Original subtitles

(Dance music)

I hadn't really met any gay people,

I only knew - you know - society's reaction to gay people.

And I hadn't had much

Experience with alcohol, and so I wasn't, like, going to go out and have two or three drinks,

And so it was a little nerve-wracking.

And especially you walk in there,

If you're new meat in town, you know,

Everyone's looking. It's like they haven't figured out how weird you are yet,

And so you're very popular.

The new meat thing refers to, they haven't figured out your flaws yet.

You haven't had a conversation where you've embarrassed yourself yet.

And so you're new meat, you're not - to use the word virgin - but

You're kind of untouched. Because we were in the closet back then,

We behaved more poorly.

I mean, because nobody knew what we were doing - we were in the closet.

So, some of the things we did in the closet were

Probably not things that we would do today.

Having sex in public - like, outdoors in public,

Or having sex in your cars, or having sex in the bars.

Those things were more prevalent in our community

I don't know, sometimes

I'd probably be embarrassed to say some of the things we did.

We were still - you know - having to deal with all the stress of

Not being able to tell your mother that you're gay.

And not being able to tell your boss that you're gay.

And deal with your teachers. I was in a class

In my first year of college- it was called Sex Roles in Modern Society.

And, you know, someone said, “I think gay is horrid, and blah blah blah."

And the teacher said, “There might be a gay person in this class."

“Hopefully they have the courage to speak up.” I didn't.

I didn't have the courage to speak up, because I'd already heard

What his opinion was on gays, and I really didn't want to go there,

So it was - even though it was the mid-70s,

We were still very much in the closet.

In '74, I moved down to teach

In a small town near Des Moines, and

My fraternity brother, who had become my partner at that time, joined me also.

We would come into the bars regularly,

And the biggest problem we had was - other than

Gary and some other people that we met - they were really inclusive,

They wouldn't allow people from outside town into their groups.

And so it wasn't until

Some college graduates from Iowa State -

They had a Halloween party, and it just blew

Everyone's minds. Everyone had fantastic costumes.

And everybody mixed for the first time

And it was never the same after that.

Well, I always had certain guys that were kind of

Interesting to me, but there was no approaching them,

And there wouldn't bet be any way to make any contact.

Instead, I actually dated girls. I was in a fraternity.

My date became the fraternity White Rose Queen,

And it was all kind of crazy.

When I actually - I started going to a counselor because I knew I had a problem.

And I didn't know how to get out of it.

So when I asked her to meet me, and go for this walk.

I think she thought I was gonna pop the question.

And instead I told her I was gay.

And I was devastated, she was devastated.

It was a pretty emotional experience overall.

But it set me on a new path.

And that path was explore the world, find out who I was.

And it's amazing how it all came together in a gay life that must me here in this chair right now.

When I was 16, I had a mustache .

And I was able to get into places

Even at 15 I had a mustache.

And so I could get into the bookstores, even though you were supposed to be 16.

I looked 16.

At 17, I had people coming to me to buy their liquor for them because I

Looked old enough and nobody ever questioned it.

Des Moines had more dirty bookstores

Than Chicago had.

Bible thumpers really need a place to release.

These were adult bookstores.

It would be dirty, it would be sleazy.

There would be someone sitting behind a desk,

Usually elevated, and of course they were checking

IDs, and making sure that everybody was 16 and over.

There were at any given time, were usually about

Four different bookstores open. And so you could go

From one store to another to another, and check out

Who was out and about.

Gay people didn't have the social outlet, so

We only had the bookstore back then.

Now we have other social outlets, so we don't need to go to the Lion's Den.

It was one of the first times that we could go in and

Buy gay pornography. Wow.

And a lot of us had some pretty good collections back in the day.

Until they came out with movies, and then we started getting our movies.

There would be a curtain.

To the back area, and the back area would then be lined with booths.

With doors on them. And of course it was

One person per booth, which - you know - always

Got fudged a little bit.

The rooms were 4x4 rooms. The screen was on the back of the door, and

It used quarters. You would take quarters in.

But if you failed to keep the projector running, they could come around

And bang on the door so you would drop another quarter in.

Sometimes the screen would be covered with phone numbers.

I did meet somebody one time with a phone number off the back of the door.

The glory hole varied in size. One particular

Glory hole was 3 feet by 3 feet,

Meaning that you could crawl from one booth to the other.

You could pretty much come onto anybody in the bookstores back then.

It was just a place to hook and meet someone

And have some casual sex, and then

Go on with your life.

