When did I realize I was gay?

You know, that's a good question.

When did I become aware of being gay?

You know?

I think I knew before I knew.

There was always some intuition I had about I know that there's something different here.

This is really weird.

But I remember watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and thinking Chevy Chase was so handsome.

So handsome.

I knew I went to the movies on Friday nights and saw all the cowboy movies.

And I remember thinking as they rode off into the sunset, I wanted to be on that horse with the cowboy.

I never thought I was unusual about that.

I thought maybe other people thought that too.

I guess.

I knew at a very young age I enjoyed female playmates, female companionship.

And then in about 4th, 5th grade, I remember some people were calling me gay and I didn't know what they meant.

And then they said, you have a boyfriend somewhere.

And I was kind of like, why would that be bad?

I can remember feeling differently about the girls in my class in kindergarten.

I didn't know what it was, but I didn't know that that was weird until church told me that it was.

And it was kind of that's when it clicked.

Like oh God, this is not good.

Like, how I'm feeling right now is not appropriate.

Something's wrong.

The fear I had was that someday, someone would find out.

I definitely felt that way in high school.

I felt like if people knew, they would not love me anymore.

The stereotypes were universal with everybody.

One of the big words was fag or queer from other kids to anybody they suspected of being more effeminate or different.

So it was a struggle.

And you really didn't have any support with teachers or definitely not churches and things like that.

Support where I grew up for the gay community was not there.

It was mind boggling to see the amount of support for queer people at the last Pride Parade.

We estimate around 4000 people attended the festival that day.

Based on cell phone data.

I'll never forget coming around the corner and seeing the crowd.

There were probably 5000 people in the streets.

And I would say 60% to 70% of these people were heterosexual people with their kids.

And they were watching drag performers in the street.

And I remember saying to my husband, we were standing there and I said, “You know, if you had told me 40 years ago that I would be standing here watching this, I would have had your head examined.” Back in the 1960s, I always said the gay community was like a secret community.

You didn't want anybody to know.

Because back then people weren't normally very acceptable, like employers and things of that nature.

When I first found a good career here, the boss that hired me knew about my lifestyle and my partner, but no one else did.

It was not spoken about like most people in small towns at that time period, I literally thought my friend and I were the only gay people in the entire world.

There were no other people to see.

Although there were examples on television stuff, they were often comedic.

For example, Paul Lynn on Hollywood Square would make terribly risque jokes, and it was very clear when you watch it now, that he was just as gay as could be.

But if you had asked him at that time, he would have said no.

Liberace would have said no.

You tried to hide yourself so that you wouldn't lose your job, so that your family wouldn't abandon you, so that your community wouldn't turn on you and expel you from your social life, from your professional life.

If you were out, you had very limited possibilities.

If you were a hairdresser, if you were a beautician, if you were a stylist, you could have a really solid following.

People made a good living.

But if you were an executive with a company and you were married to a woman and had children, you cruised Sunset Park.

Sunset Park, of course, that's been there for many years, and for many years, it was a cruisey area, especially down on the levee.

You pulled down the park, and you could play tennis, or you sat on the gazebo, or you stayed in your car, and people went up over the top of the levee at the time.

It's not that way today, but it was all trees and bushes with lots of paths.

You could always go up on the levee and walk around or wait or meet people, so to speak.

That probably went on until they cut the trees.

As long as the brush was there where people could not be seen, that was always a place.

When you want to find queer history, you have to look up words that are really ugly, and then you can parse through there and see what was going on.

As you move through the late 60s, you start seeing articles exposing Sunset Park and other parks as places where gay people congregated late at night.

It was illegal in the state of Indiana to be gay until 1977.

There was a law that was passed in the 19th century.

It basically outlawed any sex act that couldn't result in procreation.

Specifically named were sexual acts between men.

The first big sodomy case was 1922.

It didn't actually happen at Sunset Park, but it was right after that that you find people being arrested under those sodomy laws were almost exclusively at Sunset Park.

They were at the 1938 Greyhound Bus Station across from the Vendome hotel.

There were arrests at the Vendome, and at the Union Train Station.

I found something like 75 arrests of men, only one woman, and that was in that 1922 case.

There was one woman that was arrested with five men.

They were having a really good time.

We used to have lots of secret places like that that we would go to, because a lot of that was, again, undercover and out of sight.

Alleyways, so to speak.

And not literally.

But could be.

The other place was Garvin Park.

I mean, we've heard about Garvin Park.

We've heard about Mesker Park, the area around the Old Post Office that was considered Sissy Corner or the gay cruising area of Evansville for many, many years.

There was a park that was behind The Old Post office that was sunken where the office buildings are now.

There was a basketball court down there, and there was a dark side behind the Old Post Office, and there was a lit side over on the other side, and you'd get one person to park over on the lit side, and you'd all lean against their car and you'd hang out.

I didn't really spend time.

I passed through occasionally, you know, just to see who was hanging out down there.

But that was always so risky because me being a teacher, the police had some surveillance of such places, and so you had to be careful.

Just even meeting and talking to somebody.

Were a lot of harassing back then.

There were people who were very hateful to gay people.

If they thought you were, they would make fun of you and belittle you.

Even Downtown, you would always notice the people, the next block up, the block up, you saw the same car.

