Thank you all for coming and welcome to tonight's conversation, which is centering on gay life in Bloomington
in the 1970s. We're probably gonna go a little past the 1970s. Many of you have seen the exhibit upstairs,
which tells the story of how a group of activists and the city officials who were willing to listen
to them made Bloomington one of the first handful of cities in the country to pass an ordinance prohibiting
discrimination based on sexual orientation.
And you might also know how this particular exhibit came to be. It grew out of the Monroe County History
Center's ongoing initiative to collect pieces of LGBTQ plus history and tell those stories that have
too often been forgotten or pushed aside. So as part of that initiative, we have collected and we continue
to collect oral history from people like Donna Faye Reeves and Michael Bedwell, people with memories
to share and stories to tell about Bloomington's gay history. And if you are in this room tonight,
I hope that you will either leave your name outside on the table or come up to me and give me your contact
information because I know that there are so many stories in this room as well and I would love to connect
with you. And I haven't actually introduced myself. My name is Annabel Vosmeyer. I guess curated the
exhibit upstairs and I'm a volunteer here at the center. We have History Center staff scattered around
the room as well. We have Hillary and Hunter who are the curators who've been working on this project.
So what are we gonna do tonight?
Tonight, we're not going to focus on the dates. We're not going to focus on the wording of each particular
policy. But we just knew how delightful it was to sit down and chat with Michael and Donna Fang. And
we knew that they had a wealth of memories and personal anecdotes about what it was like to live in
Bloomington at this point in our shared history. And many of you as well. So we wanted to give you a
chance to hear directly from them. And then I hope at the end, we'll have time for just a few memories
from the audience as well.
So let me close on this. So Charlotte Zitlow had really hoped that she would be here tonight to talk
about her experience. She was on the city council that passed this ordinance. She unfortunately is not
able to attend tonight because of her health. And I know that she is so disappointed to not be here.
She's really brokenhearted about it. But she has shared a statement that she wrote just for us tonight.
and it will be presented by Jeff Richardson who besides being a friend of Starlet was a member of the
audience in 1975 and a newly elected city council member who started in 1976. So I know that you will
all join me in sending well wishes get well soon to Starlet and I'll go ahead and pass my mic over to
Jeff. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much. Can you hear me all right?
This is from Charlotte Zietlow, and with the help of Lynn Schwartzberg, who's been by her side this
past week when she was published from a very serious fall. Charlotte, as some of you know, is 90 years
old, and she's been almost nearly 60 years active in public service, with some remarkable background.
She was with that city council the first time
Democrats swept in with Franklin Foskey. She was president for the first few years. After that first
term, a few years later, 81 through 88, she was a county commissioner. And there's many, many other
accolades. But she continues to be very active. I'm a rotarian. Every Tuesday, she's at the meeting.
Every other meeting I attend, she's always there and always active. So again, just to underscore your
point, she's very depressed.
and sad that she's not here tonight. Here's what she shared with our friend Lynn earlier. I was elected
in 1971 with a motto, a better way. My idea for more diverse planning and zoning among other priorities.
We hired work study students for the first time. One was Frank Thomas, a black man who worked
on environmental issues. Many volunteers looked at economic development for the first time as well.
We also started the farmers market.
We introduced a human rights ordinance that supported gay rights written by Brian de Saint Croix, president
of the city council with the help of an attorney, Steve Richardson. We had received a building permit
request for a gay bar that received huge pushback from local conservative citizens. We held a public
hearing on the ordinance and many attended using biblical scripture to defend their opposition to the
ordinance.
I, along with four other city council members, all different faiths, Southern Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran,
Methodist, supported the ordinance. Mayor McCloskey, friends, Roman Catholic, supported it as well.
My belief was also biblical. Do unto others and love thy neighbor as you love thyself. We're guiding
principles. During the last meeting of 1975, which became extremely nasty,
The ordinance finally passed after hours of debate. It was the first of its kind in the state and served
as a model for other communities, including South Bend in Indianapolis. Years later, Indiana University
found our ordinance to be unacceptable and wanted it removed from the books. They prevailed and it was
removed. And there's going to be more details about that. It's a little bit more complicated than that
sentence suggests.
In 1993, the ordinance was reintroduced and received almost no fuss at all. It has been in place ever
since. People working together despite coming from very different backgrounds is how we get things done.
We can get along even if we disagree. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing. All right. So I'm going to transition into the questions. So my panelists have
approved my questions. They've also very kindly agreed to let me interrupt them if we get too far off
piste. But if the tantrums are sometimes more exciting than the question. So it's all right.
So I will start. I'll start with Donna Fay. Can you introduce yourself, say your name, and then when
you came to Bloomington and what brought you here, and then Michael, if you could follow. Okay. My name
is Donna Fay Reeves. I'm originally from Martinsville, and I graduated from high school in 1969. The
day after I graduated, I ran away from home and moved in with friends in Bloomington. I had friends
who already lived here who were a little bit older than me.
So I came out in high school and I already had a girlfriend and I ran away and lived with my friends
and lived with my girlfriend. And well, that's how I got here. I never was in school. I just lived here.
How about you, Michael? I'm Michael Bedwell. I went to high school and college in Terre Haute.
And while I was there in a used bookstore one day, I found a used copy of Kenzie's sexual behavior in
the human male, which was published in 1948 for those who are unaware. And I was still in the process
of accepting myself. It blew me away.
This happened about the same time that the movie The Boys in the Band came out. And though I've been
a gay activist ever since and I'm older than most of the people in the room, I'm in something of a minority
of gay activists that I think The Boys in the Band ultimately had a positive message. So,
Even though I wasn't a student, I got approved to write a article about homosexuality at Indiana State
University, which was a mix of talking about Kinsey's book and the movie. And of course, in learning
about Kinsey, I learned that it all happened in Bloomington. And most in the room are,
familiar with the old term, the grapevine, which preceded Facebook and social engineering, et cetera.
And whether or not you lived here at the time, I can assure you that in 1973, the word was that if you
are gay and can't get out of Indiana, Bloomington is the best place to live. So I moved to Bloomington
in the summer of 1973.
and quickly became involved with Bloomington Gay Alliance. And we can probably talk about that later.
Yeah, thank you. So one of my next questions is, what was Bloomington's reputation to the wider world?
And it sounds like both of you would agree. If you're in Indiana, Bloomington is the gay Mecca. Does
that sound about right? Yeah, Donna, you said you moved in with some friends. Were they from Bloomington?
I went to school with I went high school with him, but they they had come down here to go to IU But
you know, yeah, I moved in with gay people and they For the first probably ten years I lived here I
only knew gay people and 5% men People
Hopefully the mic will turn out, it's cutting out a little bit. We'll figure it out. So what was one
of your first memories of arriving in Bloomington, finding gay Bloomington? What spaces did you walk
into? What do you remember? Well, one of my first jobs that I had was at RCA. And I looked around and
there were hundreds of lesbians working at RCA.
I was only 18 or 19 then, and so they told me, well, they told me about gay bars in Indianapolis, women's
bars, and I was 18, and one of them who was 34 loaned me her ID to get into the gay bars in Indianapolis.
So, yeah, and then also, I was a girlfriend that had just moved here. When we broke up, I started going
out with somebody else who knew every gay person that lived here.
And I met every gay person that lived here, I think. But we went to places like, let's see, Rapp's Pizza
Train was pretty well known. Bear's, Bear's Place seemed to be pretty gay. Not? I mean, not officially.
Well, no, we had.
We do need to employ some years. What year? Well, yeah, I did a little bit before you. I moved here
in 69, and so I'm talking 70, 71, 72. Yeah. Do you remember what year bears opened, Wayne? I don't.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for reminding us. Yeah.
Wayne wants everybody to know he's younger than we were talking before and somehow he managed to mention
three times that he was 17. I was a little older and there was no gay bar in Bloomington.
Some of you may remember a cover story in Bloom Magazine in 2014 called Gabe Bloomington then and now.
