by Marc Stein. Copyright © Marc Stein 2026. All rights reserved.

Introduction

I met Bill Brinsfield because he was a regular at the Border’s bookstore café in Center City, where my partner worked as a barista. She encouraged me to interview him after hearing some of his stories about his earlier life in Philadelphia. Five years later, in 1998, I wrote to him from Maine (where I had taught for the previous two years), but the letter was returned for “insufficient address”; I believe he lived in an apartment building and my letter did not specify a unit number. On February 6, 2003, Brinsfield was featured in a Philadelphia Daily News article. In subsequent years I occasionally attempted to locate him but was never successful in doing so and I have never found an obituary.

Before beginning the taped interview I collected the following biographical information:

Date of Birth: 8 June 1927

Place of Birth: Camden, New Jersey

Place of Mother's Birth: Delaware

Mother's Occupation: Machine operator in clothing factory

Place of Father's Birth: Galestown, Maryland

Father's Occupation: “Bum”

Race/Ethnicity: English/Anglo-Saxon

Religious Background: Methodist

Class Background: “Dire Poverty”

 

Residential History

1927-1939: 52nd and Locust Streets, West Philadelphia, Philadelphia

1939-1950s: 18th and Wallace Streets, Fairmount, Philadelphia

1950s: 12th and Spruce Streets, Center City, Philadelphia

1950s-1968: 1106 Locust St., Center City, Philadelphia

1968-Early 1970s: 23rd and Walnut Streets, Center City, Philadelphia

Early 1970s-1992: 2000 Addison Street, Center City, Philadelphia

 

Work History

1950s-1960s (15 Years): Sales, Doubleday Bookshop

1950s: Bartender, Allegro, Holiday Inn, Paddock, Marlene’s

1960s-1971: Sales, Strawbridge and Clothiers

Interview Transcript

Marc Stein Interview with Bill Brinsfield, 27 October 1993. Transcribed by Abby Schrader and Marc Stein.

  

I met Bill Brinsfield because he was a regular at the Border’s bookstore café in Center City, where my partner worked as a barista. She encouraged me to interview him after hearing some of his stories about his earlier life in Philadelphia. Five years later, in 1998, I wrote to him from Maine (where I had taught for the previous two years), but the letter was returned for “insufficient address”; I believe he lived in an apartment building and my letter did not specify a unit number. On February 6, 2003, Brinsfield was featured in a Philadelphia Daily News article. In subsequent years I occasionally attempted to locate him but was never successful in doing so and I have never found an obituary.

 

Transcribed by Abby Schrader and Marc Stein.

 

MS: This is Marc Stein and I'm interviewing Bill Brinsfield on October 27th, 1993, in my house in Center City. And as I just said, I thought I'd start by asking you to say something about your early years, the kind of family you grew up in, what kind of childhood you had. I know you were born in 1927.

 

BB: '27. And well, it was a disoriented family, completely. My father and mother got married on a lunch hour. And I think he went back and quit his job and never worked another day in his life. So she supported him until he abandoned us completely. And then he would just come back occasionally to threaten her, to kill her or something, for money. And then she would take him in for a while out of fear of his doing harm to me or to herself. Well in other words, all the influences and all the interpretations and everything came through women, because I had a domineering grandmother who lived with us, a domineering mother, but passive aggressive. On the surface very docile but always behind that docileness was the fact that she probably had chosen me to live with her for the rest of her life. You know what I mean? They pick one child out of a family. Usually there's one. They figure you're the one. Since I was an only child, I was the only one. And so through my mother and my grandmother, then I had an older cousin who lived with us. It was the Depression or pre‑Depression probably. And they had taken her in because they were so poor down home. That's in Maryland. And they had so many kids then. Everybody had fourteen and fifteen children. So they took this Mary to ease the burden of her mother down home. And she lived with us for quite a long time, until she was a teenager. So all of my interpretation for my behavior was through these three domineering women. So I didn't have probably a chance, as far as coming out a macho type. Because every single thing, like I played games with Mary and her girlfriends, and there was no male figure, no father. And my mother didn't date after they were separated or even after they--he actually died--she never began to date with anyone. And so any kind of effeminacy or effeminate thinking or the channels of our minds, you know how we run in mind patterns, probably leaned to the effeminate or to the female as a result of that was the only thing I could interpret.

 

MS: Did you get teased at all about that by other kids?

 

BB: Oh well yeah. In early years, I guess my cousins accepted me for a while because of the blood ties, I guess. But they would call you a sissy. That was the word then. But then later, later on, when they became teenagers, they began to draw away because they were embarrassed by the fact that I was their cousin and I would have to go along with them. But also, at the same time, I was going out with my cousin Buddy and dating girls. In other words, we went on double dates, which of course bored me to tears, but he was a real hound. I mean he was good looking and that caused problems, too, 'cause he was always getting attention and he was very handsome and I was skinny and effeminate. And so I always felt terrible. And then noticing, one time, in the movies, with this girl that I was with, it was a blind date, and he was putting his arm around his girl, this girl he was with, and whatnot, and so I put my arm around her shoulder, and that was like my first kind of leaning towards a heterosexual act, so to speak. And she said “get off me you creep.” So it was not exactly a good beginning towards experimenting with a female. But even at that age, I mean of course my sexuality was already set from way back, from way before that. I mean probably pre‑teenage, before I even reached puberty, I realized that that was my leaning, leaning that way.

 

MS: Do you remember what you used to think about that?

 

BB: Well yeah. I mean I knew then that I found males attractive and I did not find females attractive.

 

MS: How early? Can you remember?

 

BB: Oh really early.

 

MS: Like as a child?

 

BB: I remember yeah, like at probably five years old or something, not thinking about males then, but at about five years old I had this experience where I walked up the steps and my aunt, a big, enormous woman, like 350 pounds of just that kneaded dough look of cellulose or whatever they call it. And she was stark naked in front of a mirror and looking at herself for some reason. And I saw what was to me this nightmare. And that was the first time I had seen female genitalia and I was like, “What has god wrought?” So that was one reason probably. It was enough to traumatize you that you didn't want to go exploring once you see something like that up close. And then I think my sexuality, I remember one very early experience, which was very erotic but not intentionally, but my father, who at one time had come home for one of these short periods, 'til he got a job and put his fingers in the till and had to run back down to Maryland, or 'til he got into some kind of scrape or with the horse race people and he owed them money and then he would take off again, and I do remember one time rassling or something in the early morning. And I remember that being very, very erotic.

 

MS: With him?

 

BB: With him, in a father-son kind of thing. I'm sure there was nothing sexual in his mind. But I do remember making physical contact with him and everything. And I can remember as far back that it was erotic. I wouldn't know what the word even meant then, but there was some feeling there of excitement. And that probably was one of my earliest experiences and probably was the first, if you can call it, sexual experience, because I think his genitals accidentally came out of his underwear. They wore those old funny shorts that came down to the knees or something like that. And there was nothing, I'm sure, intended on his part. It was a sheer accident. But to me it was very erotic. And then I was thinking, “Oh when I grow up, am I going to be like this, too?” Because as a child, it seems so grown man and everything.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: So it was a strange experience and I can't really say that maybe had anything to do with my homosexuality, because I personally think it's a genetic thing. And I just think the type of homosexual you become, as far as being effeminate or a drag or a sadomasochist or whatever it is, has to do with environment and with whatever your influence early, and then with learned behavior from other homosexuals. So I really think that is all a learned and environmental thing, but I believe basically it's a genetic thing.

 

MS: I see.

 

BB: Because my mother told me that my father had a boyfriend, and apparently he was a bisexual. But I don't think there was anything to do with pederism or pedophile in that incident I'm talking about. I really don't. I think that was a sheer accident, just an accidental thing. He was just trying to be like a father since he was back home for a while.

 

MS: But you didn't know that about your father then, at the time?

 

BB: No. Not 'til later. No, no, 'cause I was very small then. I mean I don't remember. I can't remember exactly what age, but later, pre‑teenage, when my mother was trying to explain about sexuality, the birds and the bees, she told me that he had this boyfriend named Spider. And I remember meeting him. And I remember him looking sort of like a hillbilly Clint Eastwood with a missing tooth or something. And even back at that young age, I can remember sort of thinking, having some kind of thinking, how attractive this person was, in this hillbilly way. So she told me one time, at times he would go off, prefer him to her. And then I never knew really if it was like spite. Like she was telling me these to poison my mind against my father 'cause she didn't like him. Although my mother didn't have that kind of nature. I think it must have really been true. And I heard other innuendos later about he and this Spider. So apparently, but at the same time, like a gypsy woman came in the middle of the night one time with a baby and said “this is a child of your husband” to my mother and “my brother kill you with knife” and all this. And my mother said, “Well I declare, how unusual.” But he was a very strange man.

 

MS: Let me ask you this. Aside from your father, then, were there other gay men or lesbians who you recall encountering as a child?

 

BB: Not, not at that age, no. The only thing I remember: a man, an older, well of course older to me, probably might have been thirty, but to me he was an old man, being ten or eleven or something like that. And coming up and following me for a while and looking in windows, but obviously not looking at the books or whatever was in there. And then he started talking. And even at that young age, I knew that he wanted something.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: And I was very frightened, and also I saw him as something slimy and horrible. You know what I mean? Because I had been told by cousins and all that this kind of thing would happen. I don't remember the exact age. So that happened a few times. Another man, one time in a car, pulled up and my two cousins and I were walking along the road. And he was exposing himself.

 

MS: Is that right?

 

BB: Yeah. And the strange thing was like somehow I was excited in a way by it, but my cousins were just baffled and bewildered. They were younger than I. And of course stupidly we went home and told my aunt what had happened. So then she told us all the horrors, that these men will do these terrible things. And I remember my grandmother telling me one time when I was, oh I don't know, probably thirteen or fourteen and already had probably had experiences, and she said these funny boys, as she called them, funny men or whatever, she said did you ever, did you ever notice, she said, they have, meaning gays, they all have nice luxurious hair and nice teeth because they suck the juice out of young boys. And I remember being absolutely horrified. I'm thinking “my god, what a thing to tell a young kid.” I mean I don't know if I was twelve or thirteen, but whatever it was, I knew it was a horrendous thing to tell anyone, let alone a developing child.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: And my aunt one time, when I was about fifteen, I already had come into my sexuality. I already had had experiences and what not. But I was telling her, just the attitude, I am telling you this for the attitude of the time, of the late forties and early fifties. Not even being cruel, or being mean in her mind, she was combing her hair. And I said when I grow up, not when I grow up, when I start to have a career, I'd like to design sets for the opera or for the theater, 'cause I was always sketching and drawing. I was an artist of sorts. I mean I was with a couple of galleries, but it was always a side job. I had to keep a regular job. And I had a little bit of a reputation in Philadelphia as an artist. So this was when I was just starting out. And I remember, without missing a beat in combing her hair, she said that what you're going to be when you, I don't know what I said, maybe when it’s time for a career, she said what you're going to be is one of those bleach‑blonde pansies that live on Spruce Street. And she wasn't even being cruel. But it was devastating to me. It was absolutely crushing. And from that moment forward, it changed, 'cause I was very fond of her. She was like a second mother or something. I mean I was really fond of her. And it changed terribly and it warped my feeling towards her. That one single statement.