There's not that many cars going around at midnight or 11:00 at night.

They'd drive down Second Street first, and yell, "Faggot," "Queer."

Then you don't know should you get in your car?

They're just driving through.

Are they going to stop and hop out?

What are they going to do?

I've seen people come up and start fighting.

There have been many times that somebody got a bloody lip.

I lost all the glass in one of my cars down there.

We didn't see the people coming, and they had crowbars inside their jackets, so I ran.

Somebody was kind enough to stop the car, pushed the back door open, told me to jump in the car.

Some people did get harmed.

I mean, some people were very viciously attacking to people who they suspected.

In the 60s, there were several men who were killed, and their murderers were acquitted.

The fact that the murdered person was gay and had made sexual overtures to the person that killed them.

The jury acquitted them because they felt that that was justifiable homicide.

Andrew Reagan was 27.

He was murdered on September 22, 1954.

He was beaten to death with a tire iron, and his body was dumped along highway 60 on the farm of James C. Ellis, who owned Dade Park, the racetrack.

But in his apartment, when you read the articles in late 54, they keep referring to a cachet of letters that he had carefully kept.

It said they were from men all around the country.

The media never discussed what was in those letters.

There was this purposeful clouding of the publicity that kept people from knowing that he was a homosexual.

If they'd come out and said, hey, Andy Reagan was gay, who are the men that he knows here?

They could have tried to find people that might have known him.

It's still an unsolved murder.

I started school at Lockyear Business College, which was right next to the old YMCA.

And that was another place where gay men found one another was the old YMCA Downtown.

The YMCAs in every community back then was totally gay.

If you traveled and you wanted to go to Chicago for a weekend and go to the bars up there and things like that, you'd always stay at the Y. I had friends that were from Jasper and they had apartments in the YMCA building.

So one day I was with one of my friends and a man had been pushed out of the window of the YMCA, splattered all over the walk.

Jack Burdette was 36 years old, had been a veteran of World War II.

Shortly after midnight on November 3, 1960, he checked into the Downtown YMCA.

About three in the morning, a man working at Indiana Bell across the street heard breaking glass, and he looked out and he saw a man's body had fallen from the fourth floor window on Vine Street and was on the sidewalk.

And there was a streetlight right there, and he could see that he was bloody.

He thought it was a suicide, so he called the police.

Police came, retrieved the Jack Burdette, took him to Welborn Hospital, which was open then, and he died about an hour later.

They came in to interview my friend, well, myself too, because I was there, to know if we heard anything, had seen anything or knew anything about the incident, and we had not.

And it turned out that there was a young man, 21 years old, that had a room across the hall.

Holcombe was his name.

And apparently he told the detectives that Burdette had invited him over for some drinks about two in the morning, and that the two of them had engaged in sexual activity and he was trying to leave the room.

And he said Burdette was pressuring him to do something else.

And he felt like the only way he'd get out of the room was to knock Burdette out.

And when he fought with him, he said he fell out the window.

At the trial, Holcomb said that he'd put him in a chokehold, but he'd stuffed two large pieces of cloth down Burdette's mouth into his throat so that he couldn't call out.

Holcombe told the jury, he said, that there'd been robberies in the building and he didn't want Burdette to yell because people might think he was robbing him.

So Holcombe was acquitted because the defense attorney, Howard Sandusky, had made such a powerful defense that a man has the right to fend off a sexual attack from a pervert just like a woman does, and throwing him out the window was the only way he could get away from him, and they acquitted him.

I started off as a deputy prosecutor.

January 1, 1981, Would have been my first day.

Hard to remember now because it's so many years ago, but I remember the name Ziemer, and I remember people talking about the Ziemer case, how the evidence was just so overwhelming.

But the jury found him not guilty.

So to me, it was in the air.

The feeling about gay people at that time would be such that you would know that that might be a problem for you if the victim were gay.

Well, Rudy Ziemer, yes, he was very well known in Evansville and very well known to the entire community as queer.

He'd been arrested several times for same sex activity, for sodomy.

But on the night of March 12, 1963, he was 56 years old.

He pulled his car into the Old Kentucky Barbecue on Kentucky Avenue and had gotten into some sort of a verbal altercation with a table full of GI's that were from Fort Campbell on leave.

When Rudy went out to get in his car, these two GI's got him in his car, and then another car followed them.

It had the two girls in it Aad the fourth GI.

These two that were in Ziemer's car, beat him and strangled him with his necktie, took his wallet.

They'd left him there in his car and got back into the girls' car that were driving around and had left.

And a few minutes later, they realized that their fingerprints were all over his car.

So they actually drove back to where they'd left him, got back in his car with him, and then drove it to the levee.

The river was over flood stage, and Weinbach Avenue was closed at the levee.

So they took his car down and pushed it into the floodwaters, left the engine on and left the transmission in drive and shut Ziemer up in the car.

Apparently, he was still alive, they said, and pushed it 4ft into the floodwater.

It was two days later when they found Ziemer in his car and the waitress at the Old Kentucky Barbecue, she said, "Well, I know who did it.

It was those GIs that he'd been fighting with because they got in his car with him."

Three of them then were charged with his murder.

And it was about a year and a half later when the trial happened.

Prosecution was able to establish a confession.

One of the GIS confessed that he strangled him because he said he kept pawing him, making "unnatural advances."