There wasn't much then in the article. I don't know if any of you are friends with Mike Leonard,
the author, but I hope if he's still alive, I get the chance to tell him how much he missed because
he basically
He only mentions the ordinance once, nothing about its historical significance. We are on Cass TV as
well, so. Oh, OK. All right. But anyway, there was an older gay man who was mentioned or interviewed
for the article. And he mentioned places that were, if not officially gay friendly, which bears place,
became, there was this underground knowledge, solis, the oaken bucket,
He also mentioned a place which has been closed for years that I had never heard of until I read the
article. And he said they had a jukebox and a way of signaling that you were a friend of Dorothy was
to play if somebody played, you know, I don't know, Moonlight Sonata or whatever. And then another man
played the same
song it was kind of like I'm where we're in in this uh together but socially uh parallel of Donna's
experience I knew I was gay I had had some sexual experience when I moved here but my coming out as
a gay person socially was in
Bloomington and though there was no gay bar, though there was no gay bookstore, there was no gay student
center on campus or LGBT or whatever, there was just you would meet people and just meeting other gay
people, other lesbians was so life-affirming that Bloomington lived up
to its reputation immediately with me. Another place I forgot to mention was a lot of gay people hang
out at the Commons in the Union. All the time, every day we went there. I remember one day we went there
with the script of the boys in the band and the people that were sitting there, whether they were men
or women, we read the whole script of the boys in the band one day.
when he was 17, when he was 17. So that slightly leads me into the next question. I was going to ask
just briefly, what was the Bloomington cruising scene like? You can keep it EG. And was that exclusively
a gay men's world or did lesbian women and others participate in it? Well, I'm going to say that I don't
think most women, we met people somewhere, but
and we got with them somehow or other, but I don't think we called it cruising. So I'm just, huh? Yeah,
I mean, we were looking at things, but that wasn't a lesbian word. So I'm going to pass it over to.
Well, it very much was a male gay world word and world.
We're a block from the county library, I think. A year after the ordinance passed, this wonderful ordinance
which affirmed our value as human beings, legally as well as sociologically, I happened to be at the
library one night after it closed.
along with several other gay men because it was a cruising spot. I think more, there was probably more
socializing than actual pickups there, though there was some of that. And one night in June or July
of 1976, I was talking with some of my friends, socializing, and all of a sudden five or six
teenage boys leapt out of the bushes and started attacking us. And you can read about it on my Facebook
page, but the short of it is that the ordinance was a major, major step forward, but it did not make
the dent in homophobia among homophobes that
that we wish it had. I have a tendency to talk too much, so I'll wrap this up real quickly. The bittersweet
closure of this story, I'm going to tear up, is that one of the boys was gay. He was a student at Bloomington
South. I don't know to this day if he ever actually
did anything violent. I was clubbed to the ground, wasn't really hurt badly. A friend got a cut on eyes.
Police came and said, it's another part of the story. But anyway, he was friends with a professor couple,
Wallace Williams and Jim Justice, that some of you might have known or have heard of.
And he would come in, by this time the Kirkwood Bar was open, and though he was not even 17, he was
allowed in the bar. He told Wallace and Jim that it wasn't about attacking gays. It was, you know, they
had heard that one of us had a nice leather jacket and they wanted to steal it. Well, it was June in
Indiana. Nobody was wearing a leather jacket out.
But one day when he was in the bar one night, he was wearing his Bloomington South track jersey.
And I said, well, that's really cool. And he said, would you like to have it? I said, yes, I would.
And he took it off and gave it to me. And I, 49 years later,
I am sure that was his way of saying, I'm sorry. I can't follow that. I've got to follow that. And so
I'll say a little bit on themes that politics can't fix everything. And so we passed this ordinance.
Both of you, before the ordinance passed,
had experienced discrimination at your workplace. So Donna, you have you have the big stories on the
wall upstairs, but you want to talk about it a little bit? Like, what what did it feel like to be in
Bloomington and to know that you didn't have this kind of protection? Sure. Well, is this one? Okay,
so I got a job at as a janitor at the
college mall, and all the other people that worked as janitors there were friends of mine. And they
told me when I got the job that my boss had been sued for discrimination against a, let's see,
a black woman, a white guy with long hair, and a white woman because she was a woman. And so he had
been told that if he was sued for discrimination one more time, you know, he would lose his job.
So they said, well,
they're gonna have to hire you. And they did, they hired me and they, you know, at first, my boss, who
was named Jess Martindale said, I mean, at first he bragged on what a good job I did, and that I was
better than all the men. And within about six months, I don't know why it took him that long to figure
out I was gay, because I had a girlfriend, she would drop me off at work, she would come meet me for
lunch and stuff. And as soon as he figured it out, he just started
saying nasty things about me when I wasn't there and just making up new rules that only applied to me.
Like I had to work two eight hour shifts back to back. When other people couldn't, I was working because
we weren't allowed to do that. He just started doing all kinds of things to make it, to make me quit
because he didn't want me to, he didn't want to fire me and then get a lawsuit. But I finally had had
enough and I did quit, but I just said,
I don't care, I'm still gonna, you know, file a lawsuit. So I went to, yeah, I'm not gonna remember
the names of things and people. The Human Rights Commission. Yeah, Human Rights Commission, and Bruce
Wachowski was there, and I said I wanted to file a suit based on sexual discrimination, you know, because
at the time there was no such thing as
sexual orientation in the human rights bill. And I said, do you think it would win? And he said, well,
nobody's ever done it before. And I said, well, they have because I read about it in Lesbian Connection.
They did it in some other city. And that's what I want to do. So that's what we did. And there was a
big trial about it. And at the end of it,
They said, well, you have been discriminated against, but it's not illegal. So then, well, so then it
happened with the. The ordinance? Yeah, I was trying to do, the city council. Yeah, it was the city
council decided to,
you know, decide whether they were going to add it, and they ended up adding it. That was in 75. How
did it feel? Well, you know, shitty. I do have to say that really when I filed it, I really didn't think
I was going to win, but I just thought that he's not going to get off scot-free
I'm going to make him at least sweat it out for a few months. And he did. He sweated it out a whole
lot for a few months. The fact that I lost didn't really matter because there was still a trial about
it. A lot of people heard what happened. And something good came out of it, although if you know the
rest, that was kind of a waste of time.
My own experience is dramatic in a different way. It's kind of R rated, but I'll try to clean up. Anyway,
I worked for a restaurant on North College or Walnut, I can't remember. It's where the CVS is now on
the north side of town. It was a fine dining restaurant, Sir Lancelot. I cannot remember the name,
I'm afraid. This was like 74.
and they had the dining room and then to the side they they prepared pizzas for the dining room and
carry out and strombolis and I got a job there making pizzas and strombolis and the guy I was reported
who hired me a young man quit like he walked out like two
nights after I started. And even in that short of time, I realized it was because the actual boss was
a raging asshole. And the most unashamed, proactive racist I've ever met in my life, and I grew up in Indiana,
And so the intermediate guy had left, so I picked up a lot of hours, which I liked. Then he hired a
man to replace, let's say, Joe. And my hours, my hours would be posted on the wall in this part of the
kitchen. They began to go down.
Pure and pure and pure. Well, what he did not know is the man he hired was gay. And he and I developed
an affair. And by the time, his name was Clint, and I'd say, Clint, why are my hours going down?
And he goes, well, you know, Joe, whatever, you know,
He doesn't like it cause you're gay. He doesn't realize I am too. So I was never directly fired. It's
just my job disappeared. But even after that, what he did not know is that when Clint got off of work
each night, I was waiting for him in his car in the parking lot. But the part that,
is somewhat parallel to Donna's, is I did go to the Human Rights Commission, probably was Bruce, and
told him the story. He was very sympathetic. And he said, well, there's no sexual orientation part,
but maybe we can argue that it is sex discrimination in some way. But he wasn't convinced enough that
that had any traction that I didn't follow up. So mine never actually went to court. My connection with
the ordinance is that I was one of the organizers at BGA of the 74 Indiana Gay Awareness Conference
at IU. And the principal speaker was the father of the gay rights movement named Frank Kameny. And during his
keynote address at the Poplar's, he said something to the effect, I understand Bloomington has no gay
rights ordinance. Why, and what are you going to do about it? A year later we had an ordinance. If nowhere
else, but I'm sure it did generally, the seed was planted in Brian de Sequa's mine,
don't think he was out yet publicly at that time until he was on the council. And during our second
conference in 75, Elaine Noble, the first gay person elected to a state legislature. There are lots
of myths about Harvey Milk first, but
a lesbian scored before he did. Anyway, she was one of our guest speakers and she met with Frank McCloskey
because she was told there was something in the works. I was head of BGA by that time and I went in
and met with him privately one day and I said, well, I'd like to tell you that we have, there are lots
of gays in Bloomington, but we don't have the political clout that I wish we did to help you if
and when you get in trouble for this. And one of the many reasons I respect him and miss him is he simply
said, I understand. And you've stayed right on schedule because my next question was going to be about
both of your involvement, so about BTA as well.
Donna, you were involved in the New Horizons Gay Community Center, and then you were first involved
in BGA. So I'd love both of you to talk about those experiences of early organizing in Billington, and
then kind of the student-non-student relationship, because neither of you were students at the time,
but they were students and non-students, kind of in both. Well, let's see.
how New Horizons came about was a lot of gay people just got together and we organized gay coffee houses
at the Lutheran Church, yeah, across from the Union. And we made so much money from them that the group
that was doing it said, well, what are we gonna do with this money? We can't just keep it. And we looked
at it and said, we have enough to rent a place full time.
So I found this really dinky old place on South Rogers. I don't know what it used to be, but it was
on my way home. That's why I found it. And we rented it full time. And let's see, we had a, well, I
was one of four people who co-founded it. And then we had a board of directors of 12. And we had,
you know, you could do something in it every night. We had a women's night and a men's night and then
dance night and then, you know,
all that and eventually, so that was probably started in 74 and then by 75 we had moved to this place
that was on 3rd Street in between Walnut and College and it's a place that used to be a garage or something
is what it looked like and we fixed it up pretty nicely.
Oh, you know, a bunch of women. We had refreshments. We didn't have a liquor license or anything. Yeah,
it was a great place. You could rent it for meetings. It didn't last all that long. Actually,
at some point, me and my girlfriend at the time broke up and she was one of the people that was on the
board. And so I kind of quit going because I didn't want to run into her.
But after that, something happened that sent something along. Since I wasn't involved, I wasn't sure
what it was, but it was part of this whole story of... I wasn't here when it petered out, but I'm guessing
that a part of what happened
And BGA had the same problems too. The students, members, participants, ended up graduating and moving
away. And there were, though, you know, your events were successful. BGA's Halloween dances were the
events on campus. But the,
number of people actually carrying the load as it were was very small. So if you lost someone, like
I'm sure Joe Metzinger and Jim graduated and simply moved away. I became president in 74 after Jim,
excuse me, John Struble, who was president
When I moved here, he graduated and he moved away. The value I think that New Horizons had beyond BGA
was creating these social meeting groups. BGA would sponsor speaking events or the conference, for instance.
the dances, but those were episodic. I remember that there was an effort to train people to counsel
people. BGA ran what we call the hotline, you know, and it was a published number
under a fictitious name, Pat Henderson, which was unisex enough for that. But it wasn't a real person.
And we contributed to people coming out in a variety of ways. A book club developed after I moved. They
would meet in the ghetto. How many remember the ghetto on the square, the gay ghetto?
where what is it called? Fountain Square is. When you go in the main entrance with the canopy of Fountain
Square, it is actually occupying what was an alley between a building on the west side and a building
on the east side.
The ground floor of the building on the east side, when I moved into the ghetto, was Charlotte Zitlow's
first location of Goods Inc. On the second and third floor above that, there were apartments.
At that time, the university owned them. And as Wayne remembered when he moved in, they were very cheap.
like RCA, so many gay people ended up renting there, though of course it was open to anybody,
that colloquially it became known as the gay ghetto. So if you go in the main entrance there, the facade
of the building is on the east side where our apartments were is still there.
but they've torn out the inside. The brick wall, which you see to your left when you go in there, I
believe is the wall, what was the exterior wall of our building. It was a part of the social culture,
the mutually reinforcing gay and lesbian
culture, the occasional bisexual and transsexual of the time. Thank you. So I want to take us briefly
into the future. And this is a question that I never got to ask you during our interview. Can you talk
about the National Women's Music Festival when it was in Bloomington? And I actually saw a National
Women's Music Festival t-shirt in the audience. So that's exciting.
What was it like? What happened? Where was it? Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Let's see. Well, okay, the national
began in Champaign-Urbana, and it was there for about eight or nine years, and then somewhere around 1980,
it moved here. And it was here for about 15 years until 95. And it was a really big thing. It was a
really big deal. Well, it still is. It kind of moved around for a while. And right now, it's been in
Madison, Wisconsin for a long time. But there were so many women here that would work on it. That was
one good reason why it was here. Mary Byrne
from Indianapolis had, she had a women's bar at that time and she brought women's music to her bar.
