In a recent email message addressed as “Hello Manuelita” (my alias in Colorado’s underground gay subculture in the late 1950s and 1960s), I was notified that my friend Bernice passed away on January 13 from complications of high blood pressure following one or more strokes that caused extreme brain pressure for which doctors tried to relieve through surgery.
When I first met Bernice (alias in the gay underground subculture) in Colorado Springs in the 1960s, he was a teenager who had dropped out of high school and was studying to get his cosmetologist license from a beauty school that was located in the same block as the Chicano bar where my mother always worked ever since I was a little boy. Because the bar and beauty school were in the same block in downtown Colorado Springs, my mother and Bernice became acquainted long before I met Bernice. Upon talking to me in Spanish about him, my mother always referred to him as “Juanito” (little John) for his real name John.
After Bernice and I finally met, we immediately knew through our gay radar that both of us were gay. An effeminate gay man, Bernice had a great sense of humor and was fun to be around. Oh, my goodness, he could carry on during our many all-night social gatherings. The famous and outrageous drag queen Divine couldn’t hold a candle to the wit that Bernice had upon carrying on and on – everything from “Ooh La La” to “muchas meat” to refer to well-endowed men with whom he did the nasty. Shortly after I introduced him to several gay men in the underground subculture, he and my longtime friend Lolita (alias for Ricardo) became lovers. Because Bernice was estranged from his family and needed a place to stay, he stayed at my mother’s place for a while before moving in to a bigger house owned by Opal and her gay son Jerry.
My Chicano gay friends and I referred to him as “La Bernice” whenever we socialized. After getting his cosmetologist license, he got jobs in that profession at various beauty shops around town. My longtime Chicano gay friend Lorena (alias for Lorenzo), Bernice and I had a “night job” working for about one year as performers at a straight bar (of all places) that was patronized predominantly by straight military men from Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. Because drag was against the law in those days in the 1960s, we had to be extremely careful to conceal our male identities on stage and off stage. I was the choreographer of the many dance routines that Bernice, Lorena and I performed on stage at that straight bar located in the city’s extra-conservative district known as Ivywild adjacent to the super-wealthy district of Broadmoor. Yeah, I know, it was quite daring for us to do something outrageous right in the belly of the beast.
Because our performances at the aforementioned straight bar were risky enough, I was downright aghast when Bernice informed me that he was hired to perform as part of a chorus line of real-women dancers at the Purple Cow Bar (PCB) that was located at the entrance to the military base at Fort Carson. In addition to his day job as a “hair fairy” (gay parlance for cosmetologist), he worked his night job at PCB for over a year. Because he was so convincing as his female persona, his male identity never once was uncovered throughout the entire time he worked at that super-straight PCB.
Bernice is the one who introduced me to the military police officer with whom I had a very clandestine three-year-long relationship while I was a radical activist in several movements for social change. Because that was the era in which the U.S. military had a strict anti-gay policy, my partner’s position as a police officer required him to take special precautions while living with a radical activist who opposed the military draft and the U.S. war in Vietnam. We were keenly aware that any slip-up about our gay relationship would have resulted in my partner getting a dishonorable discharge and facing time in the stockade (military parlance for jail).
When Bernice moved away from Colorado Springs to the San Francisco Bay Area and later relocated to a peaceful rural area on the island of Maui in Hawaii, he always made an effort to keep in touch with me. He was a loyal friend to me and others who knew him down through the years. In addition to letters and cards several times a year, he also sent me wall calendars that were handmade by him. One year, he sent me a handmade colorful trinket that still hangs on the wall in my bedroom.
“If it wasn’t for John Henson, I don’t know what I would do,” wrote Bernice in letters to me about several health challenges he had the last few years of his life. Bernice always told me how he deeply appreciated the many efforts that John Henson (formerly of Colorado Springs in the 1960s, he has been a California resident for many years) made to fly to Maui in order to assist Bernice during periods of poor health. Their longtime friendship spanned six decades.
“After all he has been through, it is surprising that blood pressure was his downfall,” wrote John Henson in his “Hello Manuelita” email letter to let me know about the death of our beloved Bernice. “He will be missed,” added Henson upon expressing a sentiment that captures my own.
© 29 January 2014
About the Author
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment