Tag: Gay history

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Connections, by Pat Gourley

Once again in writing on the early years of Harry Hay’s queer activism, the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, I am relying heavily on the wonderful collection of Hay’s writings edited by Will Roscoe from 1996 and aptly called Radically Gay. Do check out Will’s web site for further info on Radically Gay and Will’s many other books and writings: http://willsworld.org

In thinking about the topic “connections” I pulled Radically Gay off my bookshelf this morning to re-explore Hay’s concept of subject-Subject Consciousness, a profound and co-equal form of human connection, as opposed to subject-to-object. In scanning the book I came across the story of Hay’s first attempt at a call-to-arms to try and get homosexuals to begin organizing themselves. This manifesto from 1948 was rather awkwardly titled: Bachelors Anonymous (Radically Gay. Page 3.). Now that is a name describing gay men I think we can all be glad did not catch on. Two years later, with his then lover Rudi Gernreich and several others, the Mattachine movement was launched and the rest as they say “is history”. According to Roscoe within a few short years there were an estimated 5,000 homosexuals in California involved in one form or the other with the Mattachine movement. Remember this would have been in the early 1950’s in the era of McCarthyism.

Many would say that Hay’s greatest contribution to the LGBTQI movement was his insistence that we are a cultural minority. To quote Hay from Radically Gay:

“We are a Separate People with, in several measurable respects, a rather different window on the world, a different consciousness which may be triggered into being by our lovely sexuality” (Radically Gay. Page 6.)

I would contend that one of the “measureable respects” in how we differ from heterosexuals is a mode of communication, a form of connection, Hay called subject-to-Subject. In a position paper he wrote in 1976, while living in New Mexico entitled, Gay Liberation: Chapter Two- Serving Social and Political Change through our Gay Window, Hay lays out his vision of subject-Subject Consciousness (Radically Gay. Pages 201-216). I encourage all Queers to get the book and read especially this chapter.

Right out of the box he owns that this essay puts forth a Gay Masculine point of view while acknowledging that Feminine Consciousness also exists but is something quite different. I will go way out a limb here and suggest that the lesbian-feminist movement of the 1960’s and 1970’ was all over this non-objectifying form of connecting woman-to-woman.

The essence of subject-to-Subject is that of equal to equal. My very simplistic interpretation of this form of consciousness is that we gay men have a leg up on the hetero world in that we as men relating to men and women relating to women are better able to approach one another as equals without the burden of centuries of institutionalized objectification and sexism i.e. crudely put “Me Tarzan you Jane’.

However, even we as gay men, as opposed to straight men, approach relating to one another with a fair amount of objectifying cultural baggage. It may not involve the competition that comes with landing a mate for procreative purposes but we do often indulge in only hooking up with someone of the ‘right age, skin color, cock size, class background’ etc. This is an area where we need to go back in our lives to that first almost always non-sexual attraction to another boy that was so electrifying. That realization that even though I am ‘other’ so is he. A genuine sense of “equal to equal, sharer to sharer”, we are truly kindred spirits. What an exhilarating form of connecting that was for so many of us.

Gay men in particular still have as much work to do in this area of personal subject-to-Subject relating as we ever have especially once the roiling hormones of sexual attraction bubble to the surface. I am not sure that Grindr could not aptly be renamed “Bachelors Anonymous”. Though that first impulse for out of the box subject-to-Subject connecting still remains and hopefully is the essence of gay liberation. It remains our real gift to the world in this age of Trump regression and insanity.

© April 2017

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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Maps, by Pat Gourley

It has now been nearly 37 years since the second national Radical Fairie Gathering here in Colorado in the late summer of 1980. That event was the brainchild of Don Kilhefner, Harry Hay, John Burnside, and Mitch Walker with logistical help from an energetic collective of gay fairies here in Denver.

There are many parts of that event that have stuck with me for these several decades but one in particular comes to mind from time to time. This recollection involves a workshop led by Harry Hay that I did not attend but that I got a first hand report on from James Broughton, the eclectic poet and film maker. I may have been too caught up in dealing with the endless stream of issues that arose before and throughout the gathering to get to this particular workshop. Pressing issues like why was only vegetarian food available and the decision to not have heated water for the showers, something of a logistical challenge but dismissed finally as too bourgeois.

Harry was always all about trying to get us to answer the question “who are we”. According to the workshop report I received from James, Harry had declared that afternoon that we were all Shamans. This seemed fitting I supposed at the time since the confab was called A Spiritual Gathering for Radical Fairies. There are many complex layers to being a Shaman but the one I relate to most is that of “healer”. I do think it is a very worthwhile endeavor on our part to explore the many traditional and contemporary roles we queers are so often disproportionally drawn to.

These often-queer related roles were explored in some detail in Christian de la Huerta’s wonderful 1999 book, Coming Out Spiritually. He delineated the following roles we are often drawn to:

· Catalytic Transformers: A taste for revolution

· Outsiders mirroring society

· Consciousness scouts: Going first and taking Risks

· Scared Clowns and eternal youth: A Gay Young Spirit

· Keepers of beauty: Reaching for the Sacred

· Caregivers: Taking for Each Other

· Mediators: The In-between people

· Shamans and Priests: Sacred functionaries

· The Divine Androgyne: An evolutionary role?

