Tag: Gay Community Center of Colorado

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Don’t! by Lewis Brown

When I was in a Methodist Church last September 2016, many people in the congregation were becoming overly excited by the American election events. One of the lady parishioners, Kim, stood up and said “We go to church to worship God, that is we do not [Don’t] put our trust and hope in the princes of this world but in God only.” On one level, I agree with her. Donald Trump, as hostile as he is, is only a paper tiger as Mao Tse-Tung would have said.


Last Sunday I attended the Congregational Meeting of the Metropolitan Community Church of the Rockies (MCCR). The pastor, Rev. Dr. Gail Atchison said they were having severe financial problems. I learned for instance that the large commercial gas oven in the kitchen had “blown up,” so that they did not even have a functioning kitchen for catering and hosting events.

To be realistic, looking around, the only gay businesses that actually have any big bucks is the gay porno industry. And they would love to contribute to gay social agencies but cannot since they are considered, fairly or unfairly, to be moral if not legal criminals. The answer is a clever business man takes the contributions and launders the money legally of course and makes the cash available to our worthy causes. In the past the gay porno industry has contributed generously to AIDS related service and health agencies. Why not a new commercial gas stove for MCCR?

Some of the gay porno companies are Titan Men, Falcon Video, Raging Stallions and Hot House Videos. They have become big businesses.

At the MCCR Congregational Meeting we also discussed the currently proposed Mission Statement which, unlike the previous more militant Mission Statement, did not say “to develop a sense of community and the building up of the gay and Lesbian community.” It did speak of advocating for poor people and the homeless but was not much different from what a Congregational Church would have in its Mission Statement.

The pastor Gail Atkinson also stated that she was trying (I think heroically) to get more parishioners by scouring local community organizations one of which was the Denver Gay and Lesbian Community Center. She said that when she went there, no one had ever heard of the Metropolitan Community Church of the Rockies or of the denomination Metropolitan Community Church. Imagine, the Gay and Lesbian Center’s staff members did not even know that the gay and Lesbian Church was located about 10 blocks away from the Center building. The right hand did not know what the left had was doing. Mind-boggling. The Center staff members were also quite hesitant to promise to refer any young gay and Lesbian people to a “church” or to any church, given the assumed hostility of most churches to gay people.

Consider the Hassidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York. They are well organized. Their business leaders have cornered the market on the local photograph apparatus business, including the new digital cameras, and are well established in the diamond trade business, both of these businesses have become profitable. The typical Hassidic family therefore has an income from one of these businesses and lives in an apartment building owned by a Hassidic Jew so that the landlord – tenant hostility is avoided. The landlord wants the tenant to survive and thrive – for religious reasons.

So, when I hear phrases like “organize and empower the Lesbian and gay community,” I think this is what I mean. Organize like the Hassidic community in Brooklyn. They have successfully organized and the whole community has found a way to survive and thrive despite the hostility of our current politicians and hostile politicians of the past.

© 22 May 2017

About the Author

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.

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Lavender University, by Pat Gourley

My involvement in the Gay Community Center began back in 1976. My first volunteer duties started very shortly after it opened at its first location in the 1400 block of Lafayette. This was an old brick two story duplex that I think was owned at the time by the Unitarian Church on the corner and the Center was renting the space from them. My main duties initially involved phone volunteering and coordinating other phone volunteers along with building our database of referrals, which we kept on a single Rolodex! A majority of our calls were for social referrals to local bars and bathes and the emerging number of local LGBT organizations, and also not a few requests for gay-sensitive therapists and health care providers. We referred men frequently to the Men’s Coming Out Group still in existence today, which met early on in the Unitarian Church itself, their library I think.

1976 was the year I started nursing school and eventually did my Community Health rotation at the Center. One of my nursing student activities was participating, as a tester, in a weekly STD clinic at the Center on Friday evenings. I am not sure why it wasn’t on a Monday rather than a Friday since the business would have probably been more brisk after a busy weekend in the late seventies, the age of thriving bathhouses. These clinics involved a fair amount of counseling on STD’s and how you got them and how to possibly avoid getting them. Unfortunately, though, we gay men rather cavalierly thought of STD’s as just the cost of doing business and not something to particularly strive to avoid. We drew blood for syphilis and did throat, penis and rectal cultures for gonorrhea. HIV was still several years away.

My Center volunteer activities drifted from phone work and coordination to milking penises and swabbing buttholes to the much more highbrow efforts involved with a program of the Center called Lavender University. Where or from whom the name came has been lost in the mist but it was a queer take off at the time on the very successful Denver Free University. I was a member of the Center’s University Staff from its inception until probably early 1984 when The Center kind of imploded around a variety of issues including extreme tension between some community-based organizations, the tumultuous resignation of Carol Lease and the demands and urgency of the emerging AIDS epidemic. I do believe much of this tumult was fueled in no small part at the time by often-blatant sexism and an at times over the top focus on the perceived supremacy of the penis within the gay male community but that is a topic for another time.

Our quasi mission statement read as follows: “Lavender University of the Rockies is a free school by and for the lesbian and gay communities of Colorado. It is dedicated to the free exchange of ideas, to the examination of diverse points of view and to free speech without censorship.” In addition to being on the University staff I was an occasional instructor offering often erudite classes including one called: Evolving Queer Spirituality or The Potential Significance of Paganism For Gay Men further subtitled “might Christianity just be paganism with the gayness taken out.” In only three of the course catalogs I managed to keep I also see I offered a class on the Tarot and one year a November 1st celebration of the Harvest Sabbat. Yeah, what can I say this was certainly my “witch-phase?”

