Part 1: In this case I am talking about the founding of the first gay liberation group in Winnipeg in the 1970s
It was 1971 and I was a very green, first-year student at the university, AND I was seeing a psychologist to cure my homosexuality. Still, I was intrigued, to put it mildly, when I read in the local paper that a small group of students right on campus were holding their first gay liberation meetings. I didn’t dare attend, but a few months later they surprised me by actually importing a gay liberation speaker to give a talk on the campus. He was Jack Baker, an openly gay man who had been elected president of the Minnesota Student Association at the University of Minnesota.
There was no way that I was going to miss his talk. Evidently, the other students felt that way too because, when I got to the student union building, the place was jam-packed. Jack was going to deliver his lecture in a large interior courtyard, but all the seats were taken, standing room only. There was a second floor balcony, filled to overflowing, and I half expected to see bodies cascading over the railing. The grand staircase behind the podium was being used as bleachers, and people were standing on chairs in the coffee shop to get a look at him. There also must have been some students in hidden crannies somewhere, because I kept hearing these disembodied voices chanting, “Fairy, we’re going to see a fairy!” To me, it looked like the building was going to explode from the pressure of all the bodies crammed inside. Or more to the point, from the pressure of all the psychic energy emanating from the crowd. Everyone was pink faced and puffy cheeked, because they fully expected Jack to mince out in a pink suit, waving a lace hanky and lisping that he demanded his “wibewation.”
Anyhow Jack came out looking and sounding as much like a straight man as anyone could wish for, so the crowd was unnaturally silent for close to ten minutes. And then he said, “One of the arguments against homosexuality is that Man is attracted to Woman, so that they can have babies and continue the human race. Well if we start to run out of babies, I will step in and do my bit.” Well, the audience absolutely exploded at that, like it was the funniest joke they had ever heard. As for me, I thought I can’t believe it, they’re not laughing at him; they’re laughing with him. Has he won them over just like that? The atmosphere in that huge space remained friendly for the rest of the hour. I realize now that there had to be a number of silent homophobes in attendance, but they were bewildered, intimidated, and outnumbered.
At the end of the speech a group of students gathered around the podium with questions and comments, and I joined them, because I just had to ask him what he thought about my going to see a therapist. After a short while I started squirming inside, because I wanted to talk to him without an audience. I wanted to shout, “Go away, damn you!” Anyhow, I just gave up waiting and just blurted my question out. I can’t believe I’m talking about my dirty secret in front of total strangers, I thought. I think a couple of them were a little surprised, too. Anyhow, Jack answered my question thus: “That’s a pretty standard approach. You tell a counsellor that you’re gay, and he tells you that you’re intimidated by women, and you just need to find an approachable one, and date her for a while, and the sexual feelings will come. That just doesn’t work.”
I got an emotional boost that day, even though my conscience told me not to give up on heterosexuality just yet. I sneaked off to a few of the gay liberation meetings without telling my counsellor, feeling guilty, but I just couldn’t stay away. There were quite a few people there, but otherwise it was a strange and frustrating experience. Typically, someone would make a statement and then withdraw it saying, “Never mind what do I know anyway?” Or if you tried to keep the conversation going you were answered with semi-sarcastic quips or a shrug of the shoulders. I don’t think anything productive came out of those evenings.
At the beginning of my second year, I gave up my feeble attempt at becoming a heterosexual and started to attend the meetings. And we kick-started the group by saying enough with the hemming and hawing, let’s pick a project, work on it and see how it goes. So, some people started writing a brochure. The Jack Baker experience was on my mind, and so I said that we could go to psychology classes and give talks about gay liberation again. Right off the bat, I found a professor who was willing to have a few of us come to one of his classes. So there I was, a nineteen year old man of the world and authority on the gay life ready to explain what it was all about. It’s not as funny as it sounds, because I had been obsessing about the subject since I was sixteen, and studying it in everything from mainstream magazines to the gay bits in trashy novels and foreign films.
So, on the agreed upon date, three of us were greeted by the prof saying, “Something is a little bit odd here Normally there’s 20 to 25 people in this class, but today every seat is taken. I don’t know where these extra 20 people came from.” As I walked into the classroom, I started to shake uncontrollably and stared down at my shoes in fear. But I said to myself, “This is it and you gotta look ’em in the eye.” So, I slowly forced up my chin and faced a group of sympathetic smilers. The rest went really well, and I made them laugh like Jack did.
I gave quite a few of these classroom talks over the next few years, and most of them were great fun. A few of us (Bill, Susan, and myself) had become the quasi-official campus gays. Everywhere you went there was someone in the classroom or the hallway who had listened to your talk about what it was like to be gay. They were always coming up to you and saying, “I listened to you guys and your talk the other day, and it was so interesting that we spent the whole next class talking about it.”
Personally, I didn’t understand what they were trying to tell me. Fifty years later, I guess they were reflecting on what it was like to live in isolation and secrecy. And, I suppose that some of them were guarding frightening secrets of their own. But at the time, I was just a young dumb guy with one good idea: Gay Liberation.
