Rev. Robert "Bob" Cromey

Excerpts from GLHS OHP 97-27, Shedding a Straight Jacket Robert Cromey

VOICES of the Oral History Project of GLHSNC 2 Theater.

Interview with Rev. Robert Cromey

By Interviewer: Paul Gabriel

Date: 9/16/96 and 8/7/97

(photo from the photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Papers, Box 192, Seven Angry Ministers CRH 1965)

Raised in New York, Robert “Bob” Cromey’s father was an independent pastor who worked in big churches with small congregations and little money in the ‘30s that would set up soup kitchens and worked with the homeless. “Incredible, you know, I think to myself I’m doing the same thing now with the ‘90s where we have the most fabulous and wealthy country in the world that my father was doing in the ‘30s when you know, there were what? Thirty-five, forty percent people unemployed, the soup kitchen.”

Bob learned social awareness and about diversity from his father, who “made it very clear in our household, you didn’t talk about niggers or fags, that these were human beings that were friends of ours, and we had black people, they were acquaintances that my father would help out in the days of the ‘30s and the ‘40s of homeless people in Brooklyn where I was born and raised and Manhattan, in churches they had in these areas. And they would be around the house, mostly ordinary people, mostly particularly black people. But even then my father was interested or even knew a lot of gay people and they were around, this was part of our life. And you just didn’t say the N word or the Fag word or, you know, you didn’t put people down. So I had a kind of sharpening of social conscience, if you will in the ‘40s and ‘50s.”

A student of a prep school in Long Island, called St. Paul’s School. Bob was told he could have gone to Harvard, but he “never thought of it.” So he went to Colgate University in Amherst and hated it: “It was all male, I didn’t have a lot of money, my father didn’t want me to hitchhike – he was terrified that I’d be killed on the road or hurt. I was very lonely and I also was shocked again at the fraternity system, the way they talked about kikes and niggers openly.” After deciding not to be part of a fraternity system, Bob became a social outcast. Though he was a jock playing football and basketball, he didn’t make the top level team, so he transferred to New York University (NYU).

Bob was also exposed to diversity as a student of NYU (1949-53): “In those days it was called N.Y.Jew because practically eighty percent of the students at NYU in those days were Jewish and bright and smart and aggressive….” The most important organization on campus at the time he attended was the Young Communist League in the ‘50s. Bob was a member of the Canterbury Club for Episcopal students at NYU. “It was a small group but the priests who led that were very avant-garde, very concerned about social issues and that what they were trying to get us to see is that the Christian gospel had something to do with slums, bad housing, race relations and I was awakened by these particular clergy to the responsibility of a Christian person to the disadvantaged. And social justice issues as being something that we’ve got to connect to all this, all this Jesus stuff, you see. And it wasn’t just pie in the sky, it wasn’t just simple piety. It was if you’re going to be involved in what’s going on in the world, not out of the world.”

He went to seminary at General Theological Seminary in New York City in 1953 and graduated in 1956 and was ordained an Episcopal priest in December 1956. With his ordination Bob gained social status. Bob wanted to be a brighter star than his father, he strived to be the rector of a large parish and become a “bishop with a fancy, fancy hat.”

In 1956, Bob was curate (associate rector) at Christ ‘s Church in Bronxville, New York. It was a nice church, “but they were very racist and very anti-Semitic and I was shocked by the kind of attitudes that these wonderful people were expressing. They were wonderful towards us, but then they’d talk about niggers and kikes and Jews and this and that.” After a couple of years, Bob became a rector of a church in the Bronx. In this congregation, he heard prejudice about the Catholics (in reaction to the Kennedy election). Bob names this as the time he started to gain class consciousness.