· Gatekeepers; Guardians of the Gates

So in the spirit of this week’s topic of “maps” I would like to add one more role that if I contort my logic enough could be one that underpins all of those listed above and that would be cartographer.

A cartographer of course is a mapmaker. Maps are used to find one’s way from here to there. The larger society certainly has not historically, and is only now just beginning, to provide us with any positive space to get in touch with “whom we are”. I would dare to say that of the roles identified by de la Huerta all are initially engaged in as attempts to map our way. Forms of self-expression that often blossom into roles of great benefit to ourselves and society as a whole.

How do we find our way out from under the suffocating heterosexual cocoon we are born into? I would say it is by being the very creative cartographers we have learned to be. The maps are many and varied some written down but many come in the rich forms of oral history we have developed. What is this SAGE story telling group really but a form of mapmaking and sharing?

All of our maps provide guidance in answering those initial Mattachine questions of “who are we, where did we come from and what are we for”. In whatever forms our maps really are, at their most base level, they are the means for ‘pointing the way’. They are not forms of recruitment but rather loving crumbs left along the path to queer enlightenment by those who have come before, back to our earliest human ancestors. Our job as queer cartographers of course leads to these roles that have great altruistic benefit to the whole dance that is sentient life on earth.

© March 2017

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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Brother Townsend, by Cecil Bethea

Twenty-three passengers on the
Mayflower were ancestors of Prescott Townsend 
ancestors. Another forebear was the only man to sign the Declaration of
Independence, the Articles of the Confederation, and the Constitution. On
almost any route that Townsend took to grade school on Boston’s Beacon Hill, he
would past a monument to an ancestor or to an event in which some kinsman had
participated
Townsend was born in 1895 when the
blue bloods of Boston still considered themselves Brahmins and felt contented.  Henry James called them, “the sifted
few”.  Besides his inherited wealth, his
father was also the head of a large coal company.  When Townsend was fifteen his father
died.  At sixteen he told his mother that
he liked other boys.  She merely
answered, “Be careful.”.
During his eighteenth summer, he went
out West to work in logging and mining camps of Idaho and Montana where he met
people unlike himself.  The International
Workers of the World, derisively called the Wobblies were trying to organize a
union amongst the unskilled workers and hobos with whom Townsend worked.  He developed a lifelong interest in street
boys and drifters, the outcasts of society.

At Harvard, he evidently was more
interested in tennis than books, but he survived.  So many attractions drew him into a very
active social life.  After all, he was in
the SOCIAL REGISTER.  Harvard was very
pro-British during the first years of World War I.  To do his part, he joined the Naval
Reserve.  After the United States had
entered the war, Townsend was called to the colors, where he performed various
duties including being commanding officer of the Naval Unit at Texas A &
M.  After being demobilized, he returned
to Harvard to finish his senior year and later to enter law school.
Law school palled, so at the end of
his first year he quit.  So many
interesting things lured him on to various adventures. In the tropics of
Mexico, he was the co-discoverer of an unknown salamander which was named for
him.  In Paris, Andre Gide recommended
the deserts of North Africa.  Townsend
organized a small caravan with willing. complaisant, or hungry young men.  During his visit the Rift Rebellion, an
attempt by the Arabs to oust the French was taking place.  One small battle interrupted the progress of
his party.  He insisted that the fight
stop because he as an American had precedent over their squabbles.  Strangely enough the combatants ceased their
gunfire while the American passed.  How
things have changed for American tourist!
Back in Paris, Townsend became
involved with the Bohemians; in fact, Bohemia became a part of him for the rest
of his life.  In Boston he was the patron
of poets and a little theater.  Actually
he owned the building where the theater had its quarters.  His house became a home for various nomads of
the artistic and Gay worlds.  Although he
bragged he had never paid for sex, it was difficult to turn down a man who is
supplying you with bed and board.  During
his later years, all of his tenants chipped in to pay a handsome young man to
supply Townsend’s needs
During the 1950’s Townsend was much
more than a horny old man.  He was a Gay
activist.  Actually one could make that
ACTIVIST.  The Boston chapter of the
Mattachine Society had him for one of his co-founders.  Just as all the chapters had strife between
the radicals and the conservatives.  The
organization asked him to make his efforts to repeal the sodomy laws of
Massachusetts a personal cause rather an organizational one.  Townsend did not want understanding and
sympathy from the public but rights. 
Confrontational was his usual means of operation. On April 17th,
1965, he was in Washington for the first Gay demonstration.  Seven Gay men, three Lesbians, and a straight
woman friend marched in front of the White House. No doubt he was the oldest.  In 1970, he drove down from Boston for the
first parade to commemorate the Stonewall protest.  Even at seventy-six, he was amongst the first
two hundred to start the parade which grew to thousands.
In his later years Townsend was not
welcomed by other Gays because he had evidently forgotten the meaning of
personal hygiene and looked like derelict. 
No matter he was a participant in Gay functions.
Prescott Townsend should be
remembered for uncompromising attitude toward Gay rights, his early organizing
of Gay, and his early participation in early Gay demonstrations.
He was a Founding Brother.
© 9 Nov
2005 
About the Author 

Although I have done other things, my fame now rests
upon the durability of my partnership with Carl Shepherd; we have been together
for forty-two years and nine months as of today, August 18the, 2012.
        Although
I was born in Macon, Georgia in 1928, I was raised in Birmingham during the
Great Depression.  No doubt I still carry
invisible scars caused by that era.  No
matter we survived.  I am talking about
my sister, brother, and I .  There are
two things that set me apart from people. 
From about the third grade I was a voracious reader of books on almost
any subject.  Had I concentrated, I would
have been an authority by now; but I didn’t with no regrets.
        After
the University of Alabama and the Air Force, I came to Denver.  Here I met Carl, who picked me up in Mary’s
Bar.  Through our early life we traveled
extensively in the mountain West.  Carl
is from Helena, Montana, and is a Blackfoot Indian.  Our being from nearly opposite ends of the
country made “going to see the folks” a broadening experience.  We went so many times that we finally had
“must see” places on each route like the Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky and
the polo games in Sheridan, Wyoming.  Now
those happy travels are only memories.
        I was
amongst the first members of the memoir writing class.  While it doesn’t offer criticism, it does
offer feed back.  Also just trying to
improve your writing helps no end.
        Carl is
now in a nursing home, I don’t drive any more. 
We totter on. 
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When We First Knew, by Nicholas

At first, we laughed. That was how the years of fears and tears began.

It was a cool, breezy but sunny day in San Francisco as we took our lunches out to Union Square. Scattered high clouds and wisps of fog flew across the sky but not enough to dim the sun or block its warmth. Lloyd, Bill and I worked together at Macy’s and loved to spend our lunch breaks on a grassy patch in the busy park, the center of SF’s retail district. The elegantly turned out ladies who shop swirled around us. From Macy’s to Saks to Magnin’s to Neiman Marcus, they pursued their perfect ensembles. Meanwhile, tourists hurried about trying to catch a cable car ride up Powell Street over Nob Hill to Fisherman’s Wharf.

As we munched our sandwiches, Lloyd, I think, read a little item in the San Francisco Chronicle recapping a report in the Los Angeles Times about “gay cancer.” We chuckled at this latest concoction of the flourishing gay lib movement. We had our own newspapers, book stores, bars, choruses, churches, and clubs, so, of course, wanting nothing of the straight world, we would have our own cancer. We laughed.

That LA Times report told of the strange coincidence of young and otherwise healthy men who happened to be gay contracting a rare form of cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma which usually appeared only in elderly Jewish men. A cluster of these cases had shown up in Los Angeles. Nobody had a clue as to why.

We threw away the newspaper and went back to work.

Lloyd, Bill and I had by chance one day walked into a temp agency, not knowing each other. A staffer there said there were three openings in the back office at Macy’s receiving, sorting and distributing expensive fine jewelry and watches for 19 Northern California stores. We all said yes.

We got to know each other a little on the walk from the agency to Macy’s. Lloyd was a former theater major and loved disco. He and his lover Steven were regulars at Trocadero, San Francisco’s top disco in the 1980s. Bill had just moved to SF from Boston to get away from his family and to take part in the punk rock scene. He loved the B-52’s. And there was me. Recently arrived from Ohio, returning to the city I loved from a decade earlier, and hoping to start of new life, a real life, in this dynamic community with its combination of dramatic flash, earnest politics and organizations of every kind.

The three of us—me in my early 30s, Lloyd in his mid-20s, and Bill in his early 20s—hit it off from the start. We were all sassy then and made up for the routine job with a running repartee. Every morning we re-hashed that day’s episode of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, a serial in the Chronicle whose characters parodied prominent city figures. Guessing what was true to fact and what was made up kept many a conversation going for days. After work many times we went out together to a cabaret. And we went dancing at the glitzy, all-night disco parties at the Galleria. I remember one Halloween when Lloyd used his theater skills to deck us all out as Renaissance princes. I danced all that night in tights and a velvet doublet with puffed shoulders, a flouncy beret and feathered mask. I found out what fabulous really meant that night.

Through 1981 and ‘82, reports of “gay cancer” continued to grow and generated deep fear in the community. Suddenly, cases popped up in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and other places. It seemed to be a contagion that rapidly turned young men into withering, festering old men but nobody knew what or why or how it happened. Or who would be next. Then gay cancer grew into other diseases and came to be called Gay Related Immune Deficiency—GRID. Sexual transmission was believed to be involved somehow. Or maybe those disco queens just did too many drugs. Or too much alcohol and too much sex. Or a poor diet. Or not the right vitamins. Or not enough exercise, as if flinging yourself around a dance floor to a frantic beat isn’t exercise.

Bill, the youngest of us, was the first to get sick. He kept complaining of just not feeling well though his ill feeling didn’t match anything he knew, like flu or tummy ache. I told him that these weren’t days you didn’t want to be feeling well and urged him to see a doctor. He didn’t know any doctors, he said. So, one day I took him to see my doctor. I don’t know what the doctor said or did, but Bill seemed to get better. We even went dancing sometimes.

But then he didn’t feel like dancing. And some days he didn’t show up for work. And then stopped working. Soon he felt too weak to do much of anything. A few months later, he went back to his family in Boston. I lost touch with him but heard he died not long after that. He died before they could even name the disease that killed him.

Then Steven, Lloyd’s partner, got sick. Then two other guys in our little dancing circle. And then even Lloyd, whom I was closest to. It was like a stalker picking us off one by one. Pretty soon I was dancing alone. Suddenly, those corny, wrenching, kitschy disco ballads became desperate pleas longing for love and life.