So she, you know, knew a lot of the people and had a lot of experience in organizing that kind of thing.
But it was really one of the best times I had in my life. I mean, it brought thousands of women here
and wish it was still here.
You're still going now? OK. And they're in Madison? It's in the middle of Wisconsin. It's a bit smaller
in Madison. I think, wasn't this year the 50th year, I think? Next year will be the 50th festival. The
50th year was last year, but there were a couple of festivals for that. I'm sure every woman here worked
at festivals.
And Bloomington, Bloomington Gay Alliance shortly after I left became Bloomington Gay and Lesbian Alliance,
which was a part of the evolution too. I remember being introduced to lesbian singers that I
never heard of in there, though I didn't go to any of the conferences. I appreciated the music musically,
but because I'm so political, sociopolitical, the reverence lesbians had for these, the courage of these
singers to be out and realize
that at least at that time in the early 70s there would be a very thick ceiling you know it was it was
a long time before I'm forgetting her name yes exactly you know it was a long time before a lesbian
entertainer broke through that ceiling but these women kept going
And I remember being touched by the tenderness of the music and this common thread of you and I are
alike and I will shelter you. And the gay men's culture did not have any parallel at the time, nor for
for years. What made Bloomington the right place? So you had the two, the awareness conferences, you
had all the 15 years in the National Women's Music Festival. What made Bloomington the place that those
big events could happen? Well, obviously, the university. I mean, Bloomington is university town. There's
way more university here than
people that are not connected to it. In Indiana, if you're gay, you want to be in Bloomington. Indianapolis
people get mad when you say that, but it's true. It's an open-minded place. There's always young people.
There's always people of all ages, but gay people are welcome here.
which wasn't always true, but I get ahead of myself a little bit. I again think, I mean, Kinsey was
not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But I think, first of all, he armed the gay rights movement
after it got rebooted in the 50s, after the Nazis stamped it out in Germany.
uh he he armed them with statistics uh there there was a well-known uh gay lawyer whose name escapes
me at the moment and in an article uh when the marriage debate first kicked up uh largely in the Washington
Post or the the New York Times he said
justice and equality should not be about numbers, but it is. And it was too easy for centuries,
for decades, to say, well, why should we be worried about those sodomites' rights? Or those, you know,
they're just a few of them. And Kinsey proved that was wrong. And
By 73, again, when I moved here, BGA had an office in the Union Building. It was not a university
organization, but the university gave it a home. We never had to fight to be able to rent an alumni
hall for our dances or whatever.
it grew and grew and grew and grew. But the irony is that whereas the board of eons, I understand, was
involved in the creation of the LGBT plus culture center on campus, 20, 25 years before the board of eons,
period of 1955, 1959, led a witch hunt against gay men on this campus to the point that they installed
a hidden camera in one of the restrooms in the old library and filmed men coming in, cruising with each
other, and offered them to police, et cetera. Lives were ruined.
And eventually it was shut down. And again, decades later, the new members of Board of Youngs had culturally
grown. I would like to think in part whether they were aware of it or not because of the seeds that
Bloomington Gay Alliance, Bloomington Gay and Lesbian Alliance and the New Horizon people planted. Because
some people did stay.
And my anger about the article I referred to earlier that was in Bloom in 2014 is not consciously, but
functionally how many people who sacrificed here, who fought the battles here, who would not take no
for an answer. Those shoulders I stood on,
And every LGBT person, whatever their age in this town, now stands on two. And they should be named
and remembered and honored. And thanks to people like Annabel and the History Center, that is happening
formally. And more of it needs to be done. Sorry to get on my soapbox. All right.