Bob moved to San Francisco, in part because it was the ‘60s and what he called the “greatest trek in the history of humanity.” With a desire to live in another metropolitan area outside of New York, Bob wrote to Bishop Pike (pictured on the left with the Rev. Martin Lutheran King Jr at the Selma march - Photo courtesy of the Bishop Pike Papers at Syracuse University), whom he knew when Bp Pike was the Dean of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York. When a job came open, Bp Pike invited Bob out and paid his expenses in order to get a talented pastor from New York who could handle the inner city. So in 1962, he came to San Francisco, which “helped radicalize me a good deal. I worked for a very famous man, the very famous James Alan Pike, who was the Bishop of California then in San Francisco, and I was his assistant for three years.”

Bob participated in two major sit-ins that protested all-white work places (GM and the Sheraton) in 1965, the same year that he participated in the march in Selma with the Glide Memorial contingent. During the time the civil disobedience sit-ins were practically choreographed. The protesters would refuse to leave a space then they would be arrested by the policy. Radical protesters would go limp and also resist arrest, but the clergy would just walk to the paddy wagon and have lawyers and others waiting to bail them out so they would be released within a few hours.

The Selma march, lead by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr (MLK), went to Montgomery, Alabama: “the police waded into them and beat the people in the march, beat them up with clubs, you know, there was blood and it was to stop the march, you know. And they beat people up mercifully, mercilessly.” They also released dogs, so MLK asked clergy to come to Selma “and thousands of us went, rabbis, priests, ministers descended on Selma, Alabama. It was just incredible.” During the event, a Unitarian minister name James Reba was beaten up and killed and the march didn’t go through. Later the clergy came back and they were able to successfully complete the march. During the second march, Bob was the stringer who fed the local media reports of what was happening in Selma.

“It was very exciting, and I just felt this is what I want to do with my life. One way or the other, this is the side I want to be on. I don’t want to be in the middle, I don’t want to be on the right, I don’t want to be a negotiator, I want to be on the right, I don’t want to be a negotiator, I want to be a demonstrator, I want to be a person that will just make the noise and let the chips fall where they may. I’m not interested in worrying about what this, that or the other one is going to think about it. So, yes, it was very exciting, and life-changing, I mean, no question about it, it change my life, happily. “

Bob continued to use his contacts with the media to benefit CRH. He says it was because he was uninterested in meetings: “I wanted to be in more direct action things, more things where I was in direct relationship with people and activities and the media, where I could say something specifically. And so that the role I took, and took a step back, and then became a parish minister, which meant I had liturgy and my parishioners to worry about more than the larger issues.”

Bob participated in many anti-Vietnam war marches “One, I think I carried a sign that said “Fuck War” on it. “ Bob and other clergy members went down to Hunters Point in their vestments during a riot and talked to individuals and also supported a lot of picket lines. Bob attended the meetings of the NAACP from ’64-66 on behalf of Bishop Pike as part of his work as “a kind of urban work specialist.”

Bob became involved in gay issues when Bishop Pike didn’t want to go to the Folsom Retreat Center where the Glide Foundation gathered clergy and gay and lesbians (where the Council for Religion and the Homosexual or CRH was formed) and he asked Bob to go. “So I went to that long weekend where I met Phyllis and Del and Don Lucas and Hal Call and, you know, a lot of people who are leaders of that… And so I came back and I told him that, you know, this gay rights stuff is really important. Homosexuals are human beings and we can’t just have this anti-gay attitude. And he read all this stuff I brought back and he changed. And just said you’re right, you’re right! We got to support gay rights. And it was incredible, I mean, I’ll take credit for having made the conversion. Anyway, the great thing that he did was he went out and found four or five of the clergy that he had gotten out of their jobs because they were gay, got them to post – that means they couldn’t function as a priest anymore, and he got them reinstated. He got them jobs in the church.”

After participating in the CRH Dance that was raided by the police, Bob became very active in the gay community speaking at the Daughters of Bilitis Conference and Chairing the 1968 North American Coalition of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) conference in Chicago. Bob talked about learning about issues he had never thought about before. Bob continued to work with the gay groups until he was no longer needed proclaiming: “I’m not involved anymore very much in the larger community’s efforts. I would be if I were asked. But again, now a days gay people are leading those organizations, lesbians are leading, and should be.”