They had a trail of evidence.

Their fingerprints were there.

A confession, the body, the corpus, the car pushed into the floodwaters with the engine running and the transmission in drive.

And the jury acquitted all three.

The three were tried together.

They didn't each have their own trial.

Only one of the three signed a confession saying that he'd did violence to Ziemer and that he was the one that pushed the car in the floodwaters.

And the jury foreman said that since they were tried together, the jury felt they should all have the same verdict, and so they didn't have to pay for that crime.

The value of LGBTQ lives at that point was nothing.

It didn't matter.

Our lives didn't matter.

In the case of the 1966 murder of Ken Sanders, an auctioneer - it was a brutal killing - the prosecutor, Kiely, said in an article that he allowed the murderer of Ken Sanders to plead manslaughter because he said, with a jury in Vanderburgh County, there's not a jury here that would convict the murderer of first degree murder, because he said that this man made a pass at him.

That's where we were in that 60s and 70s period was that devaluation of those people's lives.

"Well, those lives don't really matter.

And it wasn't until you got to 1981, with the murder of a young lesbian woman here, Laura Luebbehusen, that a jury convicted the killer of a gay person.

I had a friend named Laura Luebbehusen, and she was a lesbian in this community who was murdered.

Laura was 28.

She was a very pretty girl from Ferdinand.

She was an employee of the Evansville State Hospital.

She was a very kind, gentle person.

I don't remember ever hearing anybody say anything different.

She loved motorcycles and she loved animals.

We both love VWs and VW buses.

She had one then, I have one now.

She was just a bright, sunny young woman.

She was with a girl named, I think, Darlene.

I had met Darlene through other people.

I didn't know her really well, and I'd never met Laura.

I wish I had.

It was February, 1981.

These two women lived together in a little house on East Tennessee.

The house is gone now.

There's a repair shop across the street.

She had a cat, and her cat had gotten out, and she'd gone across the street and asked these guys that were working in this shop if they'd by any chance seen her cat.

They all said no, they hadn't seen the cat.

But the one guy, Schiro Thomas Schiro, he watched what house she went back into.

He was a convict.

He was at a halfway house.

He'd gone across the street and he knocked on her door and he said, hey, "I work across the street, You came over when you were looking for your cat.

My car's not running.

I need to call somebody to come get me.

Can I use your phone?"

And she said, "Yeah, use the phone."

And over the course of that night, he tortured her and murdered her.

It was horrible what happened to her.

The trial was sent to Nashville, Indiana.

In this terrible trial, there was this line of defense that she had consensual sex with this man.

But Darlene testified that indeed it was a rape because Laura was a lesbian and she would not have had consensual sex with any man, let alone this guy.

It was one of the first times that this had ever come out in an actual trial publicly.

I think people were kind of shocked by it.

But at the end of the day, the jury convicted him of capital murder.

The legal ramifications of being a gay person I think ended in that 1981 murder of Laura.

After that, when a gay person was murdered, it didn't matter whether or not there was any sexuality involved, the jury would consider the murder whether or not the person was gay or not.

I just think a certain part of our society there are some that are just violent and the gays are just another one of those subgroups that just feeds that need some people have to torture other people, to bully other people.

It's part of the human condition.

I think part of the way that some people are wired is in order to feel good about themselves, they have to feel they're better than someone else.

I mean, you look at our politics of today, they're completely based on hatred of the other.

We change who the other is all the time.

We used to hate all kinds of different people.

We hated the Italians and then we didn't hate the Italians, but then we hated the Irish and then we didn't hate the Irish anymore.

And we had to find new people to hate.

I think what makes people hateful is ignorance.

I blame most of it on ignorance.

They have had to learn it from somewhere.

They weren't born hating people, nobody is.

Goes with race or religion or anything.

I mean, there's just too much of that that develops in people.

I did my reality show on CMT and so I had this national exposure.

And that was the only time in my life I ever had death threats for being gay.

Somebody that sent me a message on Facebook that apparently I went to school with, he'd seen the commercial on CMT and he threatened my life over that.

You know, there was nothing actually physical.

But you take back a second, you have people that are threatening my life just for me being me?

That's the one thing I can't understand in this.

People who can hate somebody just because of who they are, are the scariest people in the world.

I'm not scared of monsters, I'm not scared of demons or whatever fictional things.

But I am scared of people who don't understand other people and don't accept that other people can exist, because they're dangerous.

I really think it was religion that has caused all this hate.

Some of the most vicious hate I've ever got was from religious people.

I grew up in a very conservative, fundamentalist Christian household.

My dad was a pastor.

We were raised very religious and we had to go to church every Sunday.

And usually the church would preach some things that were a bit like bigoted.

That was something I think that has always been the hardest part for a lot of gay people, is going to church.

You grow up, you go to church, you're sitting there and you're being told by the preacher that if you do this, you're going to hell.

Imagine what that's like, knowing that you're the way you are inside and being told, well, you're going to hell.

Every single Sunday.

I've seen a lot of people that have been tortured with that feeling like they're living in sin, people rejecting them.

A lot of kids, like, look at magazines or like things on the internet.

And I was like, is this me?

But then I was like, no.

I was like, no, because that's not me because of my religion.

I was Baptist.