When my name and number - unless I thought they were very attractive -

And they were really good at sex.

So one night, I'd given that to two people.

So months later, after I came out to my parents,

Which didn't really go all that well, but they didn't kick me out of the house.

They didn't stop talking to me. They just went into a depression.

And I really didn't know how to help them.

One of these guys calls me, and

I said we were gonna meet and go to Lake Okoboji for the weekend.

And I said, “Don't come early.

Because I'll be working until 5.”

Well, he must've heard me say come early, because he arrived early.

So I get home and my mother says, “There was this guy

That came for you.” I said, “Yeah, we're going up to Lake Okoboji

For the weekend.” And then she says, totally unprompted,

“Boy, he was really handsome."

And I thought, well, what do you think?

The problem with me was, I'd given my name to two people that night

And I didn't know which one this guy was.

All I knew was he was good looking, he was good in the sack.

So that worked out pretty well. But not even that -

I showered, I cleaned up, and as I'm walking through he kitchen to go through the front door,

She whispers, “He's really good looking.”

And so I think that was her way of saying, “I'm OK."

“I'm OK with you being gay."

And it kind of gets to me now because that was her way of saying,

“I'm accepting you.”

It was casual - you were just having casual sex. You knew that thirty minutes form now

You were going to be going about your business.

about us.

It's because we didn't have to

worry about how we looked in

front of straight people,

because they didn't want to know

We were in the closet, which was where they wanted us.

It sounds very degrading, but

It would be not uncommon for me to have a

Couple of casual encounters and then go to work bartending,

And then have somebody waiting for me at 2 o'clock in the morning when I got off.

That would actually be a normal Saturday night.

That's kind of when you were in the closet,

That's what you were able to do. You didn't have to have

Long-term relationships. You could - we also

Didn't have quite the jealousies

We were pretty casual about it.

People that graduated high school in the mid-sixties

They turned around and got married because they thought they were

Going to screw their life up if they lived a gay lifestyle

What they didn't quite realize is that straight people screw their lives up just as easily

And they usually drag some kids along with it.

My second boyfriend, he was married when I met him.

He got a divorce and she wanted to sue me

For alienation of affection, which obviously didn't work,

But yeah, there were a lot of people that

Didn't get married, but there was a much higher percentage of

Gay men that got married. It was a time period where I think

Gay people had a lot of self hatred.

Gays tended to be more conservative.

We wanted to belong.

We wanted to be like people - like everybody else.

And as time went on, we learned we were just fine

Being who we were. We didn't need to be like everybody else

The big thing that happened in Iowa, of course, was in '78 when Anita Bryant came here.

When Anita Bryant came to sing a concert at Vets Auditorium,

She always had a press conference before

She starts out like she always does, with her crusade

Called “Save the Children”

Because this bitch was trying to smear us and turn us into

A bunch of wild creatures.

Anita - she sold the whole nation on the idea

That gay people are out to recruit your children

Into the gay lifestyle.

Feeding on the old idea that, of course, gay people don't reproduce,

And so they have to recruit children into the gay lifestyle

Or we'll run out of gay people. That's actually the argument that they used.

She used it in Miami-Dade

When they got gay rights passed there - civil rights there.

And she actually got the Date County people to rescind it.

She got all of the evangelicals all upset that your children are going to be taught by gay people

And all kinds of things, and they rescinded it.

Well then she went on to Topeka, Kansas - where, believe it or not they had it and they rescinded it.

They went to Eugene, Oregon - they rescinded it there.

They went to St. Paul, Minnesota - they rescinded it there. She was on a real roll here.

Well, believe it or not, Des Moines didn't even have such a thing, but she still was gonna mention it.

So the says she loves the homosexual - of course she didn't use the G Word -

Because that would be too kind to gay people.

The homosexuals. But she just wishes they would just stop talking.

And if that sounds a little familiar, it's because

It's exactly the same thing they're saying now.

Here we are, nearly over 50 years later,

And they're saying the same thing again. On a crusade across the nation

And try to do away with the homosexuals, then we certainly would have done it on June the 8th, after one of the most

Overwhelming victories A guy from St. Paul, from an anarchist group,

Actually came down with two friends of his

And he had entered the building, and proceeded to the front of the room and threw a pie in her face

Can't imagine -

I guess the room of people that were there just went silent.

Nobody went “Ah!” Or anything like that. And then to a place with Norfolk

Virginia, and were met with protests and all kinds of problems, and

It just went silent. But the cameras kept right on

Rolling, so it was all on film.