Some say one of the first picket actions by a gay group happened when gay picketers protested the fact that Bob’s salary was cut in half for supporting gay issues. “there was an attempt on the part of the bishop and myself to change my job description a little bit because he was going to be away and there was a lot of criticisms of me as the bishop’s assistant because I had been arrested in the civil rights movement and I had besmirched the name of the Episcopal Church by being pro-gay, you see. And I had a huge amount of criticism. So in this attempt to shift the job, the Counsel of the Diocese of California cut off the job. Said we really don’t need it. That meant I only had half a salary because by then I was going half time in the church up in Diamond Heights and it didn’t have much of a population so the diocese was supporting me. But suddenly here I was a married man with 3 young children and they just squeezed, you see, this committee squeezed. And half my salary was gone. So I forget how the picketing came about, but I was quite delighted and surprised. I was at St. Aidan’s that Sunday because I was taking the services there, but because the Cathedral was the focal point of diocese and where the bishop’s throne is, a group of the gay people got together and picketed. I heard about it, the Dean of the Cathedral called me, “did you know about this,” “I heard about it.” I was delighted. It appeared in the church papers all over the country carried stories about it. And it was their protest saying that because Cromey was involved in the gay rights stuff obviously he lost his job because of that. And of course the Counsel of the Diocese people would say, oh no, no, we didn’t have enough money for this job and this job. The usual corporate dance around why you get rid of someone who is a noisemaker, a troublemaker.”

Bob divorced in 1969, and with his marriage family counselor’s license he set up a practice and made a lot of money. Bob was much less of an activist in the ‘70s, moved to Europe for a year and “spent a lot of time nursing my wounds after the divorce and spending a lot of time traveling and seeing my children… And so the ‘70s, that was more quiescent. Although I kept a high media profile. I was doing interviews in the newspapers and lots of radio and television stuff. I was on all the talk shows with some regularity in the ‘70s. And in those days, you had local talk shows on television.”

Looking back:

The ‘60s was a time when religion was very public and appeared in the media. Bob believes this change didn’t happen because the newspapers changed, but “it disappeared because churches weren’t saying anything anymore. They weren’t on the cutting edge. They’ve gone back to saying the same old things and as newspapers say or TV, oh we heard that before; that’s not news. Bob believes that religion became public because America needed it . “The average lay person who goes to church, they don’t give a damn about you or I believe about the Trinity or that incarnation of Jesus or resurrection, you know, they go to church because it somehow connects them to God or some sense that there’s something beyond themselves.” Bob believed that only a small percentage of the church cared about the traditional tenants of the church and that pastors were being lazy or “glued in their mind” who didn’t want to be bothered by social issues.

Bishop Pike helped Bob to open up theologically, “But I feel free to say I have a lot of trouble with the notion of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. I really think there’s some kind of after life but, you know, people are getting quite used to me saying that; they don’t care, you know. ‘Cause I’m not telling them what they have to believe. I’m saying these are options for us to believe.”

Bob’s theology can be seen in his participation of the sit-in at the Cadillac dealership on Van Ness with the NAACP, where six white male clergy members (three Presbyterians: Bill Grace and three Episcopalians: Donald “Don” Gedamey, Lane E. Barton and Bob) participated as followers rather than leaders. The blacks lead the march and then invited the clergy to participate in the sit-in, where they were arrested with about 300 others. “The motivation was if were clergy in The City and we were trying to support the blacks and Hispanic people, we had to identify. We had to be part of them; we couldn’t be aloof.”

Another dynamic during the 60’s was that the denominations worked together and had Urban Specialist pastors who had the financial freedom to be radical and respond to the real needs of Urban life. The Presbyterians and Episcopalians met regularly to talk about strategy: “The idea was to identify, that the church has got to be involved with what’s going on with the people in the street. And it had to deal with the jobs and it had to deal with employment.”