I think back to that breezy day when we laughed and went on laughing until it was impossible to laugh and then some of us wondered if we would ever laugh again. I think back to the days of not knowing and then getting a phone call that let me know that I did know, did know another one sick and that I had come that much closer to it and maybe I’d be making the next phone call.

Wayne, a former boyfriend whom I’d dated for a few months, called one night. We exchanged the normal chat about how we were each doing but he hardly had to say anything to explain to me why, after months of not seeing each other, this call on this night.

“I have to tell you,” he said, “I was diagnosed with…,” something or other, the exact name of the obscure ailment escapes me or maybe I never even heard it. The word “diagnosed” told me enough. I had now, if I hadn’t already, definitely come into direct contact with whatever it was that caused this illness or combination of strange illnesses—nobody ever seemed to have just one thing going on.

I asked him how he was doing and feeling and he said he was doing pretty good. He was getting his support network together. Count me in on that, I said. Anything you need, I’m here. He said he was determined to beat this thing, an obligatory statement that everybody made back then not knowing if it had even the slightest chance of coming true. I said I hoped I could help.

“Maybe we should get together and go out for dinner or a movie,” I suggested. About the most anyone could offer then was hugs and hand holding. He liked that idea so we made a date. We got together a few times and I cooked a dinner for him sometimes. Wayne was lucky. He had lots of friends and we all made sure that he almost never had to be left alone. But each time I saw him, he was thinner and weaker and then he started getting seriously sick with high fevers, no ability to eat, and wasting away. His own body was killing him. He died six months later.

It would be a few years before science figured out anything. Eventually, a name was given this strange syndrome that turned healthy young men into withering, festering old men overnight. That name was Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS. And AIDS was about to dominate my social, romantic, political and professional life for some years to come.

© 2016

About the Author

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.

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A Magic Carpet Ride, by Gillian

Humankind does not, for the most part, create in order to promote and honor spirituality. We make killing machines and WMD’s. We compete to see who can build the tallest sky-scraper, the biggest and fastest anything and everything, and the securest vault to store our precious gold bars.

So, it was with great surprise that I received a serious spiritual kickstart from a creation weighing an estimated 54 tons; the largest piece of community folk art in the world, honoring almost 100,000 people.

Yes, of course, the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

I first saw it, or part of it, in Denver. I don’t recall where exactly it was displayed, Betsy thinks somewhere at DU, or when this would have been. Probably around 1990. What I do remember vividly is the effect it had on me.

Each quilt is 3 feet by 6, roughly the size of a human grave. At the time it was started, in 1987, many people who died of AIDS-related causes did not receive funerals, due to both the social stigma of AIDS felt by surviving family members and the outright refusal by many funeral homes and cemeteries to handle the deceased’s remains. Lacking a memorial service or grave site, The Quilt was often the only opportunity survivors had to remember and celebrate their loved ones’ lives. Each quilt is completely unique. They vary from no more than a name written in marker pen, to an embroidered name with a photograph, or many photographs. Some are covered in messages to the deceased. Many have belongings carefully attached, sometimes covered with carefully hoarded childhood toys and clothes; baby booties wailing out a mother’s heartbreak.

I couldn’t stand it. These young men – yes, others died, and are still dying in that terrible epidemic, but it was primarily stalking young gay men – these young men, so frequently reviled and feared by society, dying horrible and very premature deaths; and what do they and those who love them do? They sew a quilt, those terrible, frightening men! The pain of each individual represented there, and my anger at an ignorant bigoted society were too much. I didn’t think I could bear it. I couldn’t contemplate one more lost life. I was about to tell Betsy I would have to wait for her outside, when something strange, something wonderful, happened.

I felt the overwhelming love that had gone into those quilts flowing back out and engulfing me. It enveloped me in it’s warmth, like that of a cozy fire on a cold night, and with it came a sense of great peace, culminating in a flash of what I can only call pure joy, such as I have felt rarely in my life. It was strange, that jolt of joy in a time and place surrounded by death. But there it was. It came and it went so fast I felt almost dizzy. But the strong sense of love and peace remained, to banish the previous pain and sorrow and rage. You understand that I am looking back at it now from a place at least slightly further along the path of spirituality than at the time, so this is how I see it from a current perspective. I doubt I would have described it in quite the same way at the time. But then, with every memory we rewrite history. But it is my history, so I guess I’m allowed.

In any event, it was The Quilt which initially precipitated my journey along the spiritual path.

I wanted that jolt of joy again. And again. And again. It had been like a momentary high, and with one shot I was addicted. I wanted to live cocooned in love; to find that everlasting peace.

Easy to say! Not so easy to do. The spiritual path is a difficult one. You don’t simply decide, I’m going this way now, and go. It takes work, and, like so many things, eternal vigilance. I frequently lose my way, stumbling off the spiritual path into those nearby dark places where all the bad things lurk – those negative thoughts and emotions, always waiting to pounce. But at least I have reached a stage where, I cannot claim always, but often, I can stop myself, wherever I am at that moment. I stop. I relax. I do some deep breathing. I rest right there, lost as I may be among the good, bad, and ugly. I gather that spiritual quilt of love and peace, and wrap myself in it’s warmth. And usually it works it’s miracle and sooner or later I find myself back in the welcoming light of my spiritual being, back once again on the right path. Rescued, again, from the dark scary places, It’s a magic carpet ride. As I continue along my path, I am treated, very occasionally, to those starbursts of pure joy. But more importantly, I am, for the most part, completely at peace: with myself, with my world, and with everything in it. So I think it very appropriate that the Quilt, or technically The Names Project which began it, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, but disappointing that it did not receive the award. It seems to me the perfect candidate. If others would treat adversity in the same way, the world would be a very different place. Sadly, even trying to imagine the Nazis or those currently flocking to join ISIS, deciding instead to sew a quilt, is so impossible it’s just laughable.