The most fulfilling repeated offering I made though was one for gay men and involved a series of writings we would read and dissect by gay visionaries including Edward Carpenter, Gerald Heard, Harry Hay, Mitch Walker, and Don Kilhefner among others. These offerings were usually weekly and involved spirited group discussion around that week’s selected piece and food. Most of the sessions were held at the Center or my house up in Five Points. Many of the attendees were budding radical fairies and some friendships were made that last until this day.

These were probably the peak years of what I will rather presumptuously and ostentatiously call my Queer-Radical-Phase. These years of my life involved hours and hours of community work and play with many other often very receptive comrades in arms. It was a very exciting and challenging time for me personally and I think for the larger LGBT community, the world was truly becoming our oyster. It was constantly being reinforced for me on a daily basis that Harry Hay was right-on that we were a distinct people and a real cultural minority.

It is my belief that it was the slowing emerging AIDS nightmare that derailed this truly grassroots revolution and really forced a refocusing of our energies into survival. The tensions created by that little retrovirus locally nearly led to the end of The Gay and Lesbian Community Center and certainly to lots of soul searching and critique of the rich expressions of much of the gay male world we had come to know and love in the 1970’s.

I like to fantasize that if AIDS had not come along we would have seen a much more radical queer community and force for seminal social change than we are today. The community might have led a nationwide revolt that would have tossed Ronald Reagan out of office in 1984 and reversed the countries unfortunate slide into oligarchy. Perhaps igniting a re-election of Jimmy Carter and a return of the solar panels to the roof of the White House. We might well have been in the vanguard of the dissolution of traditional marriage, replacing it with a much more polymorphous and rich arrangement of human interaction and loving support.

A severe curtailing and redefinition of the American military into a force truly devoted to peace on earth would have been another goal. Instead of the race to the local recruiters office for those with no other economic choice everyone would do two years or more of service to the community that would have been of great benefit to the entire world and health of the planet. But perhaps I am putting way too much on our plate or …. hmm … maybe I did do too much LSD in the 70’s.

© April 2014

[Editor’s note: This story was published previously in this blog.]

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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My Earliest Queer Memory, by Pat Gourley

This is more difficult to
write on than I at first thought it would be. I believe the realization that I
was different or as Harry Hay was fond of saying “other” was a gradual process
with many little steps and discoveries along the way. This process of
realization long preceded my actual coming out which I define largely as an
internal acceptance and certainly not an initial sexual act. Again paraphrasing
Hay it took years to realize that the only thing I did have in common with
straight people was what I did in bed.
I think this is true of
queer awakening in general in that it rarely initially involves the sexual but
rather a profound and deeply real sense that we are not like our peers in some
fundamental way.  This may take the form
of what society would call gender nonconformity perhaps in dress, actions,
mannerisms and speech but again I think it can be even less blatant and more
elusive than that.  These expressions
despite their honest innocence are often met with quick and at times harsh
rebuke. For me personally it took the forms of loving to cook and garden and
when we did play cowboys and Indians I always insisted on being Crazy Horse or
Cochise, an interesting twist on being “other”.
Oh and of course there
were those times when we played school and I was always the nun.  Prancing around with a couple bath towels
serving as a shawl and headgear for a makeshift nun’s habit. This was behavior that
should have been a siren-like clue to somebody that this little kid was not
fitting into the norm.
My first sexual encounter
with another man was a spectacular bit of mutual masturbation that took place
in the biology lab of my Catholic High School with a wonderful man 20 years my
senior in the spring of 1967. This was though preceded by years of many little
messages some subtle and some others not so subtle that hey I wasn’t like a lot
of other little boys. I date my real coming out though to almost a decade
later. The Gay Community Center of Colorado and the LGBT folks I met there
playing a very significant role in cementing my comfort with my queer identity.
For years I was
fascinated and aroused especially by older men and any snippet of their naked
physiques I could spot and believe me I went out of my way to catch a glimpse
whenever I could.  My dad’s beautiful naked
ass being on rare occasions a wonderful source of inspiration! I was in some
ways sheltered from blatant homophobia in the form of overt harassment because
of my fey nature in part by the all-encompassing cocoon of Catholicism that
totally enveloped my life at home and at school. Something that I really only
broke free of when I went off to college in the fall of 1967.
Though I have no doubt I
was exhibiting less than desirable “little boy” qualities from an early age it
wasn’t until about the 4th grade that I started to respond ever so
indirectly to little cues that this could be a bumpy ride. In hindsight it all
proved pretty smooth from about 1960 until the full Monty so to speak that was
my life by the mid-1970’s. I attribute my coming out being relatively smooth
with little drama , even though it took about a decade and a half, to wonderful
parents and a host of older teachers and mentors along the way that were
accepting and even celebrating of difference and not of course only in the
queer arena.
Queer awakening is rich
with possibilities for growth that are unique to us as a people.  If we make it through this process alive, and
most of us do, we come out the other side so often strong and vibrant
individuals. Despite gains in the areas of marriage equality and military
access the coming out process for most remains initially a unique character
building solo-process with still very few societal supports and unfortunately
to this day many very negative messages. These admonitions to shun the “other”
may not be as blatant and intense as in the past but they still remain and are
quite daunting for little queer folk.
Again it is amazing how
many of us make it through to the other side stronger than ever. And this is
why continued support of community-based organizations that programmatically facilitate
the coming out process remains paramount in moving the gay agenda forward. This
Story Telling Group comes quickly to mind as one such effort.
© 17 Jul 2015 
About
the Author 
I
was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy
Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver,
Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San
Francisco, California.