Come to my last question and so I will ask our two panelists but also listen very closely because this
is a question that might be coming out to you in the audience. I would just like to ask both of you
to share your favorite anecdote or a favorite anecdote about being gay in Bloomington in the 70s. I
know it's very open ended, but you have anything in mind.
wanted to tell this story because I loved it so much. Another thing that we had was, I think you referred
to it as hotline. And what we would do was like lesbians would take call from women and men would take
call from men. So I worked the lesbian listening line a lot. And I was sometimes we'd get letters. First
of all, I got a letter from a very young woman in Spencer. And she was in high school, she was about
to graduate. And she said,
My best friend is a man that he's been my best friend for years and years and I'm afraid to tell him
that I'm gay because I'm afraid, you know, he won't be friends with me anymore. And well, so everybody
that worked on the different lines would get together and, you know, talk about what kinds of calls
they had received. And so one of the men said,
Well, that's weird, because a man from Spencer wrote us a letter saying, my best friend, I'm scared
to tell her that I'm gay. I'm afraid she won't be friends with me anymore. And we usually didn't talk
too much about these things, but we just said, we're just going to have to tell them. So I wrote back,
and he wrote back, and said, you know, I think your friend might be
gay and of course yeah it did turn out that they it that's what it was it was two best friends writing
to us and calling us and they came out to each other and then they then we became friends with all of
them and then uh one of the men went out with the guy and they were they were a couple for years that
is really cool that's really exciting and and i have an almost parallel story
which involves somebody who used to be an assistant to the mayor here and the previous mayor in Washington,
but I won't go into that. It's most of all the experiences at the conferences. Gay marriage wasn't on
our radar. It was in 1970,
for 75, 76, it was such an impossible, you know, it wasn't, you can read our agenda, you know, and it
wasn't there. Sodomy was not decriminalized in Indiana to 1976. So it was mainly about anti-discrimination.
But most of all, it was,
you know, an average gay man, young man, average lesbian, by whatever, coming to our conferences and
hearing Frank Kameny, this great orator, who was like Johnny Appleseed at that time. It was after Stonewall,
but he was still
gay Johnny Appleseed going around the country hundreds of speaking engagements of year and saying you
deserve your rights with great eloquence. It was Phyllis Lyon who co-founded the Daughters of Boletus
in San Francisco in the 1950s who spoke at our first conference. It was Reverend Troy Perry who founded
the first gay denomination who held a gay religious service
in the union building in 1974 and told these people whose families whose churches that you know you
all have heard it too but this this is when it was the fire of that self-hatred was burning it was what
became a close friend of mine Leonard Matlovich in 1975 who was the first
gay service person to purposely out himself to fight the ban. The Air Force didn't know he was gay.
He could have kept quiet and eight years later retired and lived off of his Air Force pension for the
rest of his life. But Nexus, Nexus, Nexus, he met Frank Kameny and Frank Kameny was searching for a
test case.
And Leonard was the perfect one. He had served three tours in Vietnam. He had a bronze star,
a purple heart, all of these great ratings. He was on the cover of Time Magazine in his uniform with
the caption, I am a homosexual. To this day, 50 years later, people who see that or see his iconic tombstone,
it blows their minds away. I can remember.
When he spoke and talked about he did not have the courage to accept himself being gay, did not hold
another man in a romantic way until he was 30 years old. And there were men and women holding hands
in that audience crying. Elaine Noble's speech.
a state representative from Massachusetts who ran as an open lesbian. And it wasn't all good. She often
told the story of she walked on the street. She was well known because she had worked in the busing
wars in Boston, had gone to school with little kids in Boston who races there were saying they shouldn't
be allowed to be
ride the same buses. Anyway, this elderly man approached her, you know, and he said, hello, Ms. Noble,
and she said hello, and he spat on her. But she inspired us all. And Vito Russo, if for no other reason,
if you have not yet, go upstairs and read the excerpt of his article in The Advocate.
that's a part of the exhibit, thank you Annabel, about his experiences speaking at Indiana University
in 1975. He was already, I mean the pictures from that period, he looks 14 years old, but he was already
a big shot activist in New York City, part of Gay Activists Alliance, you know, the home of Stonewall
and it all. And in that article,
is so beautifully written. And essentially he says, I learned to see my own people in a different way
because of what I experienced in Bloomington, Indiana, where these people were above everything else.
in this backwater, being themselves and loving it. Rita, go upstairs and I don't do justice to it. You
must read it. I think you did a good job doing justice to it. Thank you both so much. And I will turn
the mic over to the audience if anyone has their own anecdote they want to share. All right, we have a hand.