Why is that? I ask myself, sadly. I hear no answering reply.

I saw a part of The Quilt once again when Betsy and I took part in the March on Washington in 1993. The last time it was displayed in it’s entirety was on the Washington Mall in 1996 – something I would love to have seen but didn’t, and I will probably never get another chance. The Quilt is now too large to be viewed all together. It is stored in twelve feet square sections, housed in Atlanta. These section, placed end to end, would run for over eight miles. If you have never seen any part of it, you might want to add it to your Bucket List; things to do before you die. I’m sure it would do just as much for your soul as gazing at the Taj Mahal in the moonlight. And the trip would be a whole lot cheaper!

© June 2015

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Doc Susie, Pioneer Doctor by Betsy

So many women, so little time. This is what I have discovered while exploring the idea of exploring famous women–women in history who were explorers of a sort in their own fields.

There are hundreds of women of whom I have a bit of knowledge, but some I particularly admire; and for varying reasons, women in whom I have a bit more interest than others. One is Susan Anderson otherwise known as Doc Susie. Susan Anderson was a pioneer in the field of medicine. She made no great discoveries nor did she posses any extraordinary medical skills. But still she was truly a noteworthy practitioner and certainly a remarkable woman.

Susan Anderson was born in 1870 in Indiana. She attended medical school at the University of Michigan and graduated in 1897. From there she settled in Cripple Creek, Colorado where her family was living at the time. She had planned to have a practice there, however, women were generally not accepted as capable doctors then so she moved to Greeley, Colorado where she practiced nursing for 6 years.

Meantime she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and her condition grew worse while in Greeley. So she decided to move to Fraser, Colorado, a very cold and dry area where she could have an advantage against her condition.

In the early twentieth century there was nothing in Fraser but a sawmill and a few shacks.

Many who knew her wondered why a woman would want to go to such a cold, lifeless place. Just getting there in winter was daunting. The train trip over Rollins Pass was treacherous and unbelievably cold in the passenger car.

But she arrived there safely and settled in a small shack. Susan knew better than to announce upon her arrival that she was an M.D. She was there to cure her health condition not to confront prejudice. However, it was not long before the town folks learned that she was, in fact, a doctor. There were no other doctors in the area. What health care there was was provided by the local veterinarian. She found herself providing veterinarian services and doing so with great success. So it was not long before people realized the lady doctor in town was a skilled physician and soon she had built a practice. Her reputation spread and she was soon treating injuries and illnesses of the men and their families in the remote logging camps as well as the folks in town. In winter she would often trek on foot through deep snow to reach her patients.

“Once, Doc Susie escorted a small boy by rail to Colorado General Hospital in Denver. She announced to the intern on duty that the child needed an appendectomy. The intern was about to throw them both out when a doctor intervened. Once examining the boy they found he truly needed the operation. The hospital doctor turned to the intern and announced, ‘Meet Doctor Susan Anderson, the finest rural physician in Western Colorado…the best diagnostician west of the divide.’

“During construction of the 6 mile long Moffat Tunnel, designed to replace the treacherous Moffat Road line over Rollins Pass, Doc Susie was asked to become the Coroner for Grand County.

“They needed a ‘real’ doctor that was able to confront the Tunnel Commission about the accidents and working conditions that faced workers on a daily basis in this dangerous tunnel. It is estimated that 19 men were killed and hundreds injured during its construction. At times, Susie would have to go into the tunnel to care for the injured and retrieve bodies.”*

The Moffat Tunnel opened in 1928. Doc Susie continued practicing in Fraser and Grand County until 1956. She died in April, 1960 at the age of 90. Apparently her efforts to improve her health were effective.

Susan Anderson, M.D. was inducted into the Colorado Woman’s Hall of Fame in 1997.

Exploring the lives of extraordinary women is always an uplifting and inspiring experience. Ahhhhh! So many women, so little time.

*ellensplace.net

© 2015

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver women’s chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change). She has been retired from the Human Services field for about 15 years. Since her retirement, her major activities include tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with National Sports Center for the Disabled, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and enjoys spending time with her four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 25 years, Gillian Edwards.

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A Salute to PFLAG by Betsy

“I knew my son was gay. He didn’t want to tell me. I told him I loved him and nothing else mattered. He didn’t believe I was accepting, but I was.” These are the words of Jeanne Manford, cofounder of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, the internationally known organization of allies of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered.

The concept for the organization was born in 1972 when Jeanne Manford marched with her gay son Morty in New York’s Christopher Street Liberation Day March, the precursor to today’s Pride parade. She carried a sign which read “Parents of Gays Unite in Support for Our Children.” This brought on cheers yelling, crying and clapping and to Jeanne’s surprise many people came up to her during the march, shook hands, hugged her, begged her to talk to their parents. The requests continued after the parade with hundreds of telephone calls from gay and lesbian people wanting Jeanne to speak to their parents. It became clear to her that a support group was needed. Thus the first meeting was held in March 1973 in Greenwich Village. Twenty people attended.

Jeanne continued answering the calls and began traveling the country making appearances on radio and tv promoting the cause.

By 1979 many similar groups had sprung up around the country. By 1980 the first PFLAG National office was established in Los Angeles followed by the incorporation and granting of tax exempt status to the organization which now included some 20 groups. The headquarters was relocated to Denver in 1987 under President Elinor Lewallen, whom many of us knew well. PFLAG took off in the 1990’s and the national office employed an executive director and some staff and moved to Washington DC.

The administration of George H.W. Bush became the first to be directly supportive of gay rights when the then PFLAG president Paulette Goodman sent Barbara Bush a letter asking for her support. Her reply was “I firmly believe that we cannot tolerate discrimination against any individuals or groups in our country. Such treatment always brings with it pain and perpetuates intolerance.” Unbeknownst to some powers that be, the first lady’s comments were given to the press and caused a political maelstrom.

Today 40 years after it’s inception PFLAG has grown to a network of 350 chapters worldwide with more than 200,000 members. Perhaps one of the greatest services provided by PFLAG over the years has been the dissemination of information to educational institutions and communities of faith and the general public nationwide. This along with personal and group support for parents who sometimes are in tears and in shock and are trying to understand.

I became involved in PFLAG around 2003 when I learned that the Denver Chapter was meeting in my neighborhood. I decided to attend a meeting.

At the meeting I found many acquaintances, gays, lesbians, and straight.

The chair of the board was an old acquaintance from my married days–she had worked with my husband at CU medical school. I think she was surprised to see me there. Before I knew it I found myself on the board of directors of the Denver Chapter. There I remained for 7 years having held the office of president for 2 years until my tenure ended due to term limits.

I was glad to be active and committed to this organization. I believe that PFLAG, being an organization of allies, has been in the right place at the right time to help open people’s minds and bring about attitude and policy changes.

The credibility of parents who love their children just as they are and want to support them can be very powerful. I thought at first that I knew a good bit of what being both the parent of a lesbian and being a lesbian myself was about. But I quickly discovered at PFLAG that being a straight parent of a lesbian is very much a different thing. My eyes were opened when in a “coming out” support group meeting parents were talking about how difficult it is to come out to their friends and family. Some were having difficulty with this, fearing rejection by those closest to them, and had been closeted themselves for a long time. It had never occurred to me that these straight people had the same fear issues that their gay children did, and that they, like their gay and lesbian children had to summon up some courage to “come out” and reveal the secret of their son or daughter.

Our chapter’s major activities during my active years included

1. Speaking with school groups, students, staff, and parents to promote better understanding and acceptance of GLBT. Working with schools who have bullying issues to address. Providing support and education to parents and school personnel around transgender issues.

2. Speaking similarly with other community groups including churches.

3. Providing educational materials put out by the national office.

4. Providing an emergency “helpline” for parents or others in distress.

5. Providing a monthly support meeting with a trained facilitator for parents whose sons or daughters have just come out to them. The support meeting is followed by a program featuring a speaker or panel of speakers always bringing enlightenment to their audiences.

6. Advocating for marriage equality.

Will the support and advocacy of PFLAG be a continuing need in the future? I believe there will always be a need. The specific activities of the organization may change with the times. With more awareness, more children are coming out and often at a younger age than in past decades.

Although there has been increased acceptance and policy changes, there is still much misinformation and misunderstanding and hatred of homosexual people. The more recent emergence of awareness of transgender issues by itself presents huge challenges to families involved and to advocacy groups. In my opinion PFLAG will be in business for a long time.

Denver, 2014

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver women’s chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change). She has been retired from the Human Services field for about 15 years. Since her retirement, her major activities include tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with National Sports Center for the Disabled, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and enjoys spending time with her four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 25 years, Gillian Edwards.