 

MS: Sure.

 

BB: And I remember when she was calling for me, when she was dying. I went down and somehow I couldn't really feel the pathos that I should have. I mean I felt pathos in that there was a human being who was suffering. But just that one single insensitive thing changed my whole feeling towards someone who was a loved one at one time.

 

MS: Can you tell me, then, about some of those first sexual experiences that you recall? You said you were thirteen or fourteen years old.

 

BB: Well the usual thing with someone. Boys of that age were exploratory, had these sessions where they would smoke cigarettes or do something terribly wicked like that. And then one thing would lead to another and it was just that kind of thing.

 

MS: So they were other boys from school?

 

BB: Yeah, but what's the first school you go to, like second or third grade, elementary school. They were just kids. Nobody had reached puberty yet.

 

MS: So this was before you were thirteen or fourteen?

 

BB: Oh yeah. This was very young. And I can't remember the first. But they were boys who went on to be heterosexual, although they weren't doing anything explicit. More just all that comparison thing that people do, size comparison. And then later, a little later, they had groups where they would masturbate and see. Apparently my cousins had the same experiences and they were all heterosexual. And there were two fellows who were actually on a poster for the Marines, and they were twins, and they came and they were doing the same thing. But nobody was doing anything explicit. Nobody was getting into any really heavy stuff. It was mostly just a basis of comparison. They were children and wanted to see what the other person was like or something.

 

MS: So when you talked before that you came to terms with your sexuality when you were thirteen or fourteen, what happened around then that you were talking about?

 

BB: Oh, did I say I came to terms with it? 'Cause I don't think I'm to terms with it yet, at sixty-six years old! I don't think I ever came to terms with it.

 

MS: That might not be the right word, but you were saying something.

 

BB: Oh that I understood that this existed in the world.

 

MS: Yeah.

 

BB: But feeling isolated by the same token. 'cause somehow I knew, like the fellow next door and all that, the ones that you would have these little experiences with. You knew that they were also interested in girls. I mean I couldn't intellectualize it that specifically when I was young. But I just knew that they were going to go on to have wives and children. And I knew that I wasn't, that I wasn't interested in any way in female genitalia or in sex with females or anything, even then. I'm talking about in the early teens or pre‑teens. And yet I knew the kids from across the alleyway where we lived, in the next house, we had little kind of experiences. But I didn't think of him as being different. I just thought well he's going to do this now, but he's not going to do this, 'cause he talked about girls and it was always. And all of them, with the exception of maybe two or three people from that early period--they turned out to be homosexuals. But I didn't know it 'til later, until much later. I met them in the gay life.

 

MS: Two or three did?

 

BB: Two or three did, out of maybe twenty kids that did all this fooling around stuff. Even my own cousins and some of their friends and all like that. But none of this was really sex. It was just fooling around stuff. And don't you think most boys have experiences like that, that mean nothing. They either block it out. They either completely blank it out or it doesn't mean anything 'cause it's something they outgrow. And of course the parents keep telling you that. You'll outgrow this.

 

MS: Right, right.

 

BB: I mean you can tell them you're gay at thirty-five and they'll say, “Well this is a phase, you'll outgrow it.”

 

MS: So when did you first then encounter some part of the gay world. You described before going to the square.

 

BB: Well yeah. I still was extremely naive. And I went into the service. And even in the service, it was so taboo then. That's also something, I don't know if you know, but for the tape here, in the war years, which can be documented, you can find it documented, in the Bluejackets Manual of 1940 to, when did the war end, '44?

 

MS: '45.

 

BB: '45. O.K. During those years, if you were caught in a compromising position, a homosexual act, you were not only dishonorably discharged, but you actually, and this is absolutely documented, you can find it, if you are doing the research, you lost your citizenship. Now I know that sounds absolutely fantastic. You were not a citizen of any country. But I don't know how extreme the circumstances had to be for you to get that kind of court martial. And mostly you were just discharged, dishonorably discharged and what not.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: But that actually was a Navy law which has never been brought up. And when that man spoke, the boy who's trying to get his job back in the Navy, I don't know whatever came of it, remember he was an officer or something?

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: And he spoke at Border's or he signed books. And I wrote a note and asked him if he knew that, if he knew that during those years you actually could get, and I mean he never responded.

 

MS: I'm curious about your own experiences. What year did you go into the military?

 

BB: I wasn't in long. It was near the end of the war. It was '44.

 

MS: And were you asked those questions when you enlisted?

 

BB: Oh of course. I mean you wouldn't dare. I mean in those days nobody would dare say yes.

 

MS: So you said no?

 

BB: Well of course.

 

MS: But do you remember the question?

 

BB: Well they asked you if you liked girls. And I remember the guy in back of me, who I met later in life. His name was Tony Lutz. In fact I just saw him a few days ago. He's now like sixty-seven. And he said I like their clothes. And they put him aside. And then another guy....

 

MS: Wait what do you mean aside?

 

BB: Well set you aside, like in the group that was going to be 4F or was going to not go. You know what I mean? They just immediately, and they must have asked him other questions. But I remember hearing that through the partition. And I was terrorized, 'cause I wanted to go in, I didn't want to be drafted and go into the Army. I figured the Navy was easier for some reason.

 

MS: I see. So you went into the Navy.

 

BB: Well you didn't crawl on the ground. At least you were on a boat. You still could get killed, but….

 

MS: And did you see any aspects of the gay life in the Navy?

 

BB: Well that's where I first realized that there were other people, that I wasn't the isolated person in the world that I guess every gay person goes through at some point, where they think they're the only person in the world that has proclivities or whatever the word would be.

 

MS: Tell me about meeting other people.

 

BB: Well I met this fellow. He came into the barracks and he was effeminate. And he was wearing paisley silk pajamas. So it stopped the whole barracks dead. You know what I mean? Everybody stopped dead. And he had wooden clogs, making this clogging noise, with a tooth brush. And I think he had a bible and a tooth brush or something. So everybody said go talk to him. Everybody was trying to talk to him. And I went up. I sort of took my time. I said, “Hiya.” And I said, “Did you just get billeted here.” And he said, “I've been in the hospital.” And he said something like, “I lost twenty pounds but I didn't lose my figure.” Well right away, I mean that was enough for me to realize that this man was very peculiar. So I sat down on the bed. And he said “officers scrutinize two on a bed.” He was sitting. I sat down to talk to him and I jumped up. So he turned later to be kind of a hero. In that barracks there were four gay people who would never admit it. We even went up to Cape Cod together, but nobody would ever admit to one another that they understood that they were that way. They had all come out probably, I mean sexually they had come out but not socially. And these two drunks used to come, two tough guys, and the barracks was all heterosexual except for maybe five or six of these people. And they would go to this one little guy. He was so very puny and they would say--I'm not going to get vulgar vulgar, but I mean can I tell a little slightly off-color story?

 

MS: Yes

 

BB: And they would wave their genitals at him and say “this is what you want,” or something like that, or “this is what a man looks like,” or something like that. And so this Paul, who had been this sort of super queen that everybody was really afraid to approach, he stopped dead in his paisley pajamas. And the one said “what the fuck is this?” when he came through. Like what's this apparition. So they're standing there and he's observing the whole thing. And they were talking about him; “this is a man's dick.” And he exposed himself, and it was this enormous thing, and he said “that's a man's.” And they were so embarrassed. They were so, not embarrassed, but they were so taken like aback that they sort of like crawled out with their tails, and they never bothered this guy named Paskunis again. And all the straight guys were cheering and clapping and everything. See I mean they didn't like gays, believe me, you know what I mean? But it was a different attitude pre‑AIDS than it is since AIDS. You know what I mean? Like they knew who was gay there and nobody bothered them. That's why all this nonsense about the service is insanity. This thing with Clinton, because I mean there were twelve men, ten to twelve men, in that barracks who every single heterosexual man knew they were gay. They never made a pass at any of them. They never made a pass. These two assholes who came in doing their thing, they weren't from that barracks. I don't know where the hell they were from. They were just real goofed up and they would be drunk. And I mean people showered together all the time. All this nonsense about separate showers for gays in the military. It's so ludicrous because everybody knew they were gay but nobody really gave anybody a hard time. They didn't openly say they were. They didn't come out and say it because they could be discharged and they would have purges. Like if someone was caught, then they'd take you in the service and they would make you tell who all your friends were.

 

MS: Did anybody ever report you?

 

BB: No. Well I never did anything. Oh god no, the whole time I was in the service I never looked cross‑eyed at anybody. Or had the slightest intention of having any kind of experience.

 

MS: Why?

 

BB: Well the threat of being dishonorably discharged and perhaps even losing your citizenship or something. That might have been a threat that they told you that wasn't true. I don't know, but they did tell you that.

 

MS: Was that hard for you?  

 

BB: What?

 

MS: To not have sex during those years.

 

BB: Oh no. Well your hormones are raging at that age, but I mean certainly the alternative was not worth....

 

MS: The risk.

 

BB: Yeah, because I mean I still had male pride, even though I may have had effeminate gestures. Maybe in talking I used my hands too much or something, but there was still some aspect of male pride, and to be discharged from the service, and having people find that out would be terrible. Although in later life I became more open about it. I told my family and everything, but it took many, many years to get to the point when you could say that.

 

MS: Did you ever go to gay bars or gay gathering places while you were in the service?

 

BB: No, no, during the service. It wasn't 'til we really got out. It was right at the end, because everybody was too uptight and too afraid, really too afraid. And just before we got discharged, we went on a liberty to New York. We were stationed near New York, so we actually could go into New York every night. And by accident, we hit a bar called the Crossroads, which was at the top, the very top, of what's the famous square, Times Square. And it was a sailor pick-up place and a lot of older gay men were there. And the Astor Bar. This isn't Philadelphia memorabilia, but the Astor Bar was notorious. And we knew about that, even though nobody admitted they were gay. But they knew about the Astor Bar. It was like the most notorious place in the world. And we went in there. And there were some older men and they came up and they said, well at the time we thought, disgusting propositions. I mean they said some really disgusting things. And I said, “Oh god, like this is awful. Hopefully I'll never be like that.” This one friend had admitted to me that he was gay, but was too petrified to do anything either in the service.

 

MS: Did you admit to him? Did you tell him?

 

BB: Well I think it was all with innuendo. But we just understood. We were just too, too afraid during the war years to do anything. And I found out it was extremely repulsive at the time, because of what these men suggested. And it was very ugly. And it would not have seemed ugly to me probably if one of the people in the service, my own age, had suggested something. It probably was the age difference, 'cause you saw them as a little lecherous or something.

 

MS: Right. So it was after you came back to Philadelphia that you went to....