Growing up in a Southern Baptist church that was a fire and brimstone type of church where first times that I was ever hearing about homosexuality were in a negative context and it being a sin and something that people go to hell for.

When I unpacked or figured out what that definition really was, I knew that I did not need to tell anybody that I had feelings about my girlfriends at school and that this was something I was never going to talk about, take to my grave.

I definitely knew early on that I could not ask the questions that I needed to ask because I knew not only would be shot down, but it would probably lead to a really terrible outcome for me.

When I did want to talk to somebody in the church about being gay, I was shut down by an older minister.

We just don't talk about that.

You'll grow out of it, blah, blah.

I figured I just had to be what society said I had to be.

So that just pushed me further into the closet and pushed a lot of self loathing and self hatred onto myself.

And I grew up with a lot.

Of shame.

There were a lot of nights of just crying, praying.

You do, lots of praying that, please, please, oh, please, let me not be this way.

I don't want to like boys anymore.

I need to change.

And that was really tough.

Even as I came out, I still thought, “You know what?

God still loves me.

I can still be active in the church.” The moment I realized that I probably couldn't reconcile it any longer was I had a friend who I've since made amends with, thought they were doing the good, Christian thing by telling a pastor who actually came to my house and said he wanted to talk to me, pulled me outside and he started asking very pointed questions.

And I don't think I fully answered him, but I was more of a, hey, I still feel like I can be active.

And I was pretty blatantly told “No, you can't.

In this church, we're a Bible believing church.” And so I was told, “You have a week to tell your father, or we will - the elders of the church will get together, and we'll tell him, and then we will pray over you publicly in front of everybody in the church.

And if this is a life choice you choose to continue with, then you're not welcome to worship here anymore.” At that point, I'd come out to my mom.

It just kind of came out one day.

She caught me off guard talking about relationships, and I accidentally used a He pronoun instead of She.

But I was more worried about telling dad, so I wanted to do that in my own time.

I ended up having to tell him during a commercial break in the middle of one of his favorite movies, because we were on day six of seven, and if I didn't say anything within the next day, they were going to come to our house and tell him for me.

He didn't take it very well at first.

It actually - for a period of time, I came to a point where I said, if we can't have a constructive conversation about this without you getting upset about it or angry about it or saying hurtful things, then I won't come back.

I said, you know, I have friends in different states that have already offered couches for me to sleep on.

I'll figure something out.

Mother divorced my father when I was one, and when I came out to him at the age of 20, he basically rejected me.

My coming out essentially ended my relationship with my family, my whole family.

The relationship was never the same because I could never be considered equal ever again to them.

My parents, they were distraught.

They were embarrassed.

They were not supportive because what they knew of gay life and gay people were that they were deviants.

I never really came out to my parents.

I didn't really feel like I was able to come out whenever I was growing up.

Obviously not in high school.

High school.

I remember I told someone, “Hey, I think I'm gay.” I thought this person was my friend.

They ended up telling everyone the next day.

I mean, it was just so ostracizing to be at school, and people are looking at you, whispering about you, telling anecdotes and narratives about me doing things, and it was really dark and scary at some points.

I remember my junior year, there was a girl who 100% I had a crush on, and if she's watching this today, she will know I'm talking about her.

I did, but I didn't want to admit that, and I wasn't going to admit that.

I had a boyfriend.

I was not gay.

But she told everyone in our junior class that I was.

And I'll never forget sitting in the Panera parking lot having this conversation with my boyfriend where he is like, "Are you gay?

Just tell me."

And I'm like, "No, I'm not at all."

And yes, I was.

I was a liar.

I had to have a girlfriend.

It was horrible.

And I didn't even ask for it.

She just said, "We are dating."

It was like, "Oh, yeah, we're going to make you not gay.

This is your girlfriend now."

And I was like, oh, my God.

Every week.

And Valentine's came around.

I had to get her flowers and stuff.

Emotionally feeling like I was in a relationship, but not ... like there was zero attraction there, which I feel like a lot of people can sort of relate to.

I went steady with this one boy almost all the way through high school.

I knew in high school, but I didn't feel like I could do anything about it.

It was a very conservative time, and I was brought up ultra conservative.

And that that was a sin.

Growing up was like, everybody did the same thing.

I got married pretty young, had children, lived the traditional life that was expected of me.

You accept that as that's just the way it is.

I had gone to college and had really just one or two gay experiences, but I told myself I wasn't gay because that wasn't a normal thing by any means in the 70s, and so I found a woman that I fell in love with and we got married.

And I was married for eight years, and we had two children.

My ex husband and I dated from sophomore, junior year all the way through.

We got married in 1983.

My then husband was a Southern Baptist deacon.

My daughters, Jill and Kay, were Girl Scouts.

And I wasn't the leader, but I helped.

And there was another mother that helped.

And we got along really well.

One Sunday afternoon, she came to my house and wanted me go for a ride with her.

And she was telling me she was attracted to me and this and that and the other.

And I was not having it because I was raised a preacher's daughter and this was not right.

Not anything really intense happened in that encounter, but it was enough to make me myself see the light.

I started realizing that I was attracted to men and finally accepted that I was gay.

I felt like that I was living a lie and that wasn't fair to anyone.

I told him and he suggested we go to counseling.

I said I wouldn't be opposed to go to counseling first.