Part 2: Getting the Word Out
Our meetings at the university were entertaining and optimistic, and we basked in the relatively friendly atmosphere on campus. The students considered us just another group like Vietnam War protesters, environmentalists, socialists, and feminists. Campus radio interviewed our speakers, and the student paper printed our articles. In the mass media, there were hopeful signs as well. For instance, Esquire magazine published an article on the New Homosexual in December 1969! In television sitcomland, each show had an episode where the new straight acting male neighbour (or co-worker or whatever) turned out to be gay. Surprise! And there was a weepy TV movie of the week or two. Don’t remember any lesbians though.
However, I was particularly interested in two men who were married in a Montreal nightclub in 1972. (I can’t resist adding a humorous detail here: the ceremony was held in a nightclub with a delightfully campy name: Chez ZouZou). A national magazine, The Canadian, had covered the event, and The Canadian was delivered to the house free on Saturdays with our regular paper. So Saturday rolls around, and the article isn’t there! It seems that at the head office in Toronto, they became concerned that it might be too racy for some markets, so they gave the editors in each city the option of including it or not including it. Winnipeg was one of the cities which opted out, and it was neatly done. It wasn’t mentioned on the cover or in the index, so it was as if it never existed. That described the state of the local media at the time: we were never mentioned, as if we just didn’t exist.
Even some little incidents made me just a touch paranoid. The university library added some gay liberation books to their collection, but they mysteriously disappeared rather quickly. Were they stolen by lonely gays who wanted to read them, but did not want the librarian to see them checking out one of “those” kind of books? Or were they trashed by bigots? Around the same time, I heard that another national magazine had printed a gay positive article. I decided to just walk to my local library to read it. Unfortunately, someone had removed the article, and it had been so neatly done again. The page wasn’t raggedy from being torn out like the way they do in the patient’s waiting room. It had been meticulously removed by someone with a ruler and an x-acto knife. Someone like a conscientious librarian perhaps?
Regardless, I thought that just having a couple little cozy chats with the Winnipeg papers might break through the wall of silence. So I made an appointment with one of these newspapers, and I went there and more or less said that we have this really interesting gay group on campus and don’t you want to write a story about us? I was sitting across from two very straight looking males when I said this, and I fully expected the same reception that I was used to at the university. Something on the order of, “Oh how fascinating! You kids are just going to change the world! How brave and you!” Instead I was bluntly told, “No, we are not interested, period.” All the while they were staring at me with expressions of utter disgust on their faces. Maybe they weren’t disgusted, maybe they just thought that I was a dopey little kid. Since I kept hearing about student radicalism, I thought that I should rise to the occasion and shout something like, “You’re just a couple of male chauvinists!” Or “Down with the capitalist press!” Instead I just crawled out of there with my tail between my legs.
And it got worse. We also attempted to place a classified ad in the downtown papers around the same time. It would say something to the effect that we are a gay liberation group, and we hold meetings at the university on Monday nights, so why don’t you come down and check it out? The classifieds departments told us that they wouldn’t print it, and that they didn’t have to print it. I think that realization hit all of us with a thud. We just had no access to mass media.
Our next attempt seemed a little kooky, but we decided to give it a chance. It was our version of Dial-A-Prayer. You would dial this number, and you could listen to a short talk describing the gay liberation movement and details about where our meetings were being held. This was a lot of information to cram in a couple of little minutes, so the fellow who recorded it babbled away at breakneck speed. He sounded like he was doing a late night infomercial for a new kitchen gadget (“It slices! It dices! It juliennes! And the next ten callers will be able to take advantage of an exclusive bonus offer!”).
The Gay Line, as it came to be called, required a huge answering machine and its own dedicated extension. My friend Bill volunteered to have it installed in his apartment in a spare closet. None of us noted the irony at the time. The day after Bill went to the phone company to arrange for the service, he told us that he had the suspicion that the staff at their headquarters were lingering in hallways and common areas just to get a peak at him. Well, Bill must have been right because the instant the installer plugged the phone into the jack it rang. And rang and rang. Bill insisted that it went on constantly, day and night for weeks. He was able to pick up the receiver and eavesdrop on the calls, and what he heard was a lot of laughter. Evidently, the employees at the phone company had decided that the whole idea of a gay line was hilariously funny, and they distributed our number amongst their friends before we even got it hooked up. We were the party gag of the year in Winnipeg in 1973.
In 1974, a couple of our members, Richard North and Chris Vogel, decided to get married and issue a press release. It was the marriage thing again. This wasn’t a publicity stunt as their union endured for decades, and I think they’re still together. Behind their backs, we were a bit snide about the whole thing as we were sophisticates and believed that marriage was an obsolete institution. Still, we all went to the ceremony, and I experienced the novelty of being cruised in a church (Unitarian). The next day, the story was in all the papers and even received national coverage. Richard and Chris seemed to be on the radio all the time as well as all three of our television stations.
I guess that all goes to show you that we needed an idea like a gay wedding to capture the public’s imagination. I thought that gay liberation (as we called it at the time) was exciting enough to merit a story, but evidently not. Green kids like myself couldn’t comprehend the mindset of ultra-conventional (hack?) journalists. People slowly trickled into our group after that, but I didn’t have the brains to ask them just how they managed to find us. However, I at least know that the wedding sure punched a big hole in the wall of silence. The Unitarians told me that for years afterward people said to them, “Unitarians huh? Never heard of you. Oh, wait a minute, aren’t you the church where those two gay guys . . .”