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Summer Camp by Betsy

Unlike their counterpart the Boy
Scouts of America, the Girl Scouts of the USA have historically been accepting
of their lesbian members–girls and adult leaders and professional staff
members.   The policy regarding sexual
orientation is and always has been not to condemn or condone any sexual
behavior, and that displays of or promotion of any lifestyle over another is
inappropriate and has no place in the conduct of adult leaders or girl
members.  Inappropriate conduct sexual or
otherwise is subject to evaluation and condemnation by the administrative
authorities of the organization.
I had a 25 year career as a
professional staff member and about 40 years as a girl member and a volunteer
leader and administrator.  In those 65
years I have known many women both gay and straight who have been dedicated to
the Girl Scout program and ideals.
The Girl Scout program and the
places where it is carried out offer girls something unique; namely, a place
for girls only, a place where girls can carry out their activities and projects
without the presence of boys.  In a
girls-only environment, the dynamics are different from an environment where
boys are present.  Expectations of the
girls are higher and their performance is often higher.  The stereotypes assigned by society to
females usually disappear in an all-girl setting.  Stereotypes of acceptable female roles simply
do not apply in such circumstances. 
Studies have shown clearly that students in an all girl setting
consistently out perform those in co-ed settings.  Girl Scouting offers this all-girl setting
where recreational activities can be carried out.
It seems that homophobia has never
been an issue in my experience in girl scouting with one exception.  Summer camp. 
One can certainly understand how a
college aged lesbian seeking summer employment would be attracted to the Girl
Scout summer camp counsellor job.  How
many times have I heard these words from many of my lesbian acquaintances: “Oh,
you worked for the Girl Scouts?  I was a
summer camp counsellor when I was in college.”
There are very few times the
homophobia monster reared its ugly head in the 25 years I was with Mile Hi
Council staff.   Both were very ugly
indeed. 
I was not involved in the camp
program so I heard this story second hand but I am sure it’s accurate.  During one two-week session of camp somehow
word got out that there were two lesbians on the camp staff–maybe more.  The word got to some of the campers’
parents–parents who did not want their children exposed to homosexuality.  In the middle of the session two of the
parents appeared one day at camp and publicly and loudly demanded that their
children be removed immediately from whatever they were doing.  The mothers were there to take there darlings
home lest they fall under the damaging 
influence of the lesbian counsellors.
The second appearance of the
monster occurred when an acquaintance, the administrator of a camping program
told me that she had been directed by her CEO to be sure not to recruit camp
staff from the lesbian community.  How do
we know an applicant is a lesbian,” she asked.  
“We can’t ask.”  “They all have
short hair,” was the reply from the CEO, who, by the way, herself had never
been known to have anything but short hair.
Ahh! Summer camp.  No wonder I loved it so much myself.  Crawling with lesbians.  How is it that I ended up with a life-long
partner who doesn’t even know what summer camp is!
© 25 August 2014
About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community
including PFLAG, the Denver women’s chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for
Change).  She has been retired from the
Human Services field for about 15 years. 
Since her retirement, her major activities include tennis, camping,
traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with National Sports
Center for the Disabled, and learning. 
Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close
relationship with her three children and enjoys spending time with her four
grandchildren.  Betsy says her greatest
and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of
25 years, Gillian Edwards.
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John Burnside–Sweetness Personified by Pat Gourley

I was first introduced to John Burnside in the 1978 classic queer film The Word is Out. John was Harry Hay’s loving companion from 1962 until Harry’s death in 2002 with John to follow him in death in 2008. The documentary is still available in DVD format today and for those not familiar with the movie it is a series of talking head interviews with twenty-six gay men and lesbians that are very brave, raw and captivating in their honest presentation. What struck me the most about the movie was the segment featuring Hay and Burnside. They were interviewed at their place of residence at the time a compound nestled in the San Juan Pueblo in Northern New Mexico. The image of the two of them walking hand-in-hand through a meadow along the banks of the Rio Grande has stuck with me since first seeing it on film thirty-six years ago.

At that time I don’t think I knew that Harry was the founding spirit behind the seminal queer Mattachine Society decades before in Los Angeles. One had to be quite the earnest, independent, gay historian in those days to get to this piece of history. The roots of the modern gay movement just weren’t taught in American history classes much in those days. The film’s images of these two older very political gay men obviously in a loving relationship for years was startling to me and I thought I need to meet these two. Thanks to a powerful lesbian woman named Catherine I knew through the Gay Community Center in Denver at the time I was able to connect with them and the rest is history.

My first impressions of John at my house on Madison Street in the fall of 1978 were that he was the most gentle, fey person I had ever met. His dedication, unwavering support and love for his partner Harry were at all times evident. The meaning of ‘fey’ often conjured up these days I think is effeminate but the definition is really “other worldliness”. This quality seems to best be summed up by his own words. A short bit of poetry from John:

“Hand in hand we walk, as wing tip to wing tip
our spirits roam the universe, finding lovers everywhere.
Sex is music.
Time is not real.
All things are imbued with spirit.”

John and Harry were at the time I met them deeply involved in the creation of the phenomenon that would become the “Radical Fairies” along with a couple other souls named Don Kilhefner and Mitch Walker. Planning for the first Radical Fairie gathering in the Arizona desert was already roughly taking shape and would happen the following September in 1979.

John and Harry were an amazing couple. Amazing in how different they seemed yet how wonderfully they melded almost into one. Harry while almost always spouting very right-on analysis of almost any situation could be at times intimidating, combative even and most certainly prickly though a real teddy bear under it all. John on the other hand was always flashing the warmest and most welcoming of smiles that often belied the acute insights he could bring to almost any dialogue on a wide range of subjects. And boy could he talk, often well into the night long after I was able to hear and absorb much and I am sure rudely nodding off in his presence.

For me personally John was often great at taking Harry’s more erudite and dense pronouncements on the state of gay men and their liberation and translating them in very warm and understandable ways. Sort of like taking raw queer theory and serving it up as warm apple cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on it, mmm good, yes I want more of that, please.

John’s power was on display for me personally on several occasions when Harry would get himself into meltdown mode and John would quietly and skillfully step in and make things all right again. I mean you could not have the father of modern gay liberation be non-functional for too long, he was needed. John knew this and was always available to provide the salve to whatever wound had just been ripped open.

One small example of this comes to mind around the trip the three of us took to Chaco Canyon in the late 1980’s. We were in separate vehicles since they planned to head back to L.A. after we visited Chaco. Their truck broke down along highway 285 just a few miles outside of Denver and this threw Harry into a major non-communicative funk, probably because it was a frequent occurrence for their 20 plus year old Datsun pick-up. John stepped up immediately and had me driving him down to a Napa auto parts store for the fix needed that he had very skillfully diagnosed. This all done by a man without a driver’s license and someone I never in over thirty year had seen behind the wheel, but was always quietly and firmly in control.