He said, "Why can't we just stay married for the kids and you can go your way and I'll go mine?"

I agreed to that briefly.

We lived in an old farmhouse, so I had to go to town, to dry the clothes.

I went to town, dried the clothes.

Came by a friend of mine.

A softball friend.

And we sat up and talked till like midnight.

Time I got home, he's sitting up waiting for me.

"Where have you been?"

And I told him if this was what he meant by I go my way and he go his, then I wanted a divorce.

Told her that I was gay, and we divorced.

So by 1988, we were separated, and in '89, the divorce was final.

It was very difficult.

We had a two year old son at the time.

That made it difficult also.

But once I accepted it, it was such a relief to me.

When I look back and think, did you really have a crush on that person in high school?

Yeah, I think I probably did.

But I probably was too scared to say anything about it or do anything about it, because that was just unheard of.

My friends who did come out in high school, they were often victims of a lot of bullying.

It was very unwelcoming in school.

Just the everyday things that people throw at you in elementary school and middle school.

Derogatory terms, calling you a faggot, calling you XYZ.

Of course they're going to throw the things that they hear running around their house or their community or whatever at you whenever they see something that's just a little bit different.

In third grade, I had a classmate who had sharpened a stick and stabbed me in the leg.

Then I had a classmate, like, when I was in high school, stab me in the face with a screwdriver.

I had classmates, like, spitting on me and dumping sodas on me, scratching things into my car.

That was a day to day, it could be an hour by hour situation in high school.

I may have grown up in this sheltered place because I went to grade school and high school and some college with all the same people from 1965 on.

And I have never been faced face to face with somebody that wanted to abuse me because of who I am.

And I know that that's not a common thing.

I was the luckiest person.

Being a white cisgendered male, I had a lot more privilege.

Oh, absolutely.

I totally agree.

Inherently so.

Yes.

Unfortunately, that's the world that we live in.

I feel like, as a black, transgender man.

- even if I was a black cis man - that my voice does not speak as much as in volumes.

The concept of intersectionality comes into play, I think.

It depends how many layers of oppression you have.

If you're white, upper middle class, the likelihood of you being oppressed because your sexuality depended on your family, where you were, where you worked, what your education was.

But if you were of a lower socioeconomic group and you were a person of color, or if you were even transgender, you have all those intersectionalities there of those different layers of oppression that were on top of you.

Yeah.

Like, being gay and black is really hard for me.

My sister, she's like, "I don't care, but don't force it on me."

Like, we still hang out to this day.

But my brothers, they're just really strong black men, and oh, "We don't deal with that."

There's a thing in the Latinx community.

of machismo where it's like, the men have to be, like, really manly men, and the women have to be housewives, basically.

I shouldn't be gay because I'm a strong black man or, "I'm your brother, but don't do that around me."

Like, "What are you doing?

You shouldn't act this way.

You shouldn't be doing it this way.

You're supposed to be this certain type of person."

And it's like, but we're not.

How can I not do it around you?

It's me.

It's who I am.

I can't imagine being a cisgendered white male just as much as they probably wouldn't be able to put themselves in my shoes.

I would say it's so inherently different that you can do nothing but sympathize with what somebody else is experiencing on top of being from the LGBT community.

Living in Diamond, Kentucky, we were the only non-Caucasian people that lived in our town.

The other people who were persons of color were my brothers and sisters.

So it looked as though they had, to me, a better experience.

But I know, like, their experience was similar to mine.

Me being gay, I just had another level Oo top of what they were experiencing.

We set up so many ways to differentiate ourselves in our society.

Hair color, religion.

There are lots of barriers.

I didn't have very many of the traditional.

I didn't grow up in an Evangelical household that told me I was hated.

I grew up in a liberal, Presbyterian household that told me I was loved.

As far as religion, later on, when I was in Columbus and I was raising a family with my partner, we joined the Presbyterian Church.

Seemed to be more welcoming in my life as far as religion.

Now there's more accepting churches, lots of accepting churches.

Zion United Church of Christ in Henderson was our first really out and open and welcoming church.

River City Pride started meeting in First Presbyterian Church because they provided a space.

Today, we have so many choices here in Evansville when it comes to churches.

I can probably think of five congregations that are opening, welcoming, and more and more every day that I don't know the actual number anymore because I'll see the rainbow on their signs out front and like, oh, I didn't know about that one.

When you do have a church that welcomes us, well, there's some people who do not feel comfortable to come into the church.

I distanced myself from the church and eventually found my way completely out of church and would identify myself as an atheist.

Now, there's not a lot of love there for us, and so why would I want to be someplace that people don't want me?

It took a whole lot of what we call deconstruction to really begin to unpack everything that I've been taught to believe about God, about life, about my humanity.

And it took finding First Presbyterian Church, a church who was progressive and open and affirming and inclusive of LGBTQ people, to begin to hear a message about God's love for everyone, including gay people.

My mentor and pastor, Kevin Fleming, say the first line of the Presbyterian confession of faith, which is, in life and in death, we belong to God.

And there's no if, and or but to that.

A few years ago, I became an Inquirer first, with the full support of my church and my session in the Presbytery.

And now I am a fourth year seminary student, hopefully gearing up for ordination next year.

I credit having my own faith with God for sustaining me and helping me to continue to consider that maybe there was still space for me in God's heart.