Michael actually brought up the Halloween dances that the BGA used to do and those continued after Michael
left town and this sort of is a full circle thing for the building that we're in because one year when
it came time it was 1979
Bullwinkles had just opened, but it was time for the Halloween party. And for some reason, they usually
held it, I think, in the Frangipani room. That was unavailable, and Alumni Hall was unavailable. So
they got real Charlotte Zillow, and they were like, could we possibly do it in a county building? And
she suggested the library. And they actually asked me to play at that party. And I don't know if you
know this,
But the original entrance to the building was this way. And you walked in and there was a huge foyer
and circular staircases on both sides. And they set me up on a little table underneath one of the stairwells.
And people were going back into the main library to participate and talk. And then they wanted to dance
and came back out to the foyer area. So I had been playing for maybe an hour.
And a guy that I actually knew was up on the stairwell and he had an epileptic seizure and fell off
of the stairs onto the table with all the musical equipment. They came, the EMTs came and he ended up
being fine. He wasn't injured at all. Unfortunately, one of the turntables was very injured. The arm
was like sticking up the air like that.
But the rest of the night, I just played them one turn table and people were fine with it. But anyway,
I just wanted to bring that up to mention that the parties that he was talking about actually took place
in this building. Thank you. Do I have any other hand in the audience? National Women's Music Festival.
So the first time I ever came to Bloomington was actually for the National Music Festival in 1985. I
won't tell you the story about how I ended up here, but I was a student at Purdue. I was a veterinary
student at Purdue. And I met my wife here that weekend. Well, I'd met her before, but we kind of got
together that weekend. And a few years later, we got together a little bit more permanently than that.
But that was my first introduction to Bloomington, and it just felt like safe place, and it was a place
that I could move to once I got out of school. I'm not really telling, I hopefully am not telling anyone
something they don't know, but for all the laudatory things we say about Bloomington in the past and
in the present,
bubble you all live in and I still admire has been pierced. And most specifically, most recently, as
hopefully you all know, with the Kinsey Institute. I would guess that some of you are not aware that
the Student Center, when it was first proposed,
Republican troglodytes in the legislature at the time said, you cannot use state money to have a center
for homosexuals, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it has been, though it's in a building owned
by the university, it has been privately funded for the most part
all of those years. And now, the Kinsey Institute has been forced to do the same thing. Right, right,
exactly. At the risk of hitting on my soapbox again,
If there's anyone in this room who, good hearted and as intelligent as you might be, are under the delusion
that we are not in danger, let me apprise you that we are. They want to erase us from history. I don't
expect concentration camps, et cetera.
But you can do a hell of a lot of damage without that. And we need to be fighting for our lives again.
And I hope if you have a few extra pennies, you will help keep
Kenzie Institute open, you'll help keep the culture center open. You will contribute to a plan, I understand,
of a possible off-campus independent center. And in addition to thanking Annabel and Holly, I want to
thank each of you for coming and for Donna for participating too. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you so much for coming. And please do leave me your name so I can crack you down and
interview you. Take care. Have a good night. Real quick, hi everyone. My name's Daniel. I'm the director
here. We have some thank you cards because we really appreciate your time and what you've done for us.
So there's one for each of you, and we have flowers on the table for each of you. And Annabelle, we
have some for you, because of all your hard work and hosting. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so
much for putting this on, for supporting us. Absolutely. Wonderful. Are you still working with
the Commission? Yes. Yes. The Human Rights Commission. Right. Right. We could still take your discrimination claims.
Yes, she's a volunteer here, but her job is working with the people who fought through its many iterations.
But as an activist for 50-some years, one of the things that I learned, pleasantly surprised,
is by being out, by being yourselves, if nothing else, you may now know how many people you touch. They
might not be able to be out themselves as you.
but to see you and surviving and laughing as well as weeping, et cetera. So self affirmation is really
something that it has an energy of itself. So keep doing that. We need it again now more than we have
even when BGA
was here, and what's the bar that's so popular on Kirkwood? You all know that this is not a fruit stand
story. What is the bar? Don't worry. Oh, Nix. Oh, Nix? Yes, Nix. In 1971, Nix put up, because there
were so many gays going there, they recognized him, they put up a sign, this is not a fruit stand.
What was then Bloomington Gay Liberation Front picketed them, leafleted, exposed their bigotry, and
the sign came down. I wasn't here then, so I can't remember.