Bob believes the denominations decision to stop supporting the Urban Specialist pastors caused them to become out of touch with the needs of the world. “The churches on the denominational level since the ‘60s have pulled out and no longer finance people like the independent clergy that they had in The City in doing social service and social activism. Our diocese has nobody like that now, nobody. I don’t think the Presbyterians, Methodists or Lutherans do either. Probably the Night Ministry is one of the few programs left from those days when the clergy were actively involved… Most of the young clergy think I’m some kind of a nut when I raise issues connecting the Gospel to these issues. I’m regarded as an old fart, you know, ‘cause this is past.”

Loneliness

"Finally, if the literature regarding homosexuality is to be believed, the inevitable mark of the homosexual is loneliness. It is not without significance that the first great novel on lesbianism was called The Well of Loneliness and it would seem that much of the frantic seeking of companionship in which the homosexual indulges (including the frequent changing of partners) is a recognition of this state... this loneliness seems to be a part of the cross of the homosexual who must, by nature of his inversion, bear. One hopes that the homosexual "societies" help, to some degree, to meet this problem, one tends to doubt it."

Richard Byfiels, "A Pastoral View of Homosexuality," Pacific Coast Theological Group, November 1965, p. 5-6, [courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive, Don Lucas Papers; Diocesan Committee Documents, 1965 folder 19/22].

While this comment is found in the midst of a long essay about how pastors should work with gay people in 1965, it is admittedly a product of the media's portrayal of gay people at the time. The image above is from the article "The Sad 'Gay' Life: The Homosexual Man" [Star, Jack, Look, January 10, 1967 (courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive, Don Lucas Papers; Mattachine Document Clippings folder 19/16)]

While it is surely true that some of the rhetoric about sad lonely gay men was designed to make homosexuality a less desirable lifestyle for youth, it is not completely missing the mark. The nature of the closet and the loss of social and familial support that many gay individuals experienced, would naturally lead to loneliness. It should also be said that the dynamics of urban life also create a sense of loneliness for many (regardless of their sexuality or gender identities).

It is particularly this loneliness that the pastors working with the Vanguard youth sought to address. This article, published in the original Vanguard , written by the Rev. Ray Broshears (picture courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive, Ray Broshears Papers; News Clippings; 96-3 Carton 2) seeks to address the loneliness he witnessed in the Tenderloin.

Volume 1, Number 4, February 1967, p. 7 [courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive, Don Lucas Papers; Vanguard]

The next issue of Vanguard featured comments about loneliness from youth member, Keith St. Clare:

"The more chronically one is lonely, the more selfish he becomes... Read More. ‘I just want someone to love me!’ you cry. Do you? Usually not. Are you waiting for Prince Charming or Snow White to carry on with? Give up, Mary. The secret, the power to overthrow your loneliness, is within. Put self aside and learn to love others! Paradoxically, concern will breed concern and (Sorry ‘bout that) you’ll lose your loneliness. One way to learn concern is through uninhibited enthusiasm. Don’t hide your feelings too well...Applaud and praise at the least honest provocation. True appreciation never alienates anyone. Affectionate companions and amiable friends are rare, but if you become one you will have more than your share.”

Volume 1, Number 5, 1967, p. 7 [courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive, Don Lucas Papers; Vanguard]

Working with many of the individuals in the Tenderloin who are a part of the Vanguard generation and/or who are addicted, homeless, queer, transgender, mentally ill, addicted, etc, I know that loneliness is still one of the biggest issues those living in poverty or on the margins in San Francisco. In fact, I think it is such a pervasive problem in our city that it should be considered emotional poverty.

The more I research the history of the pastors that worked with and around the Vanguard youth, the more I see how my current ministry is a direct result of the advocacy, theology and law breaking of the Urban Specialist Pastors. My work along with that of the Night Ministry, the Faithful Fools and the many programs created by Glide Memorial Church and Foundation continue to work with the lonely souls of the Tenderloin.

Vanguard Revisited will create the opportunity for contemporary individuals to use their own words, art and writings to express how they experience loneliness.