I still have my personal beliefs, but they're different now, and I keep them very close and personal to my own.

It's my thing.

It's not anybody else's.

My dad didn't take it very well when I came out.

It took him a while to come to terms with it, but still, even when he wasn't happy about it, he still stopped going to the church.

He didn't like that there was an ultimatum issued, so he stopped doing children's church and eventually just stopped going.

And to this day, he doesn't interact with that pastor.

Are there still things my dad and I don't see eye to eye on?

Absolutely.

But we went from not speaking to my dad being one of my best friends and closest relationships that I have.

My mom and I are very close.

I talk to her almost every day.

My dad and I were very close, talked to him almost every day before he died.

They begged me for forgiveness for the way things happened, and I never didn't forgive them.

I was the one who was always still showing up, taking my son to them, to their house on the weekend so that he could visit, even though they didn't really want me around.

I knew somewhere in there, if I kept being the one to show up and show them unconditional love, that eventually it would come full circle.

And it did.

I think the best thing that ever happened was my old physician who was retiring - he had an appointment with my mom or my dad, but they were both there, and as he was saying goodbye because it was going to be the last visit, they said, "Hey, we're just curious if you're gay, are you born that way?"

And I don't know that he used this language, but he basically said, "This is my last day.

Yes, you are born that way."

He's like, "Your son was born that way."

He's like, "This is not something that he chooses to do."

I've had to tell this to a few people who have asked me, "Well, it's a choice.

You're choosing a lifestyle."

Even as a little kid, you're indoctrinated of, "This is a choice.

You're doing this."

Why would I choose a lifestyle that is going to be harder for myself?

Why would I pick this?

Why would I pick a life where I have to worry about if I'm going to get jumped walking out of a gay bar?

The Internet sort of killed gay bars around the country.

When I was 25, If I wanted to try and meet people, if I wanted to try and date, I had to go out.

This was before you could Google a list and say, "Hey, we're meeting over at Betty's house."

Now, I had a friend tell me that the first time he came to Evansville - I don't know, 1955 - he didn't know where to go to find other gay people and so he flagged down a police car and asked the policeman, "Hey, where do homosexuals go here?"

And they told him a couple of different bars to go after midnight and that's where you'll find them.

One of them was a bar called the Blue Bar.

That's where he said to go.

So he said, "That's where I went."

When I first came out, of course I was very young.

But I went to the Blue Bar down in the basement of the Lincoln Hotel.

And I looked very young, but didn't give me any trouble.

The front half was what we called straight.

The back half was gay.

But the official gay bar back when I came out was the Choral Room of the McCurdy and then the Town Room of the Vendome.

But the Town room at the Vendome was where I went all the time.

It was a mixed bar, not totally gay, but a lot of gay people went there.

We had piano bars there.

We'd sing and carry on and that lasted quite a while, until they tore the Vendome down.

And then there were several gay places.

There was a bar at Third and Sycamore called the Hawaiian Village.

That was queer space, sort of on the QT late at night.

Then there was a restaurant called Grandma's Cooking or something and they were owned by gay people and we would go to those.

There were different places in town, but you had to be on the right wavelength.

You had to meet somebody who knew what it was.

But it wasn't until PAL's Steakhouse opened in 1968 that there was a defined queer space that everyone knew what it was.

That empty lot where the Lloyd Expressway meets Fulton Avenue was where it was.

As a young teenager we used to go to Pete's Supper Club for dinner periodically, which was down the road.

And driving down Division Street you would see drag queens standing outside of PAL's Steakhouse.

So I knew that that was a queer space, but I was too young to go, and I didn't fully understand the importance of queer spaces at that time.

Queer spaces are important.

And that's such a funny word.

I'm not overly comfortable with the word queer or lesbian yet, but I'm getting better.

Queer was a slur.

Queer was a very bad thing to hear.

It took me a while to get accustomed to that word being reclaimed.

Only within the past maybe couple of years have I become comfortable myself saying it because I heard it as a slur yelled from cars.

Queer spaces are places where you're protected.

It was your space where you felt the most comfortable.

Iin that nobody's going to attack you or talk against you while you're inside this space.

You can be you and you're seeing other people like you.

I think we all want to be around people that are like us.

I think that's just a human nature type thing.

Anthropology shows that animals need to be amongst their own kind to thrive.

Especially when you're new at coming out, finding other people that are going through the same experience.

That's what the gay bar was.

It was a place where you could go, you could dance, you could dance with other men, you could socialize with people just like you and just be who you wanted to be.

You can be a drag queen for a night, you can be a drag king for the night.

You can be the most popular person in the space for a while.

It's a place where you just feel.

Safe and secure and you feel a part of - even though outside of there I felt different, very different.

Gay bars and queer spaces like that, they were where you could gather to have - especially during the AIDS epidemic - you could have celebrations of life for people that passed away when their family wouldn't have a funeral for them.

This was a community center.

If the local gay organization had an event going on, I announced it on the stage.

We had a newsletter for many, many years.

We'd bring stacks of newsletters to the bar.

If I had somebody who asked me what was going on, I'd say, "Here."

That's how we got our message out.

In trying to form some sort of organized queer life in your city, if there are no queer spaces, if there's no organization of gay life, where do they go to have community?