 

BB: Well no. We got out of the service and we were discharged honorably. And then we went up to one of the guys in the barracks, who again wouldn't admit anything. But he lived in Provincetown, near Provincetown. He lived in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. And he asked us to come up there and his father gave us a cabin and there were four of us. And we thought we were going to be artists, that we were going to sketch and paint and live the bohemian life and all this crazy stuff for a couple of months. Because I was too much of an Oedipus to ever leave home completely. Because Mamma was always there and Grandma. It was like having two mothers. So we went up there. And then we went into Provincetown. And that was the revelation of revelations. Because it was the end of the season, but it was still very gay. And we met a couple of guys. There was an older man and a younger man who was an actor or something, who was very handsome and was being kept by this older man. Well they took us to a bar, a full blown gay bar. And of course this friend of mine Bill, and Andy, and Earl or Bob, and the other guy's name was Chuck. It was a combination of horror, being horrified, and being interested at the same time. And no one still had admitted that they were to each other. I mean at this point everybody knew that all six people were gay. But nobody was going to say yes.

 

[interruption]

 

MS: You were just telling me about the one guy who would never admit it.

 

BB: Yeah, until later in life, until we became adults, like in our early twenties. And he came down for a visit. And then he decided to get into something. And I wasn't interested then, because we were almost like brothers at that point. There was no interest in it. But it took that long and he probably, and a couple of these kids married and had children and everything. In fact, the one person who I really had my first experiences with became a preacher and had a slew of kids. And then the second, probably, well I don't know if it chronologically was the second, but someone who I got involved with in that silly, post‑teenage kind of way, where you think it's going to be an affair or a long-term relationship, which was nonsense, had like fourteen kids.

 

MS: So those first experiences were just after the Army?

 

BB: Yeah, they were after. I had had a couple of like these like fooling around experiences. But I mean not really a sexual experience. And that was after the service, when we went up to Provincetown, this one fella' and I began to have real sexual experiences together. And I don't think there was any kind of emotional involvement. It was just a release, an outlet. But then he married.

 

MS: Right. And so what happened when you came back to Philadelphia? That would have been about 1945?

 

BB: O.K., well yeah. So then we started. He lived in Jersey, this Bill. I won't say his last name because he's a preacher. Well he may be dead. Who knows at this point? I mean my god, fifty years ago or whatever it was. But he would come over and then we began to try to find places. And at that time, Rittenhouse Square in the forties and in the thirties, too, was the place to go. And I mean it was filled to the brim at night with gay men. I mean it was unbelievable. And it would get raided, and they would harass them, mostly harassed by what they called Taney down here. You're living right near it, the Devil's Pocket down near the Schuylkill.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: They would come in in groups, and beat people up, and terrorize people and people would be jumping over bushes and running and everything. You know it was terrible. I mean bludgeoning people and all like that, which is nothing new. That went on just a couple of years ago after they came out of a meeting at the Ethical Society. A bunch of thugs started beating up people.

 

MS: Now you told me before that when you started hanging out there you heard about a big, mass raid that had happened.

 

BB: In '38, 1938. We were told by friends. The paddy wagons pulled up to all exits and took everybody. I don't know if they arrested everybody, but they harrassed everybody. And then that happened at a place called Reyburn Plaza, which no longer exists. It's now the Municipal Building. It was a park and it also was an area where people went to pick other people up. And there was a fence, a low fence, and people used to sit on this fence. And they'd come. They’d call it like the rack or something like that. And people made eye contact and would pick people up on the street there.

 

MS: Now where was that?

 

BB: Well it's at 15th and Arch, I guess, across from the YMCA. You know it was a park and it had a band shell. And they had concerts in there.

 

MS: Was there ice skating there in the winter?

 

BB: No, not ice skating. That was somewhere else. That was near there, but that was over at 16^th, in the Suburban Station, down in the hole, like in a lower level.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: No, this was dancing. During the service they had USO dances for the soldiers and sailors and stuff like that. And that was a big hangout. That was a meeting place, which we found out. But that was a lower, I don't want to say the wrong word, but the bar people would have considered them scroungy low‑life gays. The bar gays.

 

MS: Would have found which place?

 

BB: Would have found the Rayburn Plaza. They would be like you didn't talk to those people. They were criminal element. Tthey were gay people who were shoplifters, for real. I guess even then there was dope back there. I never ran into it, but they probably were selling reefer and stuff like that. So these were a sort of criminal, a darker side of gay life, of gay people, and they were kind of a criminal element. Because there was a group that used to really be second string, they called them. And they would go up on ladders and when the bereaved widow was out at a funeral, there would be nothing but a green robe, maybe. on the floor, when she came home. And they all got arrested. But they were all gays. And they were all gays and a lot of them were entertainers. So you knew who they were. And I said “my god, so and so got arrested for robbing a house.” And I didn't know them socially but I knew who they were. But you didn't even admit that you knew any of these people. You wouldn't dare admit you knew them, although they were public people in a sense that they were in the bars and they were very loud and vulgar and then they would tell about their experiences there.

 

MS: So tell me more about Rittenhouse Square in the mid-'40s.

 

BB: Well there was the meeting of all minds. I mean that was every level. That was the poorest, socioeconomically poorest, to Main Line, everybody. And the amazing thing, when you discovered it, was like everybody knew everybody. So they weren't serious about making out, because that was like a social thing. They walked around in groups and they talked on benches. And the people who were really out to get down to the nitty gritty, they walked around the edge, on the pavement, which they called the carriage trade, because people would come by in cars.

 

MS: The carriage?

 

BB: Trade. They would call it the carriage trade, which was some Victorian expression that meant something to do with the theater, something there where the carriages pulled up under the portico or something. So people who were serious, they would make eye contact and then they would leave the Square and maybe meet on the street. These were people who did not go to bars mostly. This was like an early evening thing.

 

MS: Now let me ask you this. The people who went to Rittenhouse Square in the '40s, was it pretty much all white?

 

BB: No Blacks at all that I can remember.

 

MS: No Blacks.

 

BB: They might have a token, like Sarah Vaughan, who was a very famous public person. I don't know if you know who I mean.

 

MS: Yeah.

 

BB: Well it wasn't that person. But there were one or two people like that.

 

MS: People like that.

 

BB: And then also, the gays would also accept a lot of offbeat people who could not fit into heterosexual society easily. So there was a lot of very peculiar women, mostly women, because in that era, men, no matter, you just could not allow yourself to be seen with a gay. It was just so degrading, you know what I mean? Because the fact that someone might think you were gay if you weren't. You know what I mean?

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: So there weren't many gays that ran around it, but there were a lot of women that ran around.

 

MS: What about lesbians? Did they hang out in Rittenhouse Square?

 

BB: I found, in my personal experience, that lesbians and gays in the '40s and the '50s absolutely were like strange bulldogs when they met. I mean there was no camaraderie. That's in my own personal experience and the people that I knew. There was no camaraderie whatsoever. It all seemed to happen in the AIDS period, and as heinous and horrendous as AIDS is, it seemed to galvanize gay people for the first time. It seemed to bring lesbians and gay men together in some kind of common denominator. And I think the AIDS epidemic had a great deal to do with that fusion. Because in all these committees that you read about, gay women were very involved, and women and men socialize now. But back then, now I mean I'm not speaking for the entire gay world or the gay community of that period, but in my experience, and in the experience of the people that I was friendly with, lesbians and gays did not get along at all.

 

MS: Why do you think that was?

 

BB: Well probably because everything that lesbians, in my observation, say that they hate about men, they emulate. Well maybe that's the wrong word. They imitate, I should say; they imitate. All the swaggering, and talking out of the side of the mouth, and acting like Victor McLoughlin or a thug, lots of them. I don't mean all lesbians, but I mean some take on those aspects and build them into their personality, which is everything they claim they hate in men. But yet they imitate men.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: Where a lot of gay men who are effeminate imitate women, they don't hate women. They're imitating them because they admire those crazy qualities, overblown things like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. And there's never been a woman, any woman of the world, that acted like that. Any woman that acted like Joan Crawford would be put in an institution. They'd throw a net on Bette Davis. But gays, somehow this burlesque of womanhood is what they would sometimes begin to actually make a lifestyle.

 

MS: So why would that make gay men and lesbians not get along?

 

BB: No, I don't think that. Well that's maybe one reason. Maybe they saw in the gay men effeminacy or something that they thought wasn't a man. And they wanted, like my friend Virginia, all her life she's wanted to be Errol Flynn. And to the point that she actually became a world fencing champion, woman fencing champion. I won't say her last name. But I mean she went to the Olympics and everything, because in her mind, she was Erroll Flynn. Oh god, I hope she never hears this tape.

 

MS: Now do you blame gay men or lesbians more for that problem or both equally?

 

BB: I think that the lesbians of that period were so intense, although it was easier for lesbians than gay men to get through life, I think. You know what I mean? Like women could dance together in bars. They wouldn't be arrested. But if two men got up, they'd be arrested immediately. It was against the law. So I think it was probably the frivolousness and the silliness, not silliness but the campy aspect of gay men that these dead serious lesbians, the daughters of that love which cannot speak its name, I think maybe that turned them off. If they were going to be friendly with gay men, they'd probably have to be very masculine acting men. At least that's what I saw, if I ever saw them being friendly with men.

 

MS: I see.

 

BB: They were extremely masculine men or it would be the bouncer of a bar or something like that or the bartender. But at that time they didn't mix. I mean this of course is just my observation, in my own personal little circle. I mean I can't speak for what was going on for the whole world.

 

MS: So you described for me the Square a little bit, and you must have discovered some of the bars around this time in the '40s.

 

BB: Well there were two we couldn't get in; we were too young. Because it was still after the service. They let us out in eighteen months, although we got the full benefits of the GI Bill and everything, so we were eighteen or nineteen. I mean we were still too young. So Maxine's was the national monument. It was the institution of all time, because it had been there since the '30s. And I think the reason why it didn't get raided as much, 'cause all the bars got raided. I mean you were forever in the paddy wagon in that period. You were always, always taking a ride. And supposedly it was owned by a judge or something like that and must have had influence to keep it from being raided.

 

MS: Do you know who did own it?

 

BB: Well it was supposed to be owned by Eddie King, but he I think was a figurehead, because supposedly it was really owned by a judge and that's why it didn't get raided as much.

 

MS: Now who was Eddie King?

 

BB: Just the owner. I mean I don't know that he was anybody in particular. I mean that was his name, Mr. King, and he insisted on being called Mr. King.

 

MS: Now was it a Philadelphia judge?

 

BB: It was on Camac. Pardon?

 

MS: Was it a Philadelphia judge who was supposed to be the owner?

 

BB: Well I mean that's only hearsay. I don't know.

 

MS: O.K.

 

BB: That was just strictly hearsay.

 

MS: So Maxine's was your first gay bar in Philadelphia?

 

BB: But it was the only one, no, maybe not. Oh I'm sure it wasn't the first one.

 

MS: No, no. The first one that you went to?

 

BB: Well that was the first one that we hung outside. We couldn't get in, so we used to hang outside.

 

MS: Is that right?

 

BB: Yeah. We hung outside. But then there was a lot of places pre‑drinking age. Also Maxine's had a lot of celebrities that used to come in because the theater was near there. And many, many times you'd see big name celebrities would go in there because they had a dining room and there were people who knew other people. Like the cook had been an old entertainer, so he knew a lot of show people who would come in to see him and everything like that. And then sometimes they would perform. If they were here with a show, like Shirley Booth was in there one time singing, and Pearl Primus, and oh I can't remember, Catherine Dunham, a lot of people who were celebrities. And Ray Bolger and different people like that would come in there. Not necessarily that they ran with gay people, but just being in the theater, they were so used to gay people it didn't bother them.

 

MS: So what were the first bars that you were able to go inside?

 

BB: Well the first one I think we got in illegally probably was another institution called the Green Dragon. It was like the scroungiest, most demented place you've ever seen.

 

MS: Where was that?

 

BB: It was on 15th Street and it's now a Japanese restaurant. And it was between Locust and Walnut on 15th Street on the west side of the street. Then it was something called the Top of the Threes one time or something. It was a lot of different names. And it was a real dive and it had a tile floor. And it actually had a trough along the bar where I guess people used to spit. And water ran down or something. It was awful. And it had these wooden booths, big high wooden booths, and a waitress, and her name, I can't think of her name now, it might come to me. And she was real tough, and kibbitzing, but again it got raided every other week. You know it would be raided. And then also you'd get these thugs coming in, hoodlums coming in, and just start punching everybody.

 

MS: Do you remember the first time you got arrested?

 

BB: I never got arrested in my life.

 

MS: You didn’t.

 

BB: Well they would take you. They would take you to 12th and Pine. And then they'd say, "How old are you?" And you would say "thirty-three." And they'd say, "Get out of here." And it was all harassment because they weren't paying. But I never got arrested. I have yet, knock wood, to ever be arrested.

 

MS: But what was the first time you got taken to the police station?

 

BB: Well when I was working in the Allegro. They raided.

 

MS: O.K. So that's a little bit later.

 

BB: Yeah. Oh yeah. No I was in my late twenties, mid-twenties then.

 

MS: You told me before about some early place down by the river?

 

BB: Yeah. Stamps on the Delaware.

 

MS: It was called Stamps?

 

BB: Stamps. S‑T‑A‑M‑P‑S. Stamps on the Delaware.

 

MS: And where was that?

 

BB: And that was around like Water Street, or Front and Race, like that little Water Street there. It was just a divy little saloon. But it was really wild, and they would close at twelve o'clock because that was so isolated, the area.

 

MS: You were telling me before about the kind of area it was. Why don't you repeat that for the tape?

 

BB: Well it was just derelict in that the buildings were all run down and there were fish markets down there and there was produce. It was a place where they picked up produce, and warehouses, and things like that, and then a lot of hobos, not to be confused with homos. And they used to bunk out there. I mean they would have lean tos and they'd have bonfires and stuff. I mean it was really scary stuff. And again, a lot of these bars, gay bars are always up some alley or always up in some dreadful place as a rule. I mean not in modern times. They have some posh ones. But back in those days it was always in some area where there were no neighbors to complain.

 

MS: Would you go to Stamps?

 

BB: Just once. I was in there once. Just when it was in its death throes.

 

MS: But you said before that you thought it had been around for quite a while.

 

BB: Oh yeah, in the '30s it raged. I mean in the mid‑'30s. Every place that had any kind of entertainment in the old days had what they called an MC, a master of ceremonies. So this Walter Darrelson, he's dead now so I can use his name, he was the famous one. And he worked there and he worked at the Bridge Tavern and worked at all these different places. And he would introduce these goofy acts, like maybe they would have ladies tap dancing on roller skates. It was just the worst stuff you can imagine. And then they would work the VFW clubs on the weekend. And they had whiskey tenors and all that. So he used to tell a lot of tales about these two bars in the '30s and then other people would tell me. But we really only got in once.

 

MS: I see.

 

BB: See I was tall. I was six foot when I was like fifteen, I think. And so because I was taller, sometimes we didn't get carded. We had fake cards. In fact I was tending bar when I wasn't even twenty-one. I mean we weren't allowed in a bar and I was tending the bar. I mean they would have closed that place forever.

 

MS: And were you finding sexual partners in the bars when you first started going?

 

BB: Well it was peculiar. I started out immediately, like almost the first experience I had, I wanted to make a relationship out of it. But there was no interest on the other person's part. So then, almost as soon as I got into actually having sexual experiences, it became an eight-year affair.

 

MS: With one person?

 

BB: Yeah with one person. And it was monogamous. I mean as far as I know, at least I was trying to.

 

MS: When did that start?

 

BB: Oh god, let's see.

 

MS: After the war?

 

BB: Yeah, but it had to be the very early '50s, because I think we went to Florida in '51 or '53 or something like that. It lasted eight years.

 

MS: Can you tell me something about him?

 

BB: Well I don't know if I'm ready yet to go into any kind of real lurid details. I mean everybody knows what people who are of that persuasion do. I mean not that everybody does everything.

 

MS: No, I don't mean so much that. I mean you didn't live together, right?

 

BB: No, well 'cause it was the mamma thing. And I don't know if he had a full‑blown Oedipus complex or not but we were kids so to speak, young people, and young people didn't have apartments in those days. Some did, but a lot of people stayed home.

 

MS: So where would you go to be alone together, if I can ask that?

 

BB: Well usually to a friend's house or something like that. We had mutual friends, or there would just be circumstances or times parents would be away or something like that.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: And it was all very secretive and all very neurotic. I mean making you very neurotic, because it was so unthinkable. In those days, the church, the police, the state, everything, your siblings and your cousins and everybody. It was just such an unthinkable, unspeakable thing. And I found when I was in Greece in the '70s, it was the same attitude. They were like thirty years behind. It was an unthinkable subject. I mean it was never mentioned.

 

MS: Tell me about how you started working in the bars. How did you get a job?

 

BB: Well a friend of mine was working there. And I think they needed somebody desperately or something. And they lied and they said I was twenty-two or something. I think I was probably about nineteen or twenty. That would have been one time we would have all got arrested, because you had to be twenty-one to enter, let alone be serving. But as a young person you don't, you're dizzy, you don't think about that.

 

MS: And what was the first bar you worked at?

 

BB: The Allegro.

 

MS: And who was the owner there? You told me before.

 

BB: Oh god, his name was Hildebrand. Long dead.

 

MS: Could you spell that for me?

 

BB: No, because I'm the world’s worst speller!

 

MS: Hildebrand?

 

BB: Hildebrand, yeah. He had a German heavy accent.

 

MS: Do you know anything about him?

 

BB: No. Only that he was married.

 

MS: He owned more than just the Allegro? Did he own other gay bars?

 

BB: Yeah, you sure you're not working for the CIA?

 

MS: I'm sure.

 

BB: I told you earlier, the Holiday Inn, of all names, yeah. And right across the street was the Rendezvous, where Ronny Graham and all those entertainers got their early start. It was neat. And he was a married man and he had sons and a couple of his sons tended bar in the bar. I mean they weren't particularly pleased about their father being a gay man, 'cause he had a boyfriend. And he was a real pain in the ass.

 

MS: So he was gay and married?

 

BB: Gay and married, with sons, and then he had this Irish tenor boyfriend who sang, much to the chagrin of every patron. And he would sing these awful [?], in this high, falsetto voice. It was just grotesque. And there was a big raid there one time. A big fight broke out, big, tremendous, like something in a movie where they were throwing the barstools through the blue mirror, everything. And of course the guys didn't know that all the gay men were going to scream and run. They thought they were going to help defend them. So the two sons start fighting with this bunch of thugs that had come in. And somehow at one point, one of the sons turned around and just bopped the boyfriend of the father. Boom, out cold, and then took a tablecloth and threw a tablecloth over him. But it was a terrible fight because the piano player, Bernice, and a local disk jockey, a local radio personality, and I, were under the piano, because beer bottles were flying. These people had knives and everything. And we had the piano stool pulled, and the three of us were crouching in horror under the piano. And all this glass was flying, and people were being punched out. And of course then, when the police came, the police rebeat all the gay people. I mean in other words, once the police got there, instead of help, they would start bludgeoning everybody in sight and let all these hoodlums go. I mean they were all there and they let them go.

 

MS: Where did the hoodlums come from. Do you know?

 

BB: Well like Fairmount, probably Schuylkill down here, Pennsport, Fishtown's a little far away, but they would come down. Because all that element is sort of all held together, it's sort of one people, if you know what I mean. It's sort of one type of people and it's all held together by ignorance, bigotry, inbreeding, incest, and a voracious sense of filth. Sort of makes them one tribe.

 

MS: Now the fight took place, remind me now, where?

 

BB: I'm now being silly but it was that element. Always that kind of lower working class. And many, many times, gay people, they would come in beating on these people, and then years later they would be in the bars.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: A couple of them who became the darlings of the bar, because they were tough acting and tough looking, would bring people in there and be smashing on people. And then a couple of years later, you'd see them with a boyfriend. So they were fighting their homosexuality by beating up on. Well that's the old self‑loathing thing.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: Which I don't understand, and of course it's only my own opinion, but I don't understand this new thing of using the word queer, like Au Courant and all these people. Everything now is a queer party or queer legislation or queers win legislative triumph and all like that. And they've chosen this word. And I asked one time an activist, or whatever you're supposed to be, I said, “Why would you use a word like that that struck terror in the heart of gay people for so long?” And it was such a derogatory, demeaning thing. And his explanation, which was very unsatisfactory to me, was that it was like you take the joy away from the breeder by using it so much and using it yourself, that when a breeder calls you a queer, he no longer has the joy of demeaning you. Which just to me is nonsense because they'll just choose another word.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: So they'll call you something worse. You know what I mean?

 

MS: Let me turn you back to the '50s.

 

BB: Yeah. I got off the subject. Well this you'll have to edit out probably.

 

MS: The bar that you described the fight at, which bar was that again? I just want to make sure I have it right.

 

BB: That was the Allegro. One of them.

 

MS: That was the Allegro.

 

BB: One of them. Hundreds.

 

MS: Were the bars mostly all white, the ones that you were going to in the '50s?

 

BB: Practically completely. I mean it would be very, very rare. There were gay Black bars.

 

MS: Did you ever go to those in the '50s?

 

BB: Oh no, no. Usually they were in neighborhoods where you just, like the Black gays probably, were terrorized. You know what I mean? They were very bad Black neighborhoods.

 

MS: Now were there bars that you went to where there were also lesbians in the '50s?

 

BB: There was one, like in the gang wars, where they have no man's land, like there would be a swimming pool. You know what I mean? Like in some of those movies where there's one place. And that was called the Surf Bar, which was wonderful. It lasted for years. And actually it's an overpass now for the Hershey Hotel. It was back there. It's all disappeared but it was back there.

 

MS: What streets?

 

BB: Well it was on a tiny street between Broad and Juniper but I don't know what the name of that alley was.

 

MS: And between Locust?

 

BB: Between Spruce and Locust.

 

MS: O.K. And could you describe the bar to me?

 

BB: Well it was a wonderful, big, enormous bar. It was huge. And it was square. And the bar itself was square and went all the way around. In other words, you could walk all the way around the bar in this perfectly square room. I think it had a little staircase going up to the men's and ladies' room. And that was the common place where gay men and lesbians met. And they seemed to get along there fairly well, because apparently the lesbians that went there, the ones who couldn't stand gay men, sort of hung to themselves, like on one side. There was like two camps.

 

MS: Was there a lot of social mixing?

 

BB: There was mixing with a certain group of lesbians and gays, and they seemed to tend to the left side of the bar. You know what I mean? It was like they sort of had their area. You know what I mean? And they were social. And that's of course where I socialized with the gay women that I knew and in their homes. My friend Lou and myself and a friend named Joe, we had a lot of....

 

[interruption]

 

MS: You were describing for me your friends who were lesbians and straight women.

 

BB: The Surf. Yeah, yeah. And these people belonged to a thing called the Friends Select Committee or the Friends something or other. They were Quakers. And they used to encourage going to houses and mixing lesbians and gays and Black and white people together, which was not done very often in the '40s. I mean people really didn't socialize, people of different colors, and not even with Orientals and all. Again I'm not speaking for the world. I'm speaking for just the little bit that I knew about.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: The behavior of people. So we used to go to one house. It was a gay woman who had it and she would make it available. And then they would be maybe five or ten lesbians, five or ten gay men, and then there would be some heterosexual whites and heterosexual Blacks and a couple of heterosexual gays, or excuse me, a couple of gay Blacks, I meant to say. Not heterosexual gays. Sorry. So it was a very mixed bag and mostly they just talked and they had coffee. I don't think there was any drinking, or if it was drinking, it was very limited.

 

MS: Now I know that there were groups, and the point was to mix Black and white, but you're saying, was the point also to mix straight and gay?

 

BB: I don't think it had like anything to do with like the gay people having experiences with the heterosexuals. It was only to socially make aware to heterosexuals who came there that these homosexuals were not going to eat them alive or find out we would go home and eat their children alive or something, and that because a person was Black, it wasn't going to rub off if they danced with them or something. You know what I mean? And it was that kind of thing, but it was Quaker-inspired.

 

MS: But I guess I'm asking: was it to....

 

BB: Not for sexual reasons.

 

MS: No, no, I'm not saying that, but was it as much to break down prejudice about sexuality as for breaking down prejudice about race?

 

BB: Exactly, both. In other words, it was supposed to introduce people to the fact that Black people are exactly like white people and homosexual people are exactly like heterosexuals. There's no difference except with the sexuality, maybe like behind a locked door.

 

MS: How many of these things would you have gone to, do you recall?

 

BB: Well we went to quite a few.

 

MS: In the '40s this was, or '50s?

 

BB: I think that was the '40s really. It's very hard, that fine line. It might have been 1951 or it might have been, but it was....

 

MS: Around then.

 

BB: And they went from house to house. I mean everybody sort of took a turn. But then of course when it came my turn, and my mother being from the South, although she was not prejudiced to my knowledge. I never heard her use a derogatory word, any racial slurs of any kind ever, but she thought, she said, “Oh no. I can't have that sort of thing.” And at this point I think when this was going on, I probably already had come out and told her of the way I felt.

 

MS: Can you tell me something about that?

 

BB: Well it was horrendous. It was absolutely the most terrible mistake I ever made in my life.

 

MS: What did you say to her, do you remember?

 

BB: Well I don't remember word for word, but I tried to explain. First I tried to explain about the Oedipus Complex. Well that was the biggest mistake on earth, because her interpretation was that there was something sexual mixed up, that there were sexual desires or something, because she was not intellectual in any way and she would never have read Oedipus Rex or anything. I mean she just didn't understand anything and she was absolutely crushed and just devastated. I guess through the years she adjusted.

 

MS: What did she say to you at the time, though? Do you remember?

 

BB: Well that I'm not going to say on tape. It was pretty awful. She was the type of person who did not have a mean streak. But she was manipulative in the sense that, at one time, when I was having an affair, the most serious affair of my whole life, she realized that there was someone who was more important in the world than she. She didn't understand that it takes two people to make an Oedipus Complex. There's no one-sided Oedipus Complex, but the mother usually has no idea that they're domineering or passive aggressive or anything else. They just can't. And they have no idea that they have any responsibility towards the way you turned out, that your environment or their influence made you the way you are. They won't accept that. It's absolutely impossible for them to think that way. And she at one point called up my other half, whatever you want to call it, and starts saying, “I don't want to be an old woman on a second floor apartment somewhere because you think you're having an affair, because these affairs don't last. It's unnatural.” I mean this is a lady from Delmar, Maryland, or somewhere from Delaware.

 

MS: Now was this the relationship that you were telling me that lasted eight years? Or was this?

 

BB: No this is a shorter one but much more intense. It was the only one. Do you know what I mean? How even though each one, you think at the time, you certainly think that it's the one, and you're in love and all like that, and you are. But there's that one, that one that's a double whammy that you never get over.

 

MS: Was that in the '60s?

 

BB: That was, yeah, in the '60s, and I was older, a little bit older, probably near thirty and the other person was like twenty-four or something.

 

MS: Where did you meet him?

 

BB: Socially. Almost everyone I met, I didn't meet most of the people through promiscuous things. I mean I'm not saying I wasn't promiscuous. I mean god, when you're seventeen or eighteen, raging hormones and all, you're going to be promiscuous, but I don't mean to say I'm a nicer person than the rest, or I'm not doing any of that, goody two shoes shit, because it wasn't. But fortunately it happened. See everything then was parties and socializing, because the bars closed at midnight, and if you didn't want to roam the streets and get arrested and be harassed by the police or all like that, then you tried to get invited to a party. So most people met socially in the crowd that I moved in. There were people who went to movie houses. I mean there were train stations and all that stuff, but that never appealed to me.

 

MS: The parties you went to, were they all in Center City?

 

BB: Yeah.

 

MS: And who would give them? More well‑off gay men or all kinds of gay men?

 

BB: Well sometimes they were straight people who just liked gay people, or who had a gay son, or whose husband was bisexual or something like that. And they were lots of times theater people and they would give a party, say, for the cast of whatever show was in town. And then they would come. They would be mixed, gay and straight. But the people giving it might be a couple that were bisexual or something like that. And really the sexuality, I'm not trying to zoom in on the fact that because they were bisexual they invited theater people. That is only a part. Your sexuality is only a very, very tiny part of your personality. Your whole personality is a whole thing. This is one little aspect. So every time, like in an interview like this, it seems to be reverting back to sex. I mean sex does not drive every single thought in a person's mind, straight or gay. I mean you'd wake up in the morning and think now how many homosexual thoughts can I have today? You know what I mean?

 

MS: I know what you mean.

 

BB: You go about your business but somehow it comes back to that, because of the situation of what we are doing here. But it didn't mean that these people were inviting these people for orgies or something, as most straight people would think.

 

MS: But would you go to house parties pretty much every weekend?

 

BB: Yeah, every weekend, and that's where you would meet all your friends, and also your sexual contacts would be through parties. And there would be parties, not debauched, wild things. I mean they went on late into the night, but nobody ever started getting undressed or doing something in front of other people.

 

MS: And they were anywhere from five to a hundred people, would you say?

 

BB: Oh no, no, no, no. They were smaller groups. Well those theater things, they might be big. But no, they might be twenty people. And people would pop in.

 

MS: I see.

 

BB: But nobody did anything there sexually. They would meet there. They would meet there and then they would go, I don't know what, to a hotel, or they would go to the person's house, but there was no, I never saw any debauchery at that time. I mean I have seen it, but not with the people that normally I ran around with.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: And if we did get into something where there would be a really frenzied horrible kind of party, it was somewhere that we went for the first time. And usually it didn't appeal and we would leave. Because I mean everybody in the '40s wasn't goody goody. I don't mean it that way at all. There was plenty of deranged stuff going on, I guess. But that was your main contact and bars.

 

MS: I want to get back to the bars in the '50s for a little while. And to maybe take this apart and go into some more detail. Maybe first, I'm really interested in who owned bars and their relationship to the police. You were saying stuff about that earlier.

 

BB: Well I don't honestly know. I mean I don't know what their relationship was.

 

MS: Well you mentioned two owners before. There was Eddie King and there was Hildebrand.

 

BB: And they're dead. They're long dead.

 

MS: Did you know any of the other owners?

 

BB: No, I mean not enough to know if they were affiliated with the Mafia. I know that all bars paid off. Every single bar had an envelope for the footman, the foot cop, and for the chief, and then probably for the bigwigs, which was like Ferguson was the biggie.

 

MS: Now how did you know that? Did you see it or did you hear about it?

 

BB: Well you actually could see. They'd come in and you could see Hildebrand hand them an envelope or something. Of course my god, we're going back forty years or something.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: But I'm sure, I remember having seen that. But those people, at this point, are all dead. The people who were the head of the police are, those particular police, are long dead.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: Because they were older people then.

 

MS: Now of the gay men who I've talked to who have talked to me about the '50s, there seems to be a real difference of opinion. Some people think that Rizzo was the best thing for gay bars because the system of payoffs allowed the gay bars to exist. And other people think that he was the worst thing for gay bars because he raided them all the time.

 

BB: Well what I knew about and what I saw was, at the beginning, he was an absolute monster. And I think he was psychotic. Because they had a meeting one time in what was the Academy of Vocal Arts or something. I forget what they called themselves. Because they had an auditorium. About him raiding. I mean he was the Cisco Kid and he wore the guns on his hips and everything. About him constantly raiding coffeehouses. And he kept raiding the Second, the Gilded Cage, and a couple of other ones. And these were revered people, a Jewish couple that were very revered in the neighborhood, just ordinary people who had a coffee shop. And they were well‑liked and he kept raiding that place and saying that all coffeehouses, I mean this is not quote unquote, maybe you can find a quote somewhere in the paper.

 

MS: I have a lot of articles about that.

 

BB: But it was that all these were all hotbeds for homosexuals and all homosexuals are communists. So they were communist hotbeds via them being gay. And then there were a couple of like card‑carrying communists probably around then. Who knows? You know what I mean? There was this guy with a beard. They used to say he was straight, but he used to come to the coffeehouses and they would say he was a communist. But it was all nonsense and hearsay. But he got so out of hand with it that they had this meeting and there were lawyers and doctors and everything. Not so much interested in gay peoples' welfare but interested in the fact that they were harassing the Segals. No that wasn't it. I can't remember their name exactly.

 

MS: There was Mel Heifetz with the Humoresque.

 

BB: Yeah, and then there was the guy that had the Second Fret, and there was the Artists' Hut, and they were all raided constantly.

 

MS: And the Proscenium.

 

BB: And the Proscenium. And then I remember one time they raided when Sarah Vaughan was very young, this public person called Sarah Vaughan.

 

MS: Yeah.

 

BB: He's a man. He's married and has children.

 

MS: I didn't know that.

