[“Maybe you remember me. We met in one of Detroit's gay bars in May of the year the twentieth century turned sixty, a month after I turned twenty-one. I saw you perhaps half a dozen times during that late spring.
The particular night I met you I was with a group of friends at a small bar on Gratiot Avenue, a bar whose name I've forgotten, but maybe you'll remember. Later that year it ended its brief tenure as a haven for queers and became a “black and tan" bar— slang in that highly segregated city for a place that welcomed blacks. I remember the city in those days as being glamorously grungy and vital, but safe, not the violent, dangerous place it was soon to become. But I also understand that I felt safe because I was young— and that some confidence of youth is taken away by the years. How I hope that yours remains undimmed.
That night in the bar I was with three other lesbians: Joan and Ann with their short, dark hair and men's pants and white shirts, visibly butch; and Carole, with her slumberous, blue eyes and simply cut dark hair, a young woman I knew from General Motors where I worked and whom I was nuts about (and would shortly lose to Joan— not that I exactly had her to lose). Carole was also butch but conventionally very pretty, as butch woman often are, and she was playing femme for Joan— role switching that made better sense to me later on when I had more knowledge and some perspective on lesbian fluidity.
We had come to the bar from a crowded coffee shop Woodward Avenue where, over coffee, I had been immersed in the company of my lesbian companions, especially Carole. What happened afterward still reverberated in me as I sat in the Gratiot Avenue bar, because I couldn't, wouldn't discuss my feelings with my companions. I didn't know what to say, and for all I knew, I was the only one troubled by what occurred.
We'd gotten up to leave the coffee shop and were single-filing our way through tables to the door when it began. My entire body seemed to burn in the rising cacophony of whistles, laughter, catcalls, taunts. While I had been obliviously drinking my coffee, everyone else in the place had identified us as lesbians— probably due to Ann's and Joan's butch drag— and they were now indulging in a litany of ridicule: “Come back, come back, we can save you": “It's your last chance, girls," called individual male voices accompanied by explosions of female giggles. “Don't go out that door";" Turn back, it's not too late"; “You, the one on the end, there's still hope... “ Carole was the one on the end. I can still see her sheepish expression as I looked back at her, her shoulders lifting and rounding as if warding off rain.
I had been singled out before, stared at during the one month in which I had become a regular in the bars. The bars were the only place I knew to be, and I was still acclimating myself, trying to figure out where and how I fit in, with very few signposts for deciphering such behavior as the cult of butch and femme. Likening this radical culture to heterosexuality was to compare palm trees to teaspoons. I seemed too tall and awkward in my skin to be femme, yet I couldn't envision myself adopting the clothing or the attitudes of a butch woman. So I was puzzling through the rules of the bar culture, its sexual signals and permissions.
I had been brought to these very bars one month earlier, on my birthday, by heterosexual friends whose idea of formal introduction to adulthood was that I should look at the seamy side of life, that I should go look at queers. But what I had seen, with a lightning strike of unwilling recognition, was the truth about my life: these were my people, and this was where I belonged. I returned alone the following night, electrified with apprehension but pulled there as the tides are pulled by the moon. So now I was one of the queers on exhibit, to be gaped at by slumming heterosexuals who came to sit in our dark, smoky bars and watch us slow-dance to wailing Connie Francis songs or twist to writhing Chubby Checker tunes.
But being stared at in a shadowy bar where I was an indigenous inhabitant was different from being singled out in the public world of heterosexuals. And so I sat in that bar on Gratiot Avenue with my insides thrumming with the aftershocks of the gauntlet I had walked through in the coffee shop.
When you strolled up to our table.
I don't know how Joan knew you, how the two of you fit into each other's lives, but you greeted each other with jocular familiarity. Those were the days before separatism and other hostilities, before the women's movement led us to a place in ourselves where we found such a depth of fury and rebellion that many of us lined up every male in the world in its focus. But back then wars and enemies were a far simpler matter, and so you sat down at that table with us, leaned back, crossed an ankle over a knee, and entered my life.
