There were many interesting—well
beyond the humdrum—events that happened at the MC, whether periodic or
one-time. The guitarist Robert Fripp (of King Crimson fame) once held a
class-cum-concert in the third floor Ballroom, which was recorded for an album
that was released in, I think, 1986 (with the title or artist name featuring
“The League of Crafty Guitarists” or such). On another occasion, Rep. Geraldine
Ferraro, running mate of Walter Mondale (who himself was running for president
in 1984) appeared at an event. Another time, a live TV show was produced in the
theater.
But, to a periodic event of a
certain interesting sort….
I am not a member of the
gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender (GLBT) community, and I don’t consider myself
an active exponent of the community, but I am tolerant enough of them. I am not
super-well-versed in their history—so when I give some here, it will be merely
a sketch as a preliminary to my real area of interest, some colorful anecdotes.
I have a cousin who revealed himself as gay to myself and my sister in an
interesting situation in 1984, which I won’t recount here. I’ve known other gay
people—some were in my grade school class, while I might not have known them to
be gay until years later—and of course numerous workers at the MC were gay.
In 1984, the Stonewall uprising
in New York City
was about 15 years in the past. The 1970s saw increased liberalization—in
societal attitudes and in laws—toward gays. Billy Crystal portrayed a gay
character on, I think, the Norman Lear show Mary
Hartman, Mary Hartman and the worst that could be said about this was that
it reflected Lear’s liberalism. Of course, some people with retrograde
attitudes regarding gays could always be found then, as today (remember Jerry
Falwell and his political pitch). But by 1984, most students who would attend a
private university—especially in a city, Washington, D.C., that had such a gay
subcommunity that it was called by some “the San Francisco of the East”—would
tend to be outwardly liberal, or tolerant, enough about gays.
There are three areas I have to
talk about, which require this introduction: the parties of the Gay People’s
Alliance at GW, which really only provide some amusing and sympathetic enough
stories; the AIDS epidemic, which relates only tangentially to my other two
topics, and which was beginning as an issue in these years; and the most
squalid story that I have to tell about the MC, which, as bad as it is, is
still a valid part of the “package” of my MC stories, at least to offer an
important and somewhat onerous fraction of my work that went on for many months
there: the bathroom gays.
In relation to this last issue,
which I will discuss in a separate blog entry, I would note that the parts of
Bob Spitz’s biography of The Beatles that came out a few years ago that deal
with the group’s manager Brian Epstein were especially eye-opening, in terms of
the squalid conditions and violence that Epstein was subjected to in the sexual
area of his life. It would seem that the environs in which he figured in 1960s
Britain were pretty medieval in terms of allowing homosexuality—maybe it was
illegal there at the time?—and his getting involved with shady gays for sexual
reasons seemed to carry as much risk of hideous violence as anything more
positive. This would seem to have gone hand in hand with, much more broadly,
the more general phenomenon of how gays in the city, in the U.S. as well as
maybe elsewhere in the world, have been relegated to, or consigned themselves
to, seeking trysts in YMCAs, bathhouses, and so on, with whatever level of
legitimacy in the specific situations there was attached to this.
When it came to gays trysting in
the public men’s rooms of the MC, this was a situation that was at once a
threat to health (or at least to peace of mind) of anyone in the immediate
environs and perhaps to GW students’ more general sense of well-being; legally
questionable if not downright illegal; and fogged with a sense of “you didn’t
know what mess you’d have to contend with” if there was a need to deal with
this on the part of you as a GW manager—both student managers and staffers at
the MC dealt with this—or you as a member of the huge Security force at GW. When
I talk about it in depth later, I may seem to be “anti-gay,” but I am not. What
I am “anti-” in this connection is at the ways a certain subset of gays used those
bathrooms in those days.
The Gay People’s Alliance
was a wholly different matter. The GPA (they may have changed their name at
GW by now) was an upstanding group at GW—run by students and with students as
among those the group served, in some good part, at least most of the time.
They would hold occasional meetings, or lectures, or the like, some (I seem to
recall) at the MC. I don’t recall now just how frequently they held meetings
there, or what the lesser ones were like, though some kind of rare educational
lecture seems likely. But what long stood out among us MC staff, and were more
famous more broadly, were the Halloween dances that they held without fail.
These were usually in the
Ballroom, which was on the third floor, and which (per fire-regulation-type
designation) could hold about 300 people, if I recall. Very often dances were
held there (movies were also shown there, by the Program Board), and we
managers brought out the “disco system” for the dances—the big
turntable/amplifier system.
The GPA’s Halloween dance was
probably the most colorful and high-profile a dance that was held at the MC on
a regular basis. But this was mainly because—and I don’t mean anything negative
about this—not only did local students attend, dressed in typical Halloween
costumes perhaps, but also gays from the broader community attended, dressed in
all range of ways. And as far as I know, they never posed any kind of threat as
the bathroom gays did. And among the array of people who attended—I always had
the feeling these were people from outside the GW student community, but maybe
some of them were not—were an assortment of drag queens.
I mean, they were the real
McCoy. You saw some high-toned-looking female turn up, dressed to the nines,
and then you said, “Wait a minute.
That’s not a female!” And there were a number of them.
They were remarkable because
they in their appearance—to a straight like me it was just an eye-opener to
see, not something to pruriently,
uncomprehendingly “ogle” as in “Lookit the queer! On my goodness!”—were more
flamboyant and remarkable than the kids who came in more typical Halloween
costumes.
There was one year that there
was some controversy surrounding the GPA dance—it was probably 1984—and I can’t
remember what the brouhaha was about. I think it might have been that some local
student group was going to protest the dance, but I don’t remember why. Every
other year the GPA had their dance, there wasn’t an issue that anyone outside
the group “formally” brought up. This night in 1984, a TV news crew from a D.C.
station showed up.
Mr. DeGrasse, who was well
versed in what the GPA was about, did not want to go on the third floor at all
that night. He said, not ashamed or embarrassed to say so, that he did not want
to be accidentally photoed by the TV crew, because if his church congregation
saw him on TV, they would not approve, or would pose him some acute
embarrassment he didn’t want.
I myself wasn’t eager to get
into the range of the TV cameras, but I had to go to the third floor anyway,
because with such a big dance, with so many people and the potential for some
minor trouble associated with whatever the controversy was and the presence of
a TV crew, I had a perfect reason to be there as the “security-related pair of
eyes” we managers had to be. This was one very typical aspect of the many
aspects of that job. And I recall seeing some TV crew person or two, but I
didn’t think I got photoed.
But some day or two later, a
friend at the Info Desk told me she’d seen me in a shot from the TV report on
the dance (and most likely I would have been seen with my radio on my belt,
looking “official,” so it wasn’t as if I’d have been mistaken for a reveler). I
was surprised that happened—that I’d been photoed (much less had not ended up being
edited out; I was once interviewed by a TV news crew in Clifton, N.J., in 1994,
but the interview wasn’t used, but a shot of me walking was).
