(WARNING — a lot of personal sh*t here about family members; read at your own risk; parts of this have been written up before but it is part of the 40-years-ago story… and I’m still not writing all that could be written of that period.)
This weekend marks the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, and the visible beginning of the Gay Liberation Movement. There had been stirrings before then, of course, but there was something about the Stonewall Riots that marked the beginning of something that would not be dismissed or denied. If you’ve read the histories of it you know that it wasn’t about rising up against straight people, but it was rising up against the blatant anti-gay behavior of the police, who would regularly target and raid the gay bars in Greenwich Village. if you haven’t read the histories, you are missing an important part of American gay history. Go look it up. It didn’t hurt that the 60s were full of social unrest and demands for change anyway. The Civil Rights Movement, Woodstock, and so many other things happened back then.
Anyone who cares to learn about it can do so. I’m going to tell my own story.
In June of 1969 I had just finished the 9th grade at La Cumbre Junior High. That summer we moved from 210 Balboa Drive right next door to 214 Balboa Drive. And just a few months prior (March 11, 1969, to be precise) I had returned home to my dad’s house, after being 12.5 months in Denver with mother.
In early January of 1968, Mother had kicked Dad out of the house. They’d had yet another drunken, knock-down drag-out physical fight, the police were called (again) and this time they actually took him away and put him in jail. He ended up staying at his sister’s (Aunt Bettie) for a time, although briefly and then got an apartment of his own downtown.
Mother got busy looking up old boyfriends (oooo, what a shock!), got signed up for AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children — welfare/food stamps), and decided she wanted to try selling Holiday Magic cosmetics (an early MLM program). There was a LOT happening in that brief couple of months.
She hooked up with an old boyfriend from school days, and he was into pendulums, Ouija, automatic writing and other psychic woo-woo stuff. She had already been into New Thought for a while, anyway, so it wasn’t such a leap for her. And one of my own friends and I had been reading the ghost stuff by writers like Hans Holzer and others, so it wasn’t such a leap for me, either.
Thanks to Mother’s dabbling on the Ouija board, she “learned” that one of our ancestors, Jesse James, had left $5 million worth of gold bullion in Denver, and it was up to her to go find it and claim it.
(Actually, as Mother told it, Jesse’s half-brother, Johnny James had married Kathryn Angel — Kathryn’s brother, George, had founded Angels Camp, CA, and through mother’s mother’s lineage there had been a string of Kathryns and Angels ever since then — including my mother, her mother, one of my sisters, one of my daughters, and then one of my granddaughters)
Anyway, Mother was all hot-to-trot to go find the gold and get rich, so it was fortuitous (for her) that the very first welfare check she got was at the end of February — a couple hundred dollars or so. The day she got the check, she decided she would go to Denver, get the gold and be back by the weekend. February 26 was a Monday.
She was all excited getting dressed and ready to go when I got home from school that Monday. She was going to leave my older brother, me, and my two younger sisters alone — “You’ll be fine, I’ll be home in a couple of days.” I told her I wanted to go too, and since it was my friend’s borrowed Ouija board that she was using, I really should get to go, since you can’t have just one person working a Ouija board. She agreed to let me come along (”but you have to bring your school books and do your homework while we’re there.), and my 15 y.o. brother would stay home and mind the girls, who were then 3.5 y.o. and 11 months old.
So we flew that night, first to Los Angeles and then connecting to Denver. Mother had brought her vodka in her purse, so along with the 2 drinks provided by the airline, she’d had plenty and was completely drunk by the time we got to Denver. A cab took us to a motel in Lakewood, where we spent the rest of Monday night and then Tuesday night. Then we went to a motel closer into town for Wednesday and Thursday night. Except there was no money left on Friday. Ooops!
The hotel manager called the police, who came banging on the door of the motel room Friday afternoon. Mother was plenty drunk and was hiding in the bathroom, telling me I had to talk to the manager and police. I was only 13 at the time. My only experience with the police was when they had come so often to make Dad stop beating up on Mother, so I thought the police were good, but Mother was now acting like they were bad. Hmmmm….
