Breaking into Gay Culture by Jon Krey

BREAKING INTO GAY CULTURE:  But first a little history.

Gay Culture? SEX was gay culture! It was found in public bathrooms (called tea rooms), dark allies, parked cars on out of town dirt roads,  money paid to hitchhikers for services rendered,  raided bars with entrapment, jail terms, fines, well enforced sodomy laws,  media exposure both in newspaper and TV many times. That was Gay Culture as far as I could see. There were some deviations with similar trappings, like the drunken gay Osage Indians I knew, suicides, gay bashing, murders and disease. I should also mention the guy who “blew” me out of the closet. He was as suggested in “Boys in the Band” one of the many “unhappy homosexuals”.

It might have been different if I had lived on either of the coasts but I didn’t.

I know this is dark but truth is truth and that was the truth then!

I suppose in reality homosexuality did exist in the arts as it always had throughout the world but that’s not what I learned in Tulsa in the late 50s and I wasn’t looking in the arts. No at least initially.

Still my late teen hormones roared; commanded my body to get it on but where and with whom? Danger was foremost in my mind and good ole’ Christian teaching. I wasn’t into sex alone and had a deep seated need for a boy-friend. All the other kids in High School had girl friends, why couldn’t I have a boy friend? Still where could I go, where to find others like myself? I fell for Tab Hunter, after reading the expose’ in “Confidential Magazine. He was one of my early crushes in life and himself a gay icon, I had to do something. I had to find “my people”. But where? Tab was an actor so I thought of the theater scene and found the “Tulsa Little Theater.”I certainly was no actor but thought it a possibility. I joined the fledgling theater; saw a few really effeminate flippant men running around mostly dishing one another; found out by hear-shot who’d blown whom and where. They certainly did notice me, at least physically, in particular a specific bodily area. None had enough interest to really become acquainted with me. I became terrified. I had made my connection but these men were nothing like boyfriend material. Sex, when I engaged in it, was so amateurish it was a constant disappointment. Socially, the theater group, an aloof group with few ties outside and with little interest other than physically.

I officially broke into the physical aspect of gay society when a gay man from the theater group put the make on me, but I never felt any commonality with him or the others. No sense of community existed then that I could identify with. Most were hidden from their families, non-gay friends and themselves! Yes they were gay but it was just for mere sexual expression or better exploitation.  I became disgusted, frightened, disheartened, terrified, filled with guilt and fell into my own internalized homophobia. Being gay wasn’t anything I had dreamed of. No boy-friends’ anywhere to grant me my authenticity, no real friends. Only a few sexual alliances. Most of them highly unsatisfactory. Tulsa gays were marginalized much worse than today. They stood alone, did whatever was necessary then to find, well, sex. It was a get it up, get it on, get off and GET OUT society!! Downright awful. I never participated in any of this, at least as an initiator, and was deeply isolated and lonely.

In the early ’60’s I had one thoroughly devastating LTR, a very bland and abusive scene which prevailed emotionally in me for many years! With all the familial pressure at home, gay bar plus other social exclusion I developed a continuous problem with alcohol.

Eventually around 1974 I left Tulsa for good but here in Denver but found the same. Small splinter groups of exclusionary people. Not many connections for basic sex even if that took place. Certainly no sense of belonging, no love, no acceptance on most levels and certainly no culture. I must have been looking in all the wrong places.

So where was this gay culture of lore? Where was this elusive thing I’d needed for so many years?  For me over five decades had passed, devoid of genuine gay socialization, emotionality and sensuality. I was closeted within; bound by internalized homophobia, feeling forgotten, overlooked, outside of a world I’d never understood nor fully participated in. I didn’t want their two dimensional reality I wanted and needed a three dimensional one. One that celebrated gay life. 

Then came the birth of the first organized gay center in Denver. Still it was exclusionary. Made up of young professionals and activists, and I wasn’t one. But then after some time it all changed. When moved and reopened at 1301 E. Colfax, The Center gave me a sense of ownership of myself, a feeling of pride, of belonging, of comradeship of meeting people like myself as I’d always hoped for.  I was home at last. Thank God Almighty I was home at last. Over 50 years later I was reborn. Though much has still to be I have hope for the future now. Maybe in this new form of Zeitgeist and true friendships a mature loving partnership may still be possible. I certainly hope so against even now in my seventy-second year. At least I’m among my own kind and have a strong degree of completeness. Men and women who do care about me. People like myself in so many ways. People I feel included with, not excluded as in the past. So it’s time to get on with life and bury the past in some other dimension.

I’M FREE AT LAST.

About the Author

"I'm just a guy from Tulsa (God forbid). So overlook my shortcomings, they're an illusion."