Rev. Lewis Durham

Synopsis from the GLBT Historical Society’s Oral History Archive
Interview with Lewis Durham
By Interviewer: Paul Gabriel
Shedding A Straight Jacket
Date of Interview: 7/18/98

Background:
Lewis Durham’s father was a pastor who worked in Methodist, Presbyterian and Southern Baptist congregations, primarily with youth or with mentoring programs connecting youth and adults. His funeral was attended by hundreds of youth gang members who were affected by his ministry. Lewis’ mother was a machinist in the War.

After serving in the Navy, Lewis attended college to become an accountant. After seminary, Lewis became a Methodist pastor and served as a Youth Organizer at Westwood, a church near UCLA. Lewis worked for eight years at the National Headquarters in Newport for the Methodist Church. During this time he began working with young adults as part of the interdenominational National Youth Organization which focused on the growing needs of the baby boomers. This work not only led Lewis to work as an educator about sex and drugs with the Navy (who wanted education for the bored sailors with too much time on their hands in submarines), but also brought him to Glide Memorial in San Francisco.

Through his work with the National Youth Organization Lewis helped to create a young adult project, run out of Tennessee by the National Council of Churches [which included United Church of Christ (UCC), Methodists, Presbyterians, American Baptist and the Lutheran Church in America (LCA]. The youth project created programs in metropolitan cities across the country. The San Francisco program was created because a poll of hitchhikers showed that most youth wanted to head to San Francisco.

Lewis and Ted McIlvenna were sent to San Francisco and began working at Glide. Lewis primarily focused on the Council and the Foundation though he also did some work with the Mission Rebels, a local gang. McIlvenna focused on youth organizing, but also used the connections cultivated by the National Youth Organization and National Council of Churches to start the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH).

Radical Ministry Despite Political, Media and Ecclesiastical Backlash:
When Ted and Lewis joined the Glide staff in 1962, Glide had lots of money from an endowment, but no programs. This made Glide an ideal location for the new program. An additional benefit for having the youth work at Glide, was that it had a foundation with a separate board. This separation protected the National Council of Churches, the Methodist Bishop and other congregations, when donors, congregations, the media, police and others complained about the radical ministry taking place at Glide.

John Moore was the pastor at Glide when Lewis and Ted began working there in ’62. A year later Cecil Williams joined the staff and in ’64 he become the head pastor when John Moore left.

Lewis worked with the board of directors (which included the Methodist Bishop) to educate them about the work they were doing in the neighborhood. This not only allowed the board to stay informed, but also enabled them to defend the ministers when conservatives, pastors, donors, press and the police tried to scandalize, defrock, arrest or shut them down.

One of the many times the Glide pastors needed support was when Vanguard, which Lewis describes as gay prostitutes, had a dance in the sanctuary (which was a gathering space for lots of gay organizations). A reporter published a column in four hundred newspapers “talking about this awful thing that had happened in Glide where young men were dancing cheek to cheek.” As a result telegrams were sent by Sothern bishops and conferences in Texas and Alabama to [the Methodist ]Bishop Tippett demanding that he to [sic] defrock [the Glide pastors]. The Bishop picked up the telegrams and letters and said “Lewie, you answer them. I haven’t got time.’”

Cliffard “Cliff” Crummy, who served as the district superintendent, also served on the Glide board and was supportive on their work. Cliff helped calm down conservative lay folk in the area and even took on large donors. One such occasion was when the President of Chevron and high level corporate bank executives who funded the National Council of Churches “passed the word down they were going to cut their funding unless the Council of Churches did something about Glide. Well, the Council of Churches doesn’t have any leverage on Glide at all, you know, just no way that could they have done anything about Glide, you know, except make us feel bad or something. But [Cliff] … said don’t worry, Lewie, we’ll find a way around this and he helped turn them onto some funding sources too.”

Lewis also talks about how Glide was harassed and tracked by both the IRS and the FBI. The IRS investigated allegations that Glide was not actually a church and the political nature of their activities. In the late 60s the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH) began having trainings for clergy, doctors, psychologists and others who were in positions to help decrease the discrimination faced by gay people at Glide. The process for the trainings was to desensitize people through the use of pornographic film.

“Laird would have 16 or 18 projectors going all at the same time. Ceiling and all, I mean, just complete media inundation of a person. And he quite often used Tchaikovsky’s Violin concerto and there would be fifteen scenes of people coming to orgasm. He would time it, you know so all the films were coming to orgasm at the same time with this Tchaikovsky music as loud as it would go.”

After the media inundation, the participants would talk about issues like S&M, drugs, gay, lesbian and transgender people in panels that were led by people who lived those lifestyles. This model of sex education was taught all over the country.

At a conference for Lutheran clergy in Minneapolis the FBI seized the pornographic films and began showing them to church folk (presumably as a way to shame or scandalize CRH and the Glide pastors). After being advised by lawyers that they getting their tapes back would look bad in the press (as the names of the pornographic films would be released), the CRH clergy went to the local FBI office in robes and performed an exorcism ritual. Lewis remembers, “We were quite impressive, you know, and there’s pots swinging and we exorcised them, and said, oh, God forgives you taking our films.”

Lewis tells a number of stories about the radical ministry that was happening at Glide. The stories include: hippies; orgies; skinny dipping; preventing riots by paying off gang leaders; encouraging nonviolence at violent protests; civil rights trips to participate in the March at Selma; removing the pews and putting them out on Turk street; a bonfire in the building with nuns and bread fed to drunk passersby; a Joan Baez concert where draft cards were burned on the alter; sunrise Easter services in the streets, urban plunges for young clergy to survive the streets for 24 hours; a coffee house for youth; creating the first 24 hour shelter for runaway youth (it was illegal when it was created); and helping to found the Night Ministry.

Bob Cromey and Lewis married two women and told them they weren’t married in the eyes of the church, only in the eyes of two clergymen. It hit the paper and “Bob made the statement, he said he didn’t care who people made love to, they could make love to lampshades if they wanted to. Well he soon had a garage full of lampshades and I mean, lampshades came in from everywhere.”

Lewis remarks that many of these strategies for ministry were learned from the hippies who taught the pastors how to make statements by doing something unexpected. While the Glide pastors are certainly radical, Lewis notes that they have an easier time being pro sex, then pro drugs, “you’re supporting a positive attitude towards sex and you’re having difficulties with drugs, particularly hard use of drugs.”

Missionary Theology:
The pastors at Glide foundation and the church saw themselves as missionaries, who did the work important to those in the neighborhood. This included working with gays, sex workers, “young chickens,” youth, hippies, gangs, drug addicts and others.

Because the pastors saw themselves as missionaries or “enablers,” as Lewis called it, they listened to the people about what the issues were in people’s lives that the church needed to address. “We didn’t really decide sex is something we’re going to, you know, it came out because people said that’s an important issue. And then it became important when we found out that nobody was dealing with it.”

The theology of the Glide pastors stems from their call to be missionaries who “went out in the world, found out what problems, what people were doing, what problems they had and how they defined their problems not the church, but how they defined their problems, and then you endorsed them and worked with them, all those problems. And it just so happened that, when you’re in the Tenderloin, you’re working with the gay community, or the gay prostitutes or the, you know, whatever, sex is one of the issues and drugs was too. And we got into the drug issue too, particularly with Joel Fort. But sex was more fun that drugs. So we basically followed what the people were saying were the issues.”

Lewis also notes: “we basically worked on the idea of defining areas with the people with the church not being the expert. The church was not the expert. We had to rely on people that knew more about it. But we were the experts when it came to endorsement and validation. And that the role of the church was to validate people …”

CRH and the Police Raid of the Ball at California Hall:
The San Francisco Gay groups threw a ball in order to raise funds for CRH. However, because the gay groups weren’t allowed to rent California Hall, Glide side the rental agreement for the ball. Shortly after the meeting the owners of the California Hall went to the police’s Vice Squad to inform them of the illegal event that would take place.