I finally let the manager and police in and they tried to talk her out of the bathroom while I just stood there wondering WTF was going on, and why my life had become so confused. After an hour (?) or so, the police loaded up our suitcases and us into the back of a patrol car and took us to the police station downtown. Since it was Friday evening and the county assistance offices had closed, the police gave us vouchers to let us stay at the Frontier Hotel near the police station for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. The idea was that Mother would contact county assistance Monday morning and do something to get herself (and me) back on track.
Mother had other plans. No money, and her vodka (and Librium) had long since run out. So she visited the hotel bar and met Orville. Monday morning came and instead of visiting the county assistance office, we were moving into the transient hotel were Orville lived. He had a little kitchenette one-room apartment (a shared bathroom was down the hall, a common feature in transient hotels back then), and we had a room closer to the manager’s apartment. Actually I had that room and mother did her thing with Orville.
Fast forward about 2-3 months, toward summer. There’d been over a dozen men, and as many places to live sleep (sometimes a night or two, sometimes up to a week), and I’d witnessed several ways to ‘pay’ for a place to sleep. (Seriously, did she really think yelling, “roll over the other way and go back to sleep” was going to make me deaf?) Then she met Ralph Raher, who lived at the Elms Hotel on Tremont Street, half a block from the Brown Palace. By that time I’d already learned that grown men like young teen boys. No, not Ralph — he was a drunken ass, but no threat to me since I was already larger than him; it was other people who saw me as unattended and vulnerable. That was a lesson to be repeated several times during my time in Denver, and even after I went back to California. Nobody actually completed their quest, but several tried. The last was the school bus driver who invited me to his place after school, but by then I knew adults don’t get ‘friendly’ or invite teenagers home except for one thing so I never showed up.
Actually, the first time someone tried something I’d been reading a book in the upstairs ‘lobby’ of one or another transient hotel. A large (both tall and overweight) black guy noticed I like to read, and said he had other books in his room and insisted I would like them and I should come check them out. Turns out it was 3 or 4 comic books. Within a few minutes he was on top of me telling me what he wanted to do, when Mother came calling for me down the hall. He waited until she’d gone back the other way and let me go, but not until he kissed me. ICK! I told Mother what he had done or tried to do. She got all upset, said I should have known better than to go with him (uhhh…and just how should I have known that?), and that she needed to run to the liquor store. Hmph. I barely escape getting raped, and she needs a drink? So I learned not to trust strangers, for sure, and to not look for a parent to guide the process of growing up.
Anyway, one thing led to another and we stayed with Ralph in his room at the Elms, and somehow Mother convinced Homer Barth and Jane Conway (the owners) that she should be the manager at the Elms. So we got the 3 room manager’s apartment. AND we got the keys to the storeroom where they kept all the shit left behind by other transients. THAT’s where I found the magazines — piles of gay porn magazines of the era, cheezy by today’s standards, but plenty graphic just the same. And that’s when I knew that what I knew inside myself wasn’t unique.
As one writer said (so long ago I can’t remember where I read or heard it), that was when I found out I wasn’t the only one who didn’t fit, and I wasn’t sure if I was more excited to know that I wasn’t alone, or that there were so many of us there was actually a name for it! And we even had our own magazines!
I should mention, too, that because we were only going to be in Denver “a few days”, I had not enrolled in school. I never finished the 8th grade at all. I’d spent most of my time staying in the hotels during school hours, hanging out with aimless adults who didn’t work (or worked nights in “adult” jobs), and my afternoons and weekends wandering around the city. But mostly hanging out in the hotels. I met drag queens, prostitutes, drug addicts, hippies, and a whole bunch of other less-than-savory characters. Actually, most were fairly decent people, and the ones in the hotels weren’t much danger to me — just down on their luck and living the hard life. They didn’t know what to make of me any more than I of them, but we got along and I grew up very, very quickly. And all the while I was going through puberty, figuring out I was gay, and wondering what to make of it all.
When summer was ending, it was obvious we weren’t going back to California, so I figured I should enroll myself in school. I showed up for the registration day and lied my ass off. I said we’d just moved to Denver unexpectedly and hadn’t thought to bring school records, but that I’d just finished 8th grade and was ready for 9th. Amazingly they put me in 9th grade and promised to fetch my records. By the time they had my records at Morey Junior High, it was clear I’d never finished 8th grade.