75 years ago, you just had to wander around aimlessly until you ran into somebody.

Today, Pride has meetings.

In the old days, groups met at The Swinging Door, or we met at Someplace Else.

My first bar that I went into was called the Cabaret.

The Cabaret was just a beer and a wine club, and they had drag shows, and that's where I found my first drag show.

After the Cabaret was the Swinging Door.

Swinging Door is the one we went to the most.

Oh, my gosh.

That was like the place in the late 70s.

It was 1979.

A group of us that weren't 21 yet used to go over there on Saturday night and sit outside and listen to the music.

Someone that I knew drove up, was going to be in a drag show that night, and pulled up and said, "Why are you sitting out here?"

I said, "Well, I'm not 21.

I don't have an ID or anything."

And he said, "Come with me."

So he took me inside and introduced me to Norma Black, who was the wife of the owner.

She was sort of the quasi mother hen of the bar.

And he introduced me and he said, "He's 21, but he doesn't have his ID with him, but I'll vouch for him."

And so she called Jim Black over, the owner.

Jim told my friend, he said, "Well, you're responsible for him if he causes any trouble."

And so then after that, I was in.

By 18, I was going into our local bars illegally.

I remember coming to one of the gay bars in Evansville - I think the bar was called the Swinging Door - and I wasn't 21 yet, but I got in.

We were sitting there celebrating my 21st birthday, and Norma taps me and says, "Didn't we celebrate your 21st birthday last year?"

And somebody at table says, "And the year before."

Jim says, "Let me see your ID."

And I said, "Well, Jim, I'm 21 now."

He says, "Thank goodness."

You can never ask for anybody who's more supportive than Jim and Norma Black.

I just remember going in and it was dark, and it reminded me so much of that way I thought of my life.

It retained that smallness.

The bar itself was small and had a dance floor.

Swinging Door had a stage that, when the drag queens weren't performing, the DJ was playing the disco, and we danced.

The DJ was a beautiful man named Mike Wilson, who was a very good friend of mine.

He would get the latest artists of the know donna Summer, Lips, Inc, Cher.

He would get the club cuts, they called them, and that's what young people wanted to hear.

I had friends that were straight, but on occasion they would come to the bar with me because that's where the really good music was.

There were straight people that came there, too, for the music.

There were certain records back then that you didn't hear on the radio.

Radio around here was really pretty bad.

We're so close to Louisville and St. Louis.

People would leave here - they didn't want to be seen out because you could still get fired for just being seen in the wrong place at that point in time.

So people would go to St. Louis, they'd go to Louisville, they'd hear songs, they'd come back, you'd hear about them.

So I made it quest to find this music.

And I would go to Indianapolis and go through the import record stores in Louisville.

I had a quest where I actually went to San Francisco to find a record called Boom, Boom Boom, Let's Go Back to My Room by Paul Lekakis.

It was so much fun.

There was just a lot of dance and a lot of cheer, a lot of laughter and a lot of drinking.

I met my first partner there, made a lot of friends there over the years.

To really meet people regularly, the bar was the place.

And particularly gay men went to the bar, but a lot of lesbians attended, too.

Men seemed more comfortable being out for some reason.

Women that were professional anyway, I think were more private about that.

A lot of people did not want to be out.

A lot of us were not drinkers or bar people, and we couldn't stay up till three in the morning anymore.

So if we wanted to get together outside of the bar, a lot of us were athletes, so we'd see each other in our athletic world, but a lot of us would just start visiting in each other's homes.

Lesbian women got together in their homes all the time.

There would be little parties of 12 or 14 women.

A lot of the people that were not exactly bar people made their own circles of friends, and we formed a group called the SOBs.

We had meetings.

Each one of us would take our turn, and we had a party every month at a different person's house.

And the furthest away someone came was from Huntingburg.

We would go do a lot of things in groups and together.

There was a restaurant out on the West Side, Stucco House, and we used to all go from USI out there and have drinks, and there was a pool table.

We used to have bowling teams, and I think they still do.

Sundays were volleyball day at Wesselman Park.

The volleyball games, those started just among individuals.

Some of us who hung out the bars wanted something to do on a Sunday afternoon because the bar wasn't open or something.

And we'd get together at Wesselman Park.

It probably started in 83, 84.

It kept growing, and there would be times there would be 40 and 50 people out there.

Mostly it was gay men, but then several lesbians came.

It was just a casual thing.

If you weren't too hungover from the night before going out partying or you were underage, it was just a great place to get together and have fun for a couple of hours.

The group did get, like I say, fairly large.

Some were more flamboyant than others, and I'm sure people who drove by or walked by in Wesselman Park realized that was a gay group playing volleyball.

I mean, you get the occasional harassment from somebody, they'd see a bunch of people, but there were women there too, so it probably had to be confusing.

It was just a fun time, and you didn't have a whole lot of places for if you were underage to go and meet people.

Swinging Door Closed three or four months after I turned 21, so I only went there once or twice.

Then bars started sprouting up.

They would open and stay open a couple of years and close or change names or something.

There was the Other Side on Morgan Avenue, whatever you want to call it.

Changed names three or four times.

Club East.

The Other Side.

The Other Side Two.

The Other Side Three.

That was the bar that I started working at.

It was this great big old dumpy building.

I think it called the Wagon Wheel before.