And she's wiping the pie away from her

Face, and she says, “Well at least it's a fruit pie.”

It turns out it was banana cream, my favorite pie.

I cheered when I read that she got a pie

In her face, because I just hated her vehemently .

It made national news, that

Anita Bryant met her match in little Des Moines, Iowa

And something we are - to this day - very proud of.

That we started the decline of

Anita Bryant's movement against us.

So after this went national,

The gay community in San Francisco were having banana cream pie parties.

I mean Now Anita, let's pray. That's all right.

Father, we want to thank you for the

Opportunity of coming to Des Moines, and Father we want to ask that you forgive him.

And that we love him, and that we're praying for him.

To be delivered from his deviant lifestyle, Father.

We're just as plain as everybody else.

We just happen to have sex with our same gender.

We had our own signals, you know.

Like if you're sitting in a bathroom stall, tapping your foot

And then kind of bring your foot a little closer to the other side,

And if you got stomped on, you knew you fucked up.

Margo Frankel was a county park

On the northern edge of Des Moines

On Second Avenue.

It had trails that went off through it,

And it kind of became a spot where gay people

Would travel the trails and hook up.

Gay people had few places to meet people, so that's one of the places that they did,

Well, it became a problem with the general public

If they were using a trail and all of a sudden

Run across, you know, two guys going at it - it became a problem.

This is back

Remember when I said the only place we could meet people was through a hole in the wall?

This was kind of a carry on of

that.

How do you meet other gay people when we're not out and about?

You know?

And this was part of that time period.

What happened was the Damron Guide came out, it lists places

That have cruising areas, gay bars, gay restaurants, gay hotels, any place

Where you would be safe being gay.

So that, you know, you wouldn't be arrested or something like that.

And Margo Frankel Park was listed as a place that was cruising.

There were two sides to it. There was the big side,

It had playground equipment, it had bathrooms - the bathrooms were cruise-y -

But it was also big and open, and that's generally where

If there were straight people in the park, they were over there.

Then there was the back side, which just had a little shelter house and the bathroom,

And they connected. You walked down into the woods and the two

sides were connected.

That way. But you go to one side

And try to pick someone up, and then you'd

Drive around to the other side. It was - you know -

It was one of those things where you didn't have to say any words.

You'd get eye contact if they were acceptable,

Then you went off to the corner, you went into the bathroom,

Into the woods, or something like that.

Well one of my famous lines, because I like to cut through the crap,

Is buy somebody a drink, hey - want to fuck? Let's go.

It worked. It worked.

Now if you do it, someone would slap you in the face.

Very romantic, you know.

I knew all about Margo Frankel Park. I never participated in any of that

Myself, but I had friends who did.

I had to bail somebody out once, as a matter of fact, over that.

We had a deputy

I think from the Polk County Sherriff's office who had

Taken on this mission of cleaning

Up Margo Frankel Woods.

Somehow, someway, somewhere, Channel 13 news announced that

And so I think that kind of alerted the police

Department that that was going on.

I can't put any of that - I have no evidence of that, but I think that's what was happening.

So there was a raid,

And what it was is it was entrapment.

They were trapping people into - you know, they were bringing out

Beautiful young men and trying to get them

To have sex with somebody,

So they would have cameras around and they would take pictures of it, then they would arrest you, take you

Down to the police station where they would keep you

There until they let you go, once you posted bond.

And if you got a good lawyer, you generally

Got it expunged from the record after so long.

But there was a big article on the front page.

It was listed, “Beware of Bears in the Woods.”

And that was to tell people that the police were watching,

And it was an article about Margo Frankel Park.

But later on, there was a place at Cherry Creek also, near Saylorville,

And there was some - it became a meeting place, I guess.

And there were a bunch of people arrested there, and those names were put in the paper.

And some of those people lost their jobs.

People took advantage of gay people back then.

My first apartment I had when I came back from Vietnam,

I was robbed in. I'd met somebody, brought him home,

And they went to the kitchen and pulled out a knife and robbed me.

I called the police

Right away, and they came and they kind of looked at me funny

And I just looked at them, and I says, “Yes, I'm gay, and I want their ass in jail."

And two days later, they were in jail.

But a lot of times people would do that with gay people and

They weren't reported.

It's because people didn't want to be outed.

A teacher actually

Was driving through, saw two young men,

Brought them back to his home, and that night they murdered him.