 

BB: Yeah, he's a grandfather. But anyway, he would be one. I think that was one reason that one time he was in drag. And drag was illegal. You could not wear female attire except on Halloween night. And if you were in female attire, it was a misdemeanor. I don't think it was a felony, a misdemeanor. But you could be arrested. And that's why they raided parties. Private parties were constantly being raided because people were in drag.

 

MS: We're covering too much too fast.

 

BB: Yeah, O.K.

 

MS: Let me slow you down. So you were at this meeting about Rizzo, right?

 

BB: No, no, no, I wasn't. No, no, no. My landlord went.

 

MS: What was your overall impression, though, of Rizzo's relationship to the bars?

 

BB: Well I think he was an absolute monster, and I saw it with my own eyes, and punched people. And particularly women. He particularly seemed to have an awful feeling towards lesbians. Why, I don't know. But I remember at the parade one time, everybody was drinking at the New Year's parade, yet these lesbians were there. He pulled a bottle out of their hand and punched one of them or something. And then there was a fight one time in the old Zu-Zu. And I remember him punching a woman or something. He was a horror. And he was absolutely very psychotic acting. And then one time he forbid, forbade, whatever the word is, anybody to be in drag on Halloween.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: Which is a national holiday or something. I don't know if you call it a holiday. And he had these stormtrooper types. And he had redesigned the costumes so they came out like this, the breeches.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: And they looked like Brown Shirts or Nazis or something. And a very amusing thing happened to a Regina. What was her name? Regina Moskowitz, that was her actual name, Regina and her sister. And anyway, they grabbed her 'cause she was kind of homely and they started to, and she said, “You maniac, I'm a woman.” And she had to pull her breasts out to show she was a woman. 'Cause they were, and this is how you know they were like storm troopers. Well that was really awful. And then after this incident, as it was told to me, secondhand information again, but it must be documented, that he went into the crowd that was having this meeting and started like with a blackjack or something, and this Ferguson had to subdue him. Then he disappeared.

 

MS: Right, he was sent to the Northeast, I think.

 

BB: Sent to the Northeast. But he was also supposedly sent to a place called Kirkbride, which is a mental institution, out at 36th and Market. And then it came out that he was a Section 8 from the service, discharged as a mental case.

 

MS: Really?

 

BB: Yeah. So then they called him buggy. What did they call him? Something to do with being crazy, bug, buggy bugs, or something, bugged, or I can't remember the expression. Now this again is all within the gay community. We don't know how much of it was true. I saw some incidents myself. I saw him punch that girl.

 

MS: Right. You said that was at a New Year's Parade?

 

BB: Yeah, it was a New Year's Parade. Maybe not punched, slapped her or something.

 

MS: Tell me about the Halloween parade, whatever you know about that.

 

BB: What do you mean?

 

MS: The Halloween drag parade.

 

BB: The year that they wouldn't let them do it, you mean?

 

MS: Well people have told me that every Halloween night there was a drag parade.

 

BB: Oh yeah. Oh it stopped traffic. But this one year they had posters in the Allegro that said, "No Drags Allowed."

 

MS: But before the crackdown, can you tell me about the parades?

 

BB: Oh yeah. Oh it was thousands of people and they would block off the street. And the main focal point, as I remember in the '50s, because my mother and grandmother and I lived on this street where there were no residents. We were the only people. It was all just businesses and bars. It was very sleazy and there were bars that were called the Bag of Nails. Well any bar that names itself the Bag of Nails, you can imagine what kind of. Then there was a place called the Streets of Paris, where people would come out with knives between their shoulders and fall on the pavement and shootings. It was just awful. And it was this awful strip of sleazy bars. The Zu-zu Club, well no, it wasn't called that, it was something else, and then all these raunchy, the Hiya Mate. Now you can imagine a sailor bar called the Hiya Mate and the Bag of Nails.

 

MS: Where was this? Where was this again?

 

BB: All around 13th and Locust, between 13th and 12th and Locust.

 

MS: And was that where the drag parade marched?

 

BB: Yeah, and the middle of that was the Pirate Ship, probably the most infamous bar in the history, maybe Finnochio's, as far as being well known. You known Maxine's was known as one of the oldest bars, and Louise's, but this was known as the raunchiest hellhole that ever.

 

MS: Of gay bars?

 

BB: Of gay bars that ever existed. And of course it drew all kinds of people, even straight people were going, because it was so bizarre, and the people. The bouncer was named Miss Juice and there was somebody called Almost Paradise, a strange man that wore white gloves. Miss Juice and all these characters, Chi Chi the African Birdwoman, and all these absolutely insane people that were really demented. You know what I mean? They had an old upright piano, and one would get up and do this kind of Balinese dance where they moved their head and the body stands still. But he was a professional; he really knew how to do it. And it was just one insane floor. It was a floor show, but it wasn't listed as one. But I mean you couldn't believe the people. And there were scenes, like there'd be somebody that came in one night and this guy started screaming 'cause they had been in jail together and he had been the boy of this tough. And then he grabbed him and dragged him out of there. It was just unreal dramas. Fellini, Ken Russell, and Greenaway, whatever his name is, all combined could not dream up a scenario like this bar, which was seven nights a week. Well no it wasn't, because they weren't open Sundays, but I mean it was every night.

 

MS: How often would you go there?

 

BB: Well we would go there for fun, for a little while. And then we'd probably go to Maxine's like a normal behaved bar where they behaved a little more normally.

 

MS: Do you know who owned the Pirate Ship?

 

BB: No, I don't remember. No I have no idea who owned it. Oh yeah, wait a minute, but I can't remember his name. He was a nice man. He was a Jewish, very strict, like Orthodox kind of Jewish man, 'cause he was always talking about his double set of dishes that his wife had and all like that.

 

MS: Really?

 

BB: And he was very nice. Jack, Jack, Jack.

 

MS: Not Kelly?

 

BB: No. He was a famous person in Philadelphia, too. I mean a public person. Not an entertainer, but he would entertain. He was always singing on a piano somewhere, singing my man or something like that. I can't think of his name; it might come to me.

 

MS: O.K., the parade, I have one question first.

 

BB: Yeah.

 

MS: I've heard that there were two parades, that the Black drag queens marched down South Street and the white drag queens around 13th and Locust.

 

BB: It might be, because I never saw the Black one, but it probably was, because like in New York there was a famous Black place called Phil Blacks and they had some bar here, a Black gay bar somewhere, probably on South Street. Or it might have been Pep's on the corner that they went to. You know there was a Blue Note, Pep's, the Blue Note. There were Black bars that were mixed. Whites would go because they would have big entertainers and they may have gone in there. I don't know.

 

MS: O.K., but you?

 

BB: I never saw it.

 

MS: You went to 13th and Locust?

 

BB: Yeah, right. And the Pirate Ship was the focal point. No matter where they were going, that was where they would always go in there.

 

MS: And was it an outdoor parade?

 

BB: Yeah. Well it wasn't a parade in the sense of the gay pride parade or the Puerto Rican parade or the Irish parade or something like that. It just was a promenade of these drags. And there would be lulls. Maybe there would be a time when there'd just be real costumes, people coming by in bunny rabbit suits or something like that. And then there would be an enclave of gays and everybody would start to cheer and scream. And it was all straight people watching. My mother used to go and stand there.

 

MS: And was there a route that everyone followed?

 

BB: Sort of. Well I don't know. But basically, when you got to Broad Street, I mean they would go to the Allegro. They would go in the Allegro. They would come out of the Allegro. I think Maxine's frowned on a lot of it. They didn't let as many in. They would say "we're crowded" or something. But it was a route like that. I think they would start at the Allegro, and then they would go to Maxine's, and then they would go to the Pirate Ship, which was close by. There were several gay bars. And then on Quince Street there was Barney Zeeman's. That was famous. The Forrest Bar probably was where they would end up. And they would sort of go back and forth in that three block area.

 

MS: And what would they do inside? Would they perform or promenade?

 

BB: Well everybody knew everybody. They would come in and they'd all scream, like you look great, or what's that tacky thing you're wearing, where'd you find that tacky outfit?

 

MS: And was everyone dressing up?

 

BB: No. Well no. There were groups of men that have disappeared. I mean it's something like the dinosaurs. These were groups of people who just don't exist anymore. Once in a while, you'll see a person like this, and you think, my god, it's a living fossil, leftover. And they were effeminate men who were in drag. At any given invitation or any reason, they would go into drag. And there was a group, a group of them, a lot of them now dead. And they worked in shows at times, and some didn't, never were professional. So there was that group. And everybody knew them but you wouldn't dare admit knowing them socially or anything. I mean people who went to bars never admitted they knew these people, but they all knew who they were. And they stayed amongst themselves. I mean they really were a group that stayed amongst themselves. They had their own parties. They had their own social kind of thing. It was a whole separate camp. You know what I mean?

 

MS: So it was mostly those people who were the drags?

 

BB: Were drags, and usually they had these very masculine boyfriends who were like stevedores or something, who were really homosexual but another kind of homosexual that never admitted it or was tough.

 

MS: Were there contests, drag contests?

 

BB: Yeah. And they would always have contests.

 

MS: Yeah?

 

BB: And some nights the big ones. Like down in Jersey, there was this place called the Four Leaf Clover, which had been a Quonsit Hut or an airplane hangar or something, but sometimes there would be thousands of people there.

 

MS: But that wasn't Halloween night. That was just a drag show?

 

BB: Well I think that might have been Halloween, too. I don't remember. New Year’s also. For some reason they didn't arrest people on New Year’s, because there were costume balls on New Year’s traditionally. Masked balls.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: Balla de mascara.

 

MS: Now the parades, what did I want to ask about that? Oh how early do you remember them? Do you remember them as early as the '40s?

 

BB: Oh yeah, I'm sure, I mean from very early. The '40s.

 

MS: What was the first one, if you had to guess a year, that you went to?

 

BB: Well in that kind of promenade with hundreds, that kind of mass people forming, lining up and bringing their lunches, 'cause they were going to be there for hours: I don't think that really began 'til the '50s, the very early '50s. The time of Rizzo, really, or just pre Rizzo.

 

MS: And can you tell me a little bit about when Rizzo stopped it and what you know about that?

 

BB: Well as soon as he became a mayor, a candidate for mayor, all that harassment seemed to dwindle down and stop. And then the years that he was mayor, it was probably the most open, maybe other than Amsterdam, one of the most open cities that you could go to. People flocked down from New York and from Washington because everything was so permissive.

 

MS: And when was that?

 

BB: During his mayor tenure.

 

MS: I'm trying to remember when that was.

 

BB: Or when he began to campaign the first time. I don't remember chronologically, but when he began to campaign for mayor. No, you know when it really started to change? When he became Police Commissioner. The harassment began to drop off.

 

MS: Why do you think that happened?

 

BB: Oh I haven't got the slightest idea. Because I think he was preparing himself to be mayor or who knows? I mean who knows what? Only the shadow knows what evil lurks in the minds of men. And he was evil.

 

MS: But I'm curious about when he cracked down on the Halloween parade.

 

BB: Well he was then the Cisco Kid, they called him. He wasn't commissioner yet.

 

MS: And what did he do to stop it? How could he stop it?

 

BB: Well he had these storm troopers out. I mean these police were on every corner and they had redesigned their costume for a while, to these kind of breeches.

 

MS: And you said he had passed a law?

 

BB: Well he hadn't passed a law, I guess. I don't say that he went to every bar, but it must have been coming from him because what was he then, chief?

 

MS: But I thought there was a rule passed that said that people couldn't dress up, couldn't be in drag on Halloween?

 

BB: Well I don't think if it was a real, what do you call it, a passed law. What do you call those things when they....

 

MS: Regulation?

 

BB: No, there's another word for it in the city. What the heck do they call that? Well anyway, a regulation, it's some kind of thing, but it isn't a law, but they pass an edict of something. And it just got word of mouth. The bar people would just say “don't come this year,” weeks before. And they had signs in the bar, “Nobody in female attire allowed.” The Allegro had a big sign on the door.

 

MS: Is that right?

 

BB: Yeah. Even the Pirate Ship. All of them.

 

MS: In some of the accounts of that that I've read, it says that Rizzo claimed that there was a lot of street violence around the drags.

 

BB: Well they had to have some excuse for dreaming up an ordinance, that's what I was trying. In other words, it was an ordinance or something maybe. I don't even know if it was a written ordinance, but if they arrest you, they're going to make sure they have a case against you.

 

MS: You were saying that as far as you know there was no street violence.

 

BB: I never saw any street violence. And at times, like I said, my mother came out to watch. My grandmother didn't, because she was usually in bed by that time, but she probably would have been out, too. It was a fun thing. It was bizarre, of course, in the fact of what was going on, but I never saw anything but good cheer and good will. And maybe late at night fights would break out or break out in the bars, but not in the early evenings when these promenades took place. They were probably about nine o'clock, ten o'clock, something like that.

 

MS: How many drags, do you think, if you had to guess?

 

BB: Oh god, I have no idea.

 

MS: Ten? A hundred?

 

BB: Ten! No, not ten hundred, but a hundred or hundreds, maybe not hundreds, but over the course, sometimes you couldn't remember each one. They would be going back and forth, so maybe you saw the same one a couple of times and didn't realize it was the same. But lots and lots, I mean. And there was no violence of any kind that I ever saw. And I would be there from the beginning probably 'til late in the evening and we'd go in the bars. And I don't know where any signs of violence were. In fact, it was so good-natured that even the straight people, there wasn't a lot of heckling or anything. They had police barriers towards the end, to keep like the crowds on the pavement kind of stuff.

 

MS: The police were helping keep order?

 

BB: Well in their indirect way. They weren't billing it as helping, but I mean the crowds just got so out of hand. And then Henri David had started his thing at the Bellevue or something and there would be big crowds there. Maybe that's where it all ended up, at this big blowout of Henri David's. Although Henri David, it seemed to me, came on the scene later. You know who I mean?

 

MS: Yeah.

 

BB: Not as far back as these promenades. But straight guys would heckle. They would make a date, pretend to be making a date. Or maybe they did, who knows? But I didn't see anything but good nature. Unless they were tourists who were just there with their mouths open to their shoes and not saying anything. Just in a total disbelief. And it was the one time that also all the gays who went to bars still probably looked down their nose at the people who were participating in this, but they also were part of it. They were out there and cheering.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: The bars were practically empty, until it would end and then everybody would go to the bars. You know what I mean?

 

MS: Were there other places, other than bars, where a lot of gay people would go out to? Restaurants?

 

BB: Well no, I don't think, because see they still had the raiding thing; they would raid restaurants. Can you imagine? I mean there was a very famous place in the late '40s, early '50s, called Hamburger Heaven. Have you been told about that before?

 

MS: A little bit, but why don't you tell me about it?

 

BB: Yeah, Hamburger, it was really called Hamburger Haven, I think. I don't remember. No. It doesn't matter. It's now where that club that was called Bananas for a while; it's like across from the Academy of Music. And it was two floors. And on Saturday night, after the bars, it would just be jammed. Every bar would empty into that place, so there would be hundreds of gay people. And they would try to guide them up to the second floor. But it would get raided. And there was a back room. And I remember sitting back there. And there was also a common denominator place where you would get like the raunchiest kind of gay person and the most elegant, the most haughty Main Line, dressed in suits and ties and hats, and then you'd have, well you can't say working class but this element that was kind of a fringe, criminal element. And they were all mixed together and that again, that was sort of like the no‑man's land where nobody got into fights and everybody sort of got along, although there was a lot of bitchery and people looking down their nose at others and all. But everybody mixed there together and gay women would come there.

 

MS: Yeah?

 

BB: And straight people, too, would come, like to see the show so to speak.

 

MS: What about Dewey's? Some people have told me about a place called Dewey's?

 

BB: Well Dewey's, they were hangouts, late, late night hangouts, because they were open all night, but they weren't really a social. People would go in there and try to make eye contact and then maybe get talking to one another or meet out on the street or something like that. But they were hangout, late hangouts. They go back to the '40s. A place called Thompson's was notorious down there, where the PSFS building is. And that was an all‑night. And they were kind of, I don't know what the word would be. Like the people who went to bars, to Maxine's or the Drury Lane, they would call them low‑life, the type that hung there. I mean they weren't low life necessarily. But they looked down on them because they would hang in there late at night.

 

MS: And where was Thompson's?

 

BB: Twelfth and Market.

 

MS: Twelfth and Market.

 

BB: And a lot of those people were prostitutes. I mean male prostitutes or something.

 

MS: So in the '50s, what was the most sort of upper‑class bar?

 

BB: Well in the '50s I guess it was the Drury Lane. It was super. And then of course the middle range of gay people would call them piss elegant.

 

MS: O.K. So which were the piss elegant bars aside from the Drury Lane.

 

BB: The piss elegant? Well that was Drury Lane. And of course they had a very legitimate, nice dining room called Cafe LaFitte or something. And Julie Newmar and people like that, Mabel Mercer, they had sophisticated entertainment from New York there. And it was expensive.

 

MS: Were there other piss elegant bars?

 

BB: Well that one was probably number one.

 

MS: What was two?

 

BB: Well there wasn't really much else. Most gay bars that I was in, and I've been on two continents, have really been cesspools. Cesspools with tables.

 

MS: O.K. What was the next tier? Maxine's?

 

BB: Well I guess Maxine's would be the next, the next up. Then later, in the '60s or '70s or something, they got that café. What was it called? Camp Williamsburg. It was very posh. And the Steps, later, much later. But in the '40s and '50s, I guess that was it. You had Maxine's, where people were dressed in suits and ties always. They might have had a dress code there, I don't know. I don't think you could come in in just a shirt. I think you had to have a tie on.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: You had to wear a tie and a coat.

 

MS: Were there after-hours clubs in the '50s?

 

BB: Yeah. They were allowed to stay open until two.

 

MS: And what were they like?

 

BB: Well there was a VFW, which was a real, ugh, god, debauchery. I mean talk about characters and thugs. But the gays would invade it on weekends. So it was this mixture of god, the toughest people you can imagine, and gays.

 

MS: And it was a veterans?

 

BB: Yeah, VFW at Broad. It's torn down now, where the new concert hall is going to be built.

 

MS: Broad and?

 

BB: Broad and Spruce‑ish, in there somewhere. It was in that block.

 

MS: What about the USA&A? Or the PBL?

 

BB: Yeah, they were after-hours clubs. Now this is not the '40s. I don't remember. I mean it might have been the '40s, but it would have been late, or it might have been. These were early '50s.

 

MS: But you remember them from the '50s.

 

BB: '50s. I don't think they were around in the '40s.

 

MS: How did they work?

 

BB: Well you had to get a membership. And it was called the USA of A and they were in the '50s. And those initials stood for something like the garment workers' union association or something. It was always some union that it was supposedly a club for. And then there was a famous one called the Witches and Bitches, which was the W and W. And that was up over the old Pirate Ship. And you had to belong to the Waiters' and Waitresses' Union, but you could bring a guest in or two guests. So that was an after-hours club, mixed gay and straight. And there was another one called the Penrose that went on, but that might have been in the early, late, mid‑'50s. So they were after-hour bars.

 

MS: I want to make sure before this side finishes that I talk to you about the event that you were talking about earlier this morning in Radnor. Can you tell me what you remember about that? You had gone out there to the Stables?

 

BB: Well, well, yeah, but you know what happened? We had gone out. We had gone out there and it was a movie thing. So we left. We didn't see the actual raiding thing. But of course everybody knew about it. Because when we came back to start the evening of drinking and dancing and everything and whatever it was, this, this thing had happened. It was an off night.

 

MS: Well, was it a place that you had been in the habit of going to or had gone to before.

 

BB: No, no, no. Because it was very far and it was a car ride. We only went a few times.

 

MS: You went a few times. But what kind of place was it?

 

BB: Well it was illegal because they had a dance floor. They danced. And that was the illegal aspect of it, although they probably didn't have a drinking license either. I don't know.

 

MS: It was called the Stables?

 

BB: I think it was called the Stables. The Stable or the Stables. Because there was another place called the Barn. And I get the names confused. But I think it was called the Stables.

 

MS: Does the name Jack Adair ring a bell?

 

BB: Not from memory. I know it was a young man and his mother and father were involved in it. I guess they just saw a way of making money, so probably it was illegal. I mean they probably didn't even have a license. I don't know. But the raiding aspect was not from the Mattachine thing. If they got raided otherwise it was because they were dancing. They had a place where men were dancing together.

 

MS: I see.

 

BB: And that was illegal. It was illegal for men to dance together.

 

MS: So that particular night, you had gone out just for a social night. You hadn't gone for the movies.

 

BB: No, we had driven out there, and when we heard it was a film, or they were showing films, we drove on somewhere else. I forget. And then we came back.

 

MS: Because you weren't interested in the films.

 

BB: No, not at that point. We had gone out there.

 

MS: But you hadn't gone out there because there was this Mattachine meeting?

 

BB: No, no, no, oh no. We didn't know.

 

MS: You didn't know anything about it.

 

BB: We didn't know anything about it. But then, of course, when we came back, they had already been taken in buses or something to wherever. And we said, “My god.” Well of course we flew, 'cause I mean in those days you didn't want to get involved in anything. The word police came up, 'cause you didn't have a leg to stand on.

 

MS: When we talked about it before, you thought at first that it was a Cocteau movie, but then when I mentioned Kenneth Anger….

 

BB: No. It was something called Firecrackers or something.

 

MS: Fireworks.

 

BB: Fireworks or something like that, because everybody was saying what they had gotten arrested for or what this thing was that was so naive and everything.

 

MS: But you don't remember a movie called Muscle Beach or anything like that?

 

BB: Well that was much later. Muscle Beach was much, much later than that incident, don't you think? Muscle Beach, it was made by that guy who made a lot of films. What was his name?

 

MS: I don't mean the Frankie Avalon Muscle Beach Party. This was another film.