“Cecil and Ted went over to see the Vice Squad. They immediately pointed to the rings on their fingers and said how can you do something like that and be married men, you know. I mean, they just really started hassling Ted and Cecil, but that’s the wrong thing to do. Those two don’t get hassled, they hassle. And but, you know, it was obvious and they kept quoting Bishop Fulton Shehan… he was a Catholic bishop who made quite a name for himself in the ‘50s and ‘60s as an arch conservative.”

So they knew there was going to be trouble, so CRH got lawyers to be the ticket takers. “The clergy wives, see this was a whole new ball game and here were the clergy and their collars on the steps. There were the police there had cameras and klieg lights. They brought their equipment with them to take pictures of everybody coming in and out. And there were forty-five uniformed and plain clothes cops. And so my wife and some of the other wives got together and got coffee and started serving coffee to the police. And they didn’t know what to do, you know, here were these very middle class, obviously, women, you know, coming around and offering coffee to them while all these gay people were going up and down the steps, you know. And it was really a trip and a half.”

The police arrested one person on the dance floor for lewd dancing and “the three ticket takers. And I’ll tell you, then all hell broke loose. That was real interesting.” Arrested at the event were Nancy May (who was pregnant), Dave Clayton (Rick Stokes partner) and Herb Donaldson.

After the ball Glide’s pastor, John Moore, had his sermon on the Church and the Homosexual on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The California Hall incident changed the way the police related to the CRH clergy:
“But we did notice, for instance, at the California Hall, the police would not have anything to do with the clergy, I mean, they’d leave them alone. If they walked down the hall, they’d give them a wide berth, you know, just kind of respect, we were not sure why you guys are here but we aren’t going to touch it. But comes the San Francisco State strike, several of the clergy got beat, including Clair Nessmith who has a leg brace from polio and he got beat. And there was a whole change in attitude. You know, they were a (p55) little more hostile toward the clergy.”

Vanguard Memories:
“They came by and I can’t remember whether an intern, we had interns would stir things up for us. And it could have been this guy, I can’t remember his name or an Ed Hanson or somebody like that. But anyway the Vanguard made their way to Glide and said they wanted a sponsor. They’d started organizing so we gave them an office and telephone a little furniture and they started out. It was pretty rioutus from the word git-go. I think they had a change of officers every two weeks because somebody would steal the treasury. And, you know, it was a very unstable group. But they had a couple of dances and, of course, the word of the dances got around that this wasn’t your typical church youth group. And I can’t remember how long, they were around several months. And then they sort of went off in fragments all over the place. They were some pretty sharp kids, some of them were pretty sharp. But they were always coming in and screaming about somebody running off with the money or something, you know. They were real unstable. And putting on their dances, there would be, you know 80-90-100 out.”

Leaving Glide and the Ministry:
Lewis left Glide after ten years, when he realized he was tired of it all. He saw that each metropolitan area had a Tenderloin and that the problems weren’t going away. He also became disenfranchised by the Methodist churches inability to handle the issues of sexuality nationally. After his experience at Glide Lewis drifts away from the Methodist church.

“In some ways, the one thing that I feel more successful about, is the fact that, you know, the Church did what it can do best and that was it endorsed and validated the gay movement. And a lot of gay movement and Pride and all that thing and self-confidence came because of the initial endorsement the Church gave to people, like you’re okay, you go ahead and do what you need to do. We’ll help you. And so you had people that would just feel better about this.”

Illustrations

One of the most interesting parts of Vanguard are the illustrations. The youth who created Vanguard not only used art as a major part of their work, by screen printing the entire periodical even the typed print looks like art. Here are some sample pages that were a part of the Night Songs poetry feature:


[Images courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive]

Local clergy learned they were needed to stand up for homosexuals

Here is a story about the pastors that helped the Vanguard youth. This San Francisco Chronicle article from Jan. 3, 1965 records the political event that helped the clergy understand their power to help call for justice on behalf of homosexuals. Check out the GLBT Historical Societies Online Exhibit about this group of pastors.

Market Street and Union Square Sex Work Economies

Reposted from OutHistory

Text by Joey Plaster. Copyright (©) by C. Joey Plaster, 2009. All rights reserved.

