what is your first public gay memory?

For me it was Harvey Milk's murder. Then shortly following AIDS. For younger gays I suspect the first memories are happier. But I would love to hear. On edit I mean a story that broke specific to gays or largely specific to gays. This would be as opposed to say a crush on some dude.

then while I was in law school, working for a legal services center when AIDS broke loose. Gays were getting evicted from their apartments and fired from their jobs in the midst of all the hysteria. It was a terrible time.

by a "public gay memory." Seriously. Can you elaborate?

what is your first memory of a public event having to do with gays? Is that clear enough.

I would say the AIDS epidemic, Matthew Shepard, or the Supreme Court's ruling that Boy Scouts can keep gays out.

I just wasn't sure what else I could say.

his name was Dave, and I was so hot for him.
I wonder what became of him...

I was nine years old --and secretly proud of the drag queens on the news --'cos I knew I was one of 'em.

so no real memory for me. Cool for you though.

It was a "wide open " bar. I had been trading joints for drinks with the bartender, small wonder it got busted. Sorry I returned to Calif , and missed the fun.

Rebellion, and got the impression that -- while there were drag queens and hustlers at the Stonewall -- it was more or less an ordinary (for lack of a better word) gay bar, with many different elements from the gay community. Now people keep saying it was primarily a hang out for drag queens or transgenders, and while they may have been customers, they were not the only or even the primary customers. It was like a standard gay bar for the period.

Does that jell with your first-hand memories of the place?

My late mother insisted that she and my father either ate or had drinks at the place years before the riots and saw gay people there, but I doubt if it was a place the two of them would have gone into, but perhaps at some point it did cater to straights as well.

Hustlers, yes, but a regular pick up bar. Being the village, it had a higher % of Drag, but not extrodinarily so, It had a back room for dancing, as this was the old days. I remember when it was straight in the early 60's, and you could drink at 18 ( I was in bars at 15)

and old beatnik bar that went Gay. It used to have barrels of peanuts around, which kept this poor little tramp alive. It became quite the Gay bar.

With Martin Sheen and Hal Holbrook as a gay couple and how Martin Sheen's son had to deal with his homosexuality. It was pretty daring television for 1972.

I had to sneak and watch it on my brother's TV. He watched it with me.

We are both scared our parents would catch us watching it.

Archie was just sure that Mike and Gloria's new friend was a "fruit" but later found out it was his own ex-jock buddy who was gay ... something Archie had a hard time accepting. I'm sure the episode would seem tame by today's standards, but the idea that macho jock types could be gay was a shock to most of the viewers.

if memory serves me it was in 1968 , I think, a young man named Gayle Whittington was being mistreated by management (I forget the real issue, it might have been a dismissal) There was another at the INS blgd on Sansome sT.where I'm sure my pic was taken. BTW, you are a young gay to me. I remember marching outside the Women's House of Detention on Greewich Ave with Allen Ginsburg in the early 60's , but that was for marijuana.

wrist slapping after the famous "twinkie defense" the Battle of Elephant walk was more pitched than Civic Center, Tose pigs came up to Castro for revenge.To see those police cars upended in flames was thrilling. They fucking deserved it. I miss Mayor Moscone , too.

But my best friend (she and I came out together) told me her brother's stories of that night. He got clubbed in the leg by a cop.

I can't imagine what it would have been like that night.

Unfortunately followed by "Patient 0", which has been debunked, yet no one ever wants to talk about that fact.

maybe it would be Barry Manilow's coming out on the Grammys and one of my teachers indicated to us in her class that she disapproved and that "you just don't do that" and then she made a limp wrist gesture, rolling her eyes. Which was kind of strange coming from her, because she was known as being more liberal.

It wouldn't exactly shock me...but I wasn't aware that he publically came out.

That's cool if he did. :-)

as related by the teacher, and this was back in 1981 or 2 (and I didn't watch the Grammys that year), was that he had done something during the Grammy presentations which indicated that he is gay, and she thought was inappropriate. Apparently, he has never come out as gay per se, but perhaps he dedicated a song to another man, or something?

The salient point to me was that my public school teacher was being so blantantly homophobic, and even back in the days when it was far more common to be openly homophobic, I found it shocking and disappointing that she would be so mean and dismissive.

But I guess in terms of something even MORE publicly associated with gays, the onset of the AIDS crisis was probably the first thing, because prior to that time, many people wouldn't even verbally acknowledge the existence of gays and lesbians. Now, of course, you have presidents holding press conferences on the importance of denying gays and lesbians their civil rights.

We've sort of come a long way, baby, I guess. :eyes: :rofl:

any kind of gay issues hit home for me. When I finally realized that my great-uncle and his parter of 10 years or so at the time were more than just friends.

They stayed together for almost 20 years (that I know of at least. He came out right around the time I was born, but they might have been together before then.), unfortunately his partner died from cancer a few years before their state (Mass.) allowed gay marriage.

There are people out there who may accuse them of 'living in sin' or somesuch nonsense... but to me, they were my uncles. And that's all there was to it.

in my room. It was a factor in discovering my sexuality.

liberace being liberace, and fearfully Richard Simmons being....er......Richard Simmons. Even though he wasn't out.... I just knew I didn't want to be identified with him.

and when she got the pie in the puss!

My teacher came out as a lesbian. I still have a hard time imagining how difficult that must have been.

that is impressive

I remember reading a feature in LIFE magazine about the play or the film BOYS IN THE BAND.

That just confused me. They were self-loathing metro-centric jerks without a deep thought in their heads. I was a bookish (I'd already finished CANTERBURY TALES and several Shakespeare plays) Boy Scout living in a middle-class suburb of a small city.

What did I have in common with them?

that featured "The Tool Box" South of Market in SF?

rebellion (too young to go to any bars, however) and in New York, I never knew a thing about it until after I came out years later. Members of New York's Gay Activist Alliance (a group I later joined and became Media Chairman of for some years) came to speak at my college and that helped tremendously. Can't think of one specific news story -- during my years in GAA it was one thing after another after another.

Hope MitchTV will tell us more about what the Stonewall Inn was really like back then (see reply # 31).

it's not that i didn't know about stonewall etc -- it's that i lived in the midwest.
then -- what happened there seemed remote.

then in the early seventies i moved to ny -- and my first real lover.

any way -- we were walking near the lincoln center on our way back from sushi and on our way to his house -- and he held my hand as we
walked.