 

BB: Yeah, but don't you think that was much later? There was a guy.

 

MS: I'll tell you. I found a letter in an archives in New York from 1960 that says that that was the movie that was being shown there.

 

BB: Muscle Beach? Well then they may have shown more than one movie.

 

MS: Exactly. That's why I'm trying to find that out.

 

BB: That I don't know. I know the thing that caused all the troubles, supposedly, was this firecracker coming out of someone's trousers.

 

MS: Oh in the Fireworks movie there was....

 

BB: Yes. Someone unzipped their trousers and a firecracker, a lit firecracker, came out of their fly.

 

MS: Uhhuh. In the movie.

 

BB: And I guess it exploded or something, I don't know.

 

MS: In the movie, though, right?

 

BB: In the movie, in the film, yeah. And that was supposed to be what made it pornographic and what they were showing. It was a disorderly house or whatever.

 

MS: Now what Muscle Beach movie were you talking about?

 

BB: Well wasn't that one of those, that guy, Casey Donovan, and then he changed his name to Calvin Culver? It was the same actor. And they made Boys in the Sand. And these were early gay films that this director got some fame for. Boys in the Sand was one of them. And I forget. I never saw any of them, but the star was this guy named Casey Donovan. Then he decided to go into legitimate movies and on the stage. And he changed his name to Calvin Culver. And he did make a movie or two but he was a terrible actor.

 

MS: I see.

 

BB: And he was good looking and he didn't make it. And then he died of AIDS.

 

MS: So you remember a movie called Muscle Beach?

 

BB: Muscle Beach, but it seemed much later than that Mattachine, although I don't know. Again, when you get to be my age, just the computers in the brain are so overloaded with facts. And you just can't chronologically, and I'm not good anyway at remembering.

 

MS: Right.

 

[interruption]

 

MS: O.K., in our last few minutes, as I just said, maybe the most useful thing would be to have you talk about what you think are the most important things to include in a book about gay Philadelphia in the '40s and '50s. Have we covered most of those?

 

BB: Well I think probably one of the most important things was the Rizzo regime, the harassment and the terrible constant raiding of the bars and everything, seemed to end when he became police commissioner. Why I have no idea. And then things got very easy. It was very open. And when he was mayor, it was extremely open. And I don't know what the reason behind it was, the change in the attitude. But that probably was one of the best times in Philadelphia for gay people, although you still had no legal rights. I mean you could not sue city hall, so to speak, like they do today. I mean you really couldn't sue the police yet.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: Or it would be futile to try to.

 

MS: But that's later. What about in the '50s?

 

BB: Well when did that happen?

 

MS: He didn't become police commissioner until the '60s.

 

BB: Well I guess nothing in the '50s. There was really not much to look up towards\ any kind of improvement. It really was harassment, harassment, harassment. And the only thing that kept you going from killing yourself was some of the humorous aspects, some of the colorful people, some of the ludicrous situations you would get into, and the camaraderie. There was a lot of camaraderie that I don't see. Well I don't see anything today. Because I don't go to the bars. It’s been years and years and years since I've gone to bars or parties or anything like that. But at the end of the period I was going, I didn't find the camaraderie that there was amongst gay men in the '50s. And that probably was because a lot of people went to parties and it was more social in someone's house than in a public bar. I mean you were drawn together in a more polite, you had to behave a little more politely than just in a bar where nobody really knew anybody.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: And there was a lot of camaraderie, a lot of people knowing each other and getting together for picnics. In fact, they even had a gay hay ride one time, which was hysterical, in the '50s. And it was absolutely unthinkable I guess. But I remember they were someplace up on the boulevard that they went to. And there were picnics, there were boat rides.

 

MS: You didn't tell me on tape about the fountain.

 

BB: Oh yeah, well amusing things like that at the Beaux Arts Ball in Paris, they all ran into the Place de Concord Fountain, but I think it was August. So here we had our first Beaux Arts Ball and everybody ran to Logan Circle. And it was October or something, or late September, and they all jumped in and everything. And about twenty of them got pneumonia.

 

MS: And was that the '50s?

 

BB: I think that part of it was about 1951, '50, yeah, yeah, the '50s. And many amusing, wonderful, but the camaraderie is what I missed towards the end, when I divorced myself from social activity as far as gay life, just out of age, out of simply being older. And I just started seeing my own friends and not going to the bars anymore and all that. But at that point, when I'd go to some of the more current bars, well I can't really remember. The Allegro might still be going, might still have been in existence, or the Westbury was anyway. That was a famous bar. It had moved or something from its location. I didn't find the camaraderie in the bars and at the place called the Venture Inn, where all the older people went, or the Denture Inn, as they call it, I didn't find the camaraderie in the bars and I didn't find that kind of camaraderie in parties.

 

MS: What do you think happened?

 

BB: I don't know. Just like anything, everything changes. I mean I don't know. A lot of people got involved in drugs, which were not around in the '50s. I'm sure there were people who took drugs, but it really was very, very rare and it was an element that everyone kind of shunned and looked down on. It was unspeakable, it was unthinkable, at least in the group that I went around with. It was unthinkable to know people who were drags. I mean you didn't admit that you knew people who took Benzedrine or smoked reefer or anything like that. Apparently I was in a very Victorian staid group of people. But they were. There was a lot of women in that group. Straight women and you just behaved yourself, like you didn't use four letter words out of respect for women. So maybe I didn't see the drug aspect of the '50s, but it just didn't seem to be around, like in the bars. You never smelled pot or anything like that.

 

MS: Do you remember when Philadelphia Magazine did this article "The Furtive Fraternity" in 1962. A big, big story?

 

BB: Yeah, and some gay person supposedly gave them all this information, the one who wrote it, or something?

 

MS: Gaeton Fonzi.

 

BB: [?]

 

MS: I'm not that old. I was born in 1963. No, they published the addresses and names of a lot of the gay bars.

 

BB: Yeah, yeah, I remember vaguely. But again, there's a backlash with that. Because a lot of people who didn't know where to go, and who were suppressed or closeted, came out that way. The same with the AIDS epidemic, which has galvanized. We have organizations now who have some political clout and whatnot who had never been dreamed of until that happened. So I think that could have had a positive effect, although it had a devastating effect on some people too.

 

MS: What was the devastating effect?

 

BB: Well, I don't remember. No, no, wait a minute. That was where they just listed bars.

 

MS: That was in '62.

 

BB: Where they just listed bars. I don't know. I was thinking of something else. It was something else where they mentioned certain prominent people. Something was written at one point about McIlhenny and Henry Gersley and people who were prominent. Max Dechoncet and all these people; they said that crowd and the Countess Brajadi and all that. And the innuendo was that they were gay.

 

MS: I see.

 

BB: And I think that was the first outing kind of stuff, before whatever this epidemic of outing is now.

 

MS: Right. And did you ever encounter, in the early '60s, any of the political groups that started here? The Mattachine Society, Clark Polak, the Janus Society?

 

BB: Well yeah. Well I knew Clark Polak.

 

MS: You did?

 

BB: Yeah, oh I did. And I remember him marching in front of what was the Dewey's. 'Cause Dewey's had a big sign and it said no queers, fags, and some other vulgar thing, allowed, or something like that. And even the Pirate Ship, which was the biggest gay bar of all, had this great big sign on the mirror that said all queers and fags stay out. People were shocked when they walked into this great big paper sign. And I don't remember the exact year, but I remember him and he had a march outside of Dewey's 'cause they refused to serve gays. And he was out there with picket signs and everything. And he was alright. But of course the woman who was so revered by everybody.

 

MS: Barbara Gittings?

 

BB: Barbara Gittings, I mean god bless her. I went up to her one time and told her. I said I wanted to shake her hand because I remember when you used to stand outside of Maxine's, when nobody heard the word activist, and it would be freezing cold, and you would give out pamphlets to gay men coming out, about AIDS, the beginning of AIDS, that there was a disease. I'm not sure exactly what pamphlet she was giving out, but it seemed to me it had something to do with that. It was something to do about legal rights. If you're arrested this is what you could do. And that woman would stand out there in the bitterest weather and she couldn't get one gay man to help her. I mean I hate to say that.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: But she was a real devoted person and I think one of the real folk heroines of the gay movement. I mean she's a very important person.

 

MS: Can you tell me more about Clark Polak? Did you used to see him around?

 

BB: Well yeah, I knew him. I knew him to speak to. And of course activists were somebody that you kinda' were almost afraid of during all that suppression. You know what I mean? Like you were afraid to get into those groups. Or maybe I was a pussy. I don't know. I was afraid to. But I would be afraid to get into any of those marches or anything because, well, there were still loved ones alive that I wouldn't want to have, they would have felt disgraced.

 

MS: Did you know of Drum magazine?

 

BB: Yeah, I remember it. Yeah, Drum magazine. Also there was a boy who printed a kind of pornographic magazine, but it was the first one. It wasn't too bad.

 

MS: Jay Mitchell?

 

BB: He had a store down in what was a....

 

MS: Was it Jay's Place?

 

BB: Yeah, right, and he put out a gay magazine. And it wasn't terribly lurid. It was all sort of suggestive pictures. There was no real true sexual stuff going on there. But it was all kind of innuendo.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: But he also was very open and that was like the first openly gay store in a sense. Maybe not the first, but I mean it was known as a gay shop.

 

MS: Do you think a lot of people in Philadelphia knew about Clark Polak, might call him if they were in legal trouble?

 

BB: Ah perhaps. I don't really know. Because there weren't many people you could call. We didn't. I mean now, you know the Liberties, what's it, what do they call the organization?

 

MS: The ACLU?

 

BB: Something Liberties. Oh they take up causes for the underdog. Civil Liberties Union.

 

MS: Yeah. The ACLU.

 

BB: They may have existed, but I don't think gays knew about it, and I don't think gays had any idea that you had any rights. You just shut your mouth, said nothing, and hoped you didn't get pistol whipped or something. And that was about it. Because I know this friend, not a friend, an acquaintance, John Brown, who was a sort of a public person. And they took him into the police station one night and they made him undress and dance around. And they shot blanks at his feet. It wasn't real bullets. This is the horror stuff and that was in the '50s. So the '50s didn't have too much of a light at the end of the tunnel. You know what I mean?

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: It wasn't until the '60s, well probably Stonewall, and then, like I say, this bringing together of gay men and lesbians, and sympathy from heterosexuals because of the AIDS epidemic. I think the AIDS epidemic has helped to galvanize a lot of stuff that was all loose before.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: And I really think, as devastating as it is, it's had a positive purpose too, 'cause it really has brought people together for the first time. Certainly there was no organization in the '50s. There were no organizations that you could go to, no camaraderie that I saw between women and men and what not. And now there are even heterosexual organizations, like for people who have gay sons and gay daughters, support groups.

 

MS: Right.

 

BB: There was nothing. And particularly religion. Like we have Dignity and those things now for Catholics. And there was nothing like that.

 

MS: I'm afraid I'm going to have to stop because I have to run to my appointment, but thank you very much.

 

BB: O.K.