With Mother’s drinking, plus some time in the hospital [ed.: her in the hosp., not me], and other craziness I actually managed to get to school an average of maybe 2 days a week. I honestly do not remember actually attending an entire week in a row. Failing miserably, not fitting in, I might as well have just not bothered with school. In the span of a few months, I’d gone from a kid in junior high into a junior adult trying to take care of a wet drunk, and covering up at the hotel so nobody would know I was doing the work and not her — taking in the rents, signing people in and out, doing all the linen changes each day, and generally being in charge of things, including being in charge of myself.
It wasn’t particularly ‘fun’, and definitely not the kind of life a kid should have. Certainly not the kind of life any of my schoolmates in Santa Barbara were having. Most of that year I was the most sober, and most sane adult — or trying to be a reasonable fascimile as best I could. (in retrospect, it’s amazing I didn’t start drinking — I’d seen what it did to others, and I knew I had to keep my wits about me, so I just never got into that, and didn’t even have my first beer until my 30s, and still haven’t ever tried pot.)
For my “new school wardrobe” Homer and Jane fronted me $25.00. I went to a seconds store (they were popular then, selling new goods that weren’t up to quality standards but serviceable; now they have the Dollar Stores), found a pair of pants, a shirt, and a pair of shoes. Everything else I wore had been scrounged out from that storeroom of other people’s cast-offs and left-behinds. In the entire time we were in Denver I never saw a washing machine. All laundry was done by hand in the bathtub, which meant things were worn several times before washing. I only had 2-3 underpants, so they were worn a LOT between washings. (Gosh, any wonder I have 3-4 weeks worth of clean unders and socks now?)
Mother blew her shot at “managing” the hotel because of her drinking, and we were relegated back to one of the rooms upstairs, this time one of the 3 rooms that actually had an adjoining bath.
I’d turned 14 in November (my grandmother sent me a small check, and I bought myself a birthday present — a Spirograph — at Denver Dry Goods). Mother and Ralph were too drunk to notice my birthday (or much of anything else), but I found them at their favorite bar and showed them what I’d gotten for myself. They bought me a coke and sent me back to the hotel. (I’d been in the bars so often, the bartenders knew me and didn’t throw me out, because they knew what I was dealing with.) Christmas was another ‘non-event’ that year. The Tuesday before Christmas there was a freezing storm. Mother ‘needed’ some oleo from Safeway. It was well below freezing outside, everything was iced over, and even the sidewalks were slick with ice. I had a thin leather jacket but no hat or gloves, and the slip-on loafers I’d bought for school. But Mother needed it, so it was up to me to go get it. It took a couple hours to maneuver the 8 or 10 blocks to the Safeway store and pick up a lonely block of oleomargarine, and get back home. It was night time, so the streets were bare. I’d skitter from one storefront door way to the next, trying to avoid the winds and not slip on the ice. What a cruel and inhumane thing to make me do. My hands were nearly frozen, and Mother said to hold them under hot water to thaw them out. I turn on the hot water and just as it turned scalding, I heard Ralph yell, “NO, use COLD water.”
Then one night it happened. Ralph’s wife Terry showed up looking for money (I’d learned earlier they weren’t actually divorced) and beat the snot out of Mother, who didn’t fight back because she thought Ralph didnt’ want her to hurt his wife. I couldn’t believe Mother did that, but she did.
A few days later, Ralph was gone. I guess he went back to the suburbs to get sober and start over with his wife and son. Whatever.
I started going back to school, trying to catch up and not having a clue.
And then it happened. I came home from school and the place was silent, and it looked like stuff was missing. Specifically, nearly all of Mother’s stuff was missing. The bitch had moved out! It was 3-4 days later, she came back to see how I was doing. WTF? I was FOURTEEN years old, abandoned by my mother in a city I didn’t know and no family close at home, how the fuck did she think I was doing???
(Mind you, this entire time, my dad had not made any attempt to contact me… at ALL! After my grandmother told him what Mother had done, he moved back into the house the Friday after we left, totally pissed because he’d just signed a lease on his apartment, so my brother actually only missed that week of school.)