I have reams of correspondence much of it hand written from Harry but only a couple of letters from John. One I received just a few short months after meeting them here in Denver and it was John very kindly reaching out to me about a frustrated love affair I was involved in at the time we met. The bottom-line for me was I should have avoided a relationship with a closeted Mormon E.D. doctor with a bad cocaine habit but live and learn. John however approached my torment with loving advice based on his obviously complex and mercurial relationship with Harry and a couple of their New Mexico friends who as he described them were a foursome but without shared sex beyond the two dyads involved.

I won’t quote from the philosophical part of the long hand written letter but rather share a bit of the queer theory he laid on me towards the end of the tome:

“Heterosexual false assumptions are based on taking their beliefs about themselves (mostly false, for them, in truth) as absolutes. We Gays start with a different set of possibilities and the power to deal flexibly with our feelings and hopes. We must not allow ourselves to become frozen when those hopes are frustrated.” John Burnside-March 15, 1979. Sage advice from a great gay Sage.

I seriously doubt the Radical Fairie movement would have come into being without John Burnside’s loving and continual ongoing massage of the message. Not to be too trite here but if Harry brought the ‘radical’ piece to the trip then John certainly brought the ‘fairie’ piece. I’ll end by quoting Bob Dylan: “I like my sugar sweet” and John Burnside was certainly sweetness personified.


© July 2014

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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A Circle of Loving Companions by Pat Gourley

Harry Hay is best known for founding the Mattachine Society in 1950 an organization certainly seminal as far as the modern gay movement is concerned. He is also fairly well known for helping create the Radical Fairies in an attempt to redirect what he felt was the disheartening slide of the Queer movement into dreary assimilation. Hmm, I wonder how that worked out?

The Radical Fairies had a definite spiritual bent and cultivated a rejection of straight culture. As I have written here on other occasions I feel it was the devastation of AIDS and the resulting preoccupation with survival and death for so many and in so many insidious ways that took the gas out of the Radical Fairie movement. That though is not to deny that Radical Fairies are not still vibrantly around today here and there.

Another less well-known effort of Harry’s was the formation in 1965 of a queer collective that he called a “Circle of Loving Companions” an entity lasting for decades. I’ll quote a brief description of this group from Stuart Timmon’s biography of Hay called The Trouble with Harry Hay (1990): “ The Circle was often politically active, and Harry stressed the name symbolized how all gay relationships could be conducted on the Whitmanesque ideal of the inclusive love of comrades. The Circle’s membership specifications were based on affinity…”

I first became aware of the name by way of written correspondence I had with Harry and his loving companion John Burnside in the late 1970’s. The phrase “Circle of Loving Companions” was frequently the letterhead on his written correspondence to me in those days and was also stamped on the outside of envelopes as part of the return address. I still do prefer “loving companion” as a descriptor of intimate queer relationships that sits with me much better than partner, lover, significant other or the current rage “husband”.

If I didn’t at the time I should have realized that I was a part of a genuine Circle of Loving Companions that was formed here in Denver out of the intoxicating crucible that was gay liberation the 1970’s. Viable remnants of this Circle remain in my life today but significantly depleted over the years, primarily by AIDS.

I met the most significant loving companion I have ever had in the fall of 1980 shortly after the second Radical Fairie Gathering here in Colorado in August of that year and a few short weeks after returning from my father’s funeral back in Illinois. David was at the time the Methodist minister in Aspen Colorado and was a close friend with one of the roommates I had in our house up in Five Points. He was visiting this friend and staying at our house when we were first introduced. We actually had a bit of a courtship consisting of a couple of dates before we fucked, something extremely rare in the gay male world of 1980. Over the ensuing months though I realized that I did have a deep affinity for this person and he soon left his church in Aspen and moved into the house on north Downing

Street that was sort of the Radical Fairie vortex for Denver at the time. He must have felt a real affinity for me to make such a bold change.

In hindsight I think it best to have a primary loving companion when one is part of a Circle of Loving Companions and David certainly filled that role for me. Our affinity only deepened over the next fifteen years until his death from AIDS in 1995. The nineteenth anniversary of his death is this week on Wednesday the 17th, 2014.

Since his death I have been involved in one other long-term relationship. I guess you can call 11 years a long-term relationship and though it had its moments there didn’t seem to have the same sustained ‘affinity’ in so many ways I had with David. This second long term partner did not seem to fit as well into my circle of friends and this to me is something that any current partner I might fall in love with would need to accommodate. Something to keep in mind is introducing any prospective partner to your circle of companions sort of like straight folks do with each other’s biological families.

So I guess any new partner would need to be a bit of a collectivist and tolerate the coming and goings of my circle and I would certainly need to be accommodating of his companions. I also would insist on dependability. You need to always be there for me and me for you. Sex at this stage of the dance is quite peripheral to the whole enchilada and though mutual orgasms occasionally that involve seeing Jesus would be nice they are definitely not required.

As mentioned above my circle of loving companions is much depleted from what it was 35 years ago but still limping along. It has though it seems gotten much more difficult to add new members. If anyone is feeling an ‘affinity’ and is interested in interviewing for a position in the Circle we could meet over coffee.

© September 2014

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.