This isn't enough to have you even recognize yourself, much less remember me, so let me describe you.
You wore your straight, blond hair in close- cut neatness except for a cowlick at the crown of your head that you couldn't tame no matter how much you patted or wet- combed it. You had a fine broad forehead, wide apart powder blue eyes, pale blond eyebrows, a good nose; but there was a boniness in the shape of it, that endearing element of rawness young men sometimes have. The sprinkling of acne scars across your cheeks only added to your attractiveness.
You weren't a student but you dressed collegiate in the fashion of those days: open-throat white shirts and what were called continental pants— a style using a two- or three-inch flap of fabric as self-belting— that looked pleasing on your trim body and long legs. In the chilly spring evenings like that one, you added a crewneck sweater, usually navy blue, and I loved its rough wool and masculinity. Your pants were conservative dark colors, but once you wore baggy trousers in a snappy- looking houndstooth, and that first night your pants were tweed, in a small checkered pattern. You were never expensively dressed but always immaculately (though not meticulously) neat, and you smelled of a clean scent of aftershave lotion. You were always smart looking in the casual chic way that young people today or any day would kill to achieve.
I immediately loved your look and I still do. I still love it when any gay man (or better yet a butch woman) dresses even somewhat the way you did. I envied your style. You exuded a charming combination of boyishness and maturity. You were a field of dreams ... you still are.
I don't remember what any of us talked about in the bar that night, but it didn't matter. In that small, dark, intimate place your talk was light, free, and confident, and your words were like music to me.
We went out into the brightly lit street. Your bearing and slenderness added to an impression of height, and most beautiful of all was the ease in the way you moved. You seemed to contain in your body the freedom of a dancer who dances for himself and then for others.
"I took this guy home last night," you said, talking to Joan. “He was a doll, a real doll, really sweet." But then somehow your words— your welling laughter— became directed at me. “Let me tell you, I wasn't what he expected. We were in bed and I was making him very happy. I just turned myself around, and was he ever surprised at what he had in his mouth." And you flung your head back and laughed so joyously, and you strode so buoyantly at my side along the street, and your strides were so long and confident and cocky. “So he found out all about sixty-nine. He was such a doll."
I laughed with you in my own sheer delight, not at the story you told me in such intimate, audacious detail, but because for the first time I could take unalloyed pleasure in the company of a man without any fear of complications.
Much more than that. Your joy in your life and your confidence in your sexuality were balm on those burns from the coffee shop.
The image of you striding along that Detroit street, your naturalness with the profound mysteries of sexuality, unfolds as easily and as vividly in my mind as if on film. At the time, I didn't know anything else about why this image of you was so vital to me, why I clutched it so close inside myself, how much it meant to me.
Joan and Carole— and you— soon disappeared from my landscape, which is another story, and the following year I fled to California, carrying all the despair and confusion of my profound homophobia with me. A very long process followed, of struggle and anger and healing, of support from good people in aiding my growth and evolution, before I could find the ease within my own skin that you showed me on that Detroit street, before I could dance for myself and then dance for others.
You gave me the first of the building blocks on which I learned to shape my lesbian pride and self-esteem; you were part of the genesis from which the affirmative images of lesbian life and love eventually came into being in all my books.
In the many years since that May night, friendship and camaraderie with gay men have taken their rich place in my life. Our two communities needed that time apart in the seventies to explore our own identities and culture, and then the devastation of AIDS brought us all together. You were the first gay man I ever knew. You were the first to show me the promise of what we have since brought into each other's LGBT lives.
I don't know your last name; I don't know what you did for a living. I don't know the name of the bar where we met; I don't know what happened to you.
I only know that on the lonely streets of that city all those years ago, you were light, you were hope, you were possibility.
Today all gay men are my brothers. But you, Steve, you were my first.”]
romaincrisis
stormborns
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