Turns out she’d met a guy (surprise!) in a bar (Surprise!) and moved in with him the same day. She invited me to “come for dinner” and meet the guy. It was just another one-room affair. She was oh-so-cordial about it and said I was welcome to come and stay with them a while, or I could stay where I was. WHAT? How the hell did she think I was going to PAY for that? But it was clear she (and he) didn’t want me or have room for me, so I said I’d stay where I was. I went back to the Elms, told Homer and Jane that I’d found Mother, and that she didn’t want me. Homer and Jane let me stay in that room by myself, while they called the county.
I guess I stayed there a week on my own, with Homer and Jane letting me eat with them or giving me money to go out and eat, then a welfare person came and talked to me. During that week, Homer and Jane had talked about sending me to Boys Town, as a ’safe’ place for kids in trouble. They tried to talk with my Dad, but he wasn’t really interested in having me come back and seemed to like the BoysTown idea. The county welfare people talked to Grandmother, and circumvented the Boys Town notion and arrangements were made for me to go back to my dad’s house. He had to re-arrange the house and make room for me, so I spent about 5 days at Mrs. Payne’s house – a lovely older black woman, a foster mother, where I’d spent time before during one of Mother’s hospital visits - she was nice and I asked if I could go back there, so they let me even though she’d been ill and wasn’t a foster mother any more. Then on March 11, 1969, I was flying back to Santa Barbara.
Grandmother met me at the airport (Dad couldn’t be bothered, I guess). She was horrified. She gave me a hug, but in her eyes I could see she wanted to cry. I’d grown several inches taller and 20-30 pounds lighter, partly because kids don’t eat until Mother had enough liquor at hand, and partly because I was smoking a pack or more a day, which helped ward off hunger (i smoked because everyone around me did and in order to pass as ‘grown-up’ in order to survive, I did what they did; it wasn’t until later that I learned smoking curbs appetite). And because Grandmother worked in the school system with a long and unimpeachable history, she was able to talk them into letting me continue in the 9th grade - on the condition that if I fucked it up I’d have to do it over again. No, she didn’t use such language, but the message was clear — she’d put her reputation on the line for me, so I could stay with my peers.
I tried. For her, I really did try to fit back in and make it work at school. And I managed to pass my classes the second semester of 9th grade. But it was SOOOO hard. I tried a few times to talk to her and tell her some of the things that had happened, but she didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to know the grown-up stuff I’d seen and heard and done, especially since it was her only daughter who had put me in those situations. After all, this was still the 60s and nice people simply didn’t talk about that, especially not with young teenagers.
I’d learned in Denver how to ‘detach’ — just completely disconnect from the people and events around me and just be there observing, trying to not feel anything about stuff I couldn’t control. Excellent survival technique in the moment, but it’s hard to shut it off when you spend such a long time in that mode. I’ve been ‘detached’ most of my adult life.
But in June of 69, when news reports were coming out about Stonewall, I gobbled it up. I needed to know what was happening with ‘my people’. I couldn’t come out and say so back then, but I was more aware of that than I was about this-or-that new group on the radio, or school events, or whatever. I spent my high school years pretending the year in Denver didn’t happen, but seriously you cannot unsee what you’ve seen. And you can’t detach from one part of your life without detaching from all of it. I couldn’t relate to what other kids were doing (gawd, it all seemed so frivolous to me), and they surely couldn’t relate to me. Better to keep to myself and not let on that I wasn’t fitting in, than to try and be ‘found out’.
It would be another 14 years before I could actually come out. After high school I immediately went in the Air Force (mostly just to get away from my Dad), then in the Air Force, I was ordained and got married, had four kids, and then realized it was all for nothing.
Gay Liberation started in 1969, but I didn’t get mine until 1983 a few months after my divorce. I knew I was gay the whole time, but because it was a ’sin’ I never did anything about it, and tried to pretend that if I just behaved ‘right’ and did all the ‘right’ things and didn’t talk about “IT”, I’d be okay. But I never was okay; there are still parts of me that I feel are missing, and ‘holes’ where other people have normal teenage histories.
Even though I will never be in a relationship personally (too many trust-and-abandonment issues that I don’t know how to change or fix at this point), I will continue to speak out, long and loud, in support of marriage equality for everyone else. And I will always be grateful for what was started at Stonewall. I wasn’t there, but it’s very much a part of our collective history. So, its been 40 years since the riots in New York, and 40 years since my hell on earth in Denver.
It has been an interesting 40 years.
