had no footprint and there were no family or friends whose reputations he must protect even as he protected his reputation from their judgment of him. If this were not the best place for him to be, there was nothing, no emotional connection that would prevent moving on. He had nothing to lose. At one point because he would not stay in the closet, his employer attempted to appear solicitous and supportive when he suggested this person should be mindful of how his openness could negatively affect his family by having them forced to deal with the attitudes of neighbors, not a consideration for people living in a more forward thinking state half a continent way.

This bestowed a form of privilege, and with the loss of any power that the veiled threat was assumed to have, he was able to attain rights for others that he would never get to use because he was an adult and the rights were for minors that he would never meet.

He used his privilege to benefit people with whom he had at one time been a fellow traveler, students, and those yet to be born. Should he have ignored his privilege to the detriment of others or be assigned a malicious motive by people in the future.

While being praised for what he accomplished, he must now be discounted and/or erased for a more warm and fuzzy substitute?

Is it “privilege” to simply benefit from his work without having to contribute to the effort?

Privilege includes using what others supply for one’s own benefit without cost because it is simply yours now.

And, when one of us objected to the Label du Jour, Queer, and how we ceded control of the word by releasing it for public use outside the community in any way the person wants to use it, spit it, snarl it, give a knowing look with laughing eyes while seriously (wink, wink) using it, he was told, as we had been in the past, others had decided that he would be called that now, and to object was to obstruct.

We got one final history lesson that included criticism of Gay, white males in the past who, the lecturers claimed, had refused to accept the, as yet at the time, undiscovered science that began a concentrated study of gender and all its manifestations. This deliberate ignoring of the undiscovered and actively excluding people because in 2024 we have decided that people in 1969 not using words and identities that would not be recognized until decades later was a willful act of control and all subsequent progress was limited and controlled because we did not use the words yet to be invented nor recognize gender variants that were not known and unnamed at the time even by those to whom they would eventually apply.

We failed because we had not applied 2024 knowledge to the past when in the past and we cling to actual history which sees beyond the glitz and glitter to the blood on the dance floor below the mirrored disco ball and know it was not a party.

And we do not accept the rewritten history as we lived the truth, and “truth is absolute”.

The night ended on that note and did not improve as, on the walk through the parking lot from the bar in which back in the day our evaluators could not purchase a drink because of sexual orientation and/or gender identity not age as it had been when we were their ages and as they left to get to another popular family oriented chain restaurant to meet other friends to have a few wedding anniversary drinks for Mark and Stefan, one old duffer pointed out that we can never take back the wins the kids in the bar apparently do not think we should share in nor get back the time taken up in the fight that resulted in a form of exclusion based on looking for failures and ignoring or reassigning the successes to others while letting us know that while benefiting from the successes they have rewritten history making my peers the enemy after the fact when I known the person telling me that can present their gender anyway they so choose because some of them couldn’t and changed that.

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This is my apologia, offered for informational purposes and not for discussion especially as it delineates the parameters for acceptable discourse.

In a number blogs I have lamented the deplorable lack of facts related to past historical events in favor of easy to accept mythical treatment of them for agendas and self-esteem purposes, individual or group, that often erases the real history with the real people being substituted with characters that, while based in reality, erase or at least divert attention away from the real people.

I went around the country twice in two years to find that even as the older members of the Gay Community (my preferred label) know what the community had been like in the past and appreciate even the slightest progress that had been made even if it lacked fireworks, Rainbows, lollipops, and unicorns to make it legitimate, we are often told what it was like and, sadly, this has resulted in the dilution of people’s experience and the value of the prize won.

I found that not only had my personal history now been reduced to having been helpful so that a school district “embraced” diversity, including GLBT students in policies, when there had been a twelve year fight and a lot of harm done to people by the district.

This not only erases the history, but it denies the future members of the community their true history, but also the knowledge that we had exercised powers and won, and could again if necessary.

Many people I spoke with found that when they attempted to correct a mistake in some young person’s retelling of the past, they have been advised to do more reading so the older person would learn what the younger knew.

I had this told to me when, listening to a young person explain to me who I was, having never met but only heard or read about me and what role I played in a past event, I corrected a common misconception and was informed that if I wanted to know about this person and event, I would need to do a lot of reading to get up to speed.

So I have arrived at a decision.

I was born in 1950, meaning I have been around going on 75 years, and of those years I fought for Labor, Teacher, Minority, and Gay rights for forty-plus years of them. I lived all the post Stonewall years, post Upper Room, Post Silver Lake, survived the attempted genocide in the 1980s. In my forty-plus years of on the pavement activism I met and worked with real people, some famous still, some replaced because they lacked glitter.

From now on, if I am in conversation with younger people, by which I mean anyone born after 1990 (I chose that cut-off point as, judging by my experience with the changing world of my students, seeing the changes during what by that year was 18 years teaching in various places and grade levels, and saw how by the time the people born that year came of age, student interest in the world around themselves became insular as what they learned they learned only if it was okay with their peers and all they seemed aware of was the bubble in which they lived while growing more and more confident in telling people outside their own bubble what all that space was about) I will be asking with the first mistake, if corrected but defended, the year a person was born, subtract that from 1950, and then point out how many years I was already on this earth dealing with things those years before they were born but am still around living more history with them until I die.

I was at some Community gathering being run by young members of the it to educate us on our needs. When AIDS came up, the general consensus expressed by the speakers was that the suffering in those days must have been horrible and we have no idea today what it must have been like. The audience nodded their heads in solemn agreement while the elders in the back of the room could have told them what it was like as to us it was more than imaginable.

A person born in 1990 only appeared on the scene after I had lived the forty years prior. We can discuss current events as we are living in these times together, but the other person can only repeat what is heard or learned from suspect sources and must listen to, not correct, people who lived the history.

I just have no time to argue with people who define the times decades before they were born and before they attained what used to be called then “age of reason”, about seven years old, and then decide to judge us according to their created rubric and not the reality of the elders.

So, at the minimum: 1950-1990=40.

Anyone born after 1990 increases the gap between the beginning of the past I lived added to the times I will be living until me demise. am living.

To this end, do not define past events, people, and decades according to 2024 knowledge and standards and then condemn those from the past for creating the situation they had to survive, and I mean the real situations not the modern interpretations.

Do not attempt to correct people who lived history with the phrase, “But, I heard.”

Our history is rich, we do not need to modify or embellish it.

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