You had your main front room.

And then there was a back room, which was the show bar where they did the drag shows and strip shows.

Johnny was the owner of that.

Again, a straight man, rough, carried a little pistol on him all the time.

Very seldom was ever there when the bar was actually open.

Huge space.

Johnny kept on adding on to it.

He kept mysteriously having fires where he would build a new space.

My best friend was a doorman.

I can remember 800 people coming through there on a Halloween.

I don't care what anybody says - Halloween is a big gay holiday.

And the reason Halloween is a big gay holiday is you can dress up whoever you want and nobody knows who you are.

Club East stayed until 93 or four, I think.

After Club East there was the Show Bar.

The Show Bar is one we always talked about that Madonna wrote on the wall there.

In 1991, we were filming A League of Their Own in Huntingburg, and then later Evansville.

Show Bar had opened up and that was on East Franklin.

And we were right down from the Columbia office where they were doing some of the filming.

Madonna came in one night.

I worked on the film - I actually had a scene with Madonna that day.

I am just anxious to get to the bar and tell all my friends like, "You will not believe what happened to me today."

And I get in there and Jenny Nix says, "Hey, can you start DJing?"

I'm looking over and she says, "Oh yeah, Madonna's here."

Jenny Nix was not always the easiest person in the world to get along with.

She was a bail bondsman, she ran the door.

She charged Madonna cover.

And everybody in the bar is like, "How in the world could you charge Madonna - you know, one of the most famous people in the world - cover?"

And she'd look at, she'd say, "Can she not afford it?"

And it's, "Well, you got a point there."

So Madonna paid for her whole entourage to come in.

A little bit later, know, Penny Marshall and a lot of the other Peaches and crew came.

Penny Marshall hung out in the DJ booth with me.

Everybody came from the movie.

Our organizations made a lot of money thanks to them.

There were other short term bars around.

The Old Woody's at the Corner of Maine and the Lloyd.

Tina Faye's.

It had to been 99, 2000 that Scotty's opened up.

Scotty's was the first time that we had a gay bar that was actually owned by gay people.

There was a couple others that were a little bit more seedy.

I can't remember what it was called, but I know at one point they changed its name to the Slipper Inn on Kentucky Avenue.

I just remember that because everybody kind of said "That's kind of a gross name."

When I was in college.

There was the Brick House.

That's the first place that I went to for a drag show.

I tipped my first drag king there.

Someplace Else, the longest staple.

Someplace Else, which is the only remaining gay bar in Evansville.

Someplace Else, back before it was a gay bar, was a popular eating lunch place.

I mean, judges and lawyers would go there because it was so close to the courthouse.

And when Ellen made the decision to turn it into a gay bar, her day business just dropped.

A lot of backlash from the straight community; the lawyers and the judges, they stopped ... She stopped doing lunches, and it struggled the very beginning, but she stayed with it.

I love that we have a place that people can go and be free to dance and be who they are.

I never had any problems at any of those bars, but sometimes I think they did.

Maybe outside.

Not so much inside.

I do remember coming out of the bar a time or two, and vehicles driving down Maryland Street would yell at people coming out of the bar, "Fag" and things like that.

Every so often, you would have a pickup truck with boys with baseball bats that would come and circle around the block.

We called them the Beaters, because they would come around, maybe have too much liquor or just not like us, and they would come around and they would find people to beat up.

Some people were reluctant to report it because they didn't want people to know of their lifestyle.

There was a small group of people got together and formed an organization called the Tri-State Alliance to try and combat this violence.

In 1982, I was delivering some flyers to the Swinging Door.

I took them in and started to go back out, and I thought, "That's not enough."

And I was talking to some people, and they were about to leave, and I was about to leave, but I stepped back in and I laid the flyers on the bar.

And when I stepped out, there were people that were attacking my friend.

A man had broken a beer bottle and went after my friend, and he said, "Suck on this," and he cut his teeth out.

That's how we were treated for many years.

And that was to a large degree, why I hid for so long.

I went to see about my friend in the hospital, and I just kept thinking, "What can I do?

What can I do?"

I talked to some folks and I said, we need to start a meeting.

And a few people did come forward.

The community was very angry the first meeting we actually had at the bar, because that's where people went.

But I still didn't feel like that was enough.

And I was telling my hairdresser, and she said, "You know, my brother is on the police force.

Lieutenant Larry Qualls."

I went to Larry and I met with him a few times, and I brought him out to Tri-State Alliance, and he met with us.

At that particular point in time, that was a godsend, because people were actually taking us seriously and trying to help that situation.

So in the early 80s, gay people were on just the cusp of acceptance in places like Evansville.

It was about that time.

Joycelyn Winnecke wrote a really long article in May of 1981, and it was called Gays Existing in a Straight World.

We were all anxious to read this article.

And I remember going to brunch - there were about 10 of us that all went to Brunch - and every one of us brought our Sunday paper so we could read this article by Joycelyn Winnecke.

I think it opened a lot of people's eyes that weekend that your neighbors that are hiding from you, they're no threat to you.

They're just trying to live their life.

And it was only a month or so later when we started hearing about this gay cancer on the coasts.

I remember reading the paper about places like New York, San Francisco, of men, and they would talk about them being gay men having these lesions on their legs, and then they started to die.