Union Square, 1955. Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library.

Redevelopment in the central city would dramatically impact the Polk Street in the 1970s. The Polk Gulch district sat on the western fringe of the Tenderloin. The area housed the city’s bustling entertainment industry, until the 1920s, when city officials shut down the Barbary Coast “vice” district at the behest of the city’s business elite before the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and much of the trade went underground and relocated to the Tenderloin district.^[1]

San Francisco’s modern gay subculture began to come together in the Tenderloin’s speakeasies and gin joints during the era of Prohibition. When Prohibition was lifted in 1933, a number of gay bars quickly opened in the area. By the 1960s, the low-income area was a haven and a residential ghetto for low-income elderly, runaway youth, and an emerging transgender community, who found space in its residential hotels, 24-hour cafeterias, bars, and liberal religious institutions.

Patrons of the Gilded Cage, a Tenderloin club and afterhours youth hangout. 1968. Courtesy of the Peter Fiske collection at the GLBT Historical Society.

Ed Hansen, a liberal minister with close ties to anti-poverty campaigns and youth organizing, called the Tenderloin “the human dump heap of San Francisco. It is the place where the social outcasts – the aged, the poor, the infirm, the youth with sexual problems – persons of all races and religions – go and are out of sight. Here they are forgotten, ignored, and ultimately die, emotionally and then physically.”^[2]

Several discreet sex work economies were also based in the neighborhood, each built around a specific “type” of sex worker and customer. While youth may have carried themselves differently in other aspects of their lives, while working they conformed to each location’s style of dress and sexual identity.

Patrons of the Gilded Cage, a Tenderloin club and afterhours youth hangout. 1968. Courtesy of the Peter Fiske collection at the GLBT Historical Society.

The “Meat Rack,” located along Market Street at Mason, was known for “trade,” a term referring to heterosexual-identified, traditionally masculine or “rough” young men, as well as individuals we would now refer to as transgendered. In 1962, a letter to the editor in LCE News complained about the “Walking Eyesores of Market Street” made up with “Lipstick, Rouge, Pancake, Eyeshadow, Spraynet and Bobby Pins,” and “the Hustler,” “lounging in the doorways of Market and Mission looking for the married man from down the Peninsula or over in East Bay.”^[3]

“A few are quite honestly married with children,” a 1968 article noted of the “Meat Rack” hustlers, “and proud to wheel the carriage down past the meat rack on Sunday afternoon, introducing the wife to the johns and other hustlers.”^[4] These youth were also thought be less educated and more likely to be involved in drug use and crime. “This is the male who is more likely to claim that he is straight …who is temporarily out of work and is transient to the city,” criminologist Martin Stow wrote in the early 1970s. He is “not likely to have completed high-school and comes from a family of conflicts.”^[5]

Gay-identified prostitutes, many of them thought to be in college or with higher education levels, worked outside Union Square’s St. Francis Hotel, where the upscale “men-only” Oak Room was a well known cruising spot among gay men in the 1950s and early 1960s. “His goal,” according to a 1968 article, “will be to meet a truly generous sugar daddy, not too hard to take and too demanding of time, that will set him up as a keptie, put him through college, buy him a car, or place him in a life-time business career.”^[6]

In this economically depressed area, aboveground businesses depended on the money generated by the sex trade. “The Plush Doggie…has suffered mightily from the gay trade,” Guy Strait wrote sarcastically in 1964 of a 24-hour diner. “They have suffered so badly they are still in business, otherwise they would have had to close their doors many months ago.”^[7]

Vanguard Magazine, 1966. Courtesy of the GLBTHS.

Vanguard, a short-lived queer youth organization that arose out of liberal ministers’ anti-poverty work in the central city, characterized the economy as exploitative in the mid-1960s: “We Protest the endless profit adults are making off youth in the central city,” one mid-1960s flier read. “We demand justice and immediate corrections of the fact that most of the money made in the area is made by the exploitation of youth by so called normal adults who make a fast buck off situations everyone calls degenerate, perverted, and sick.”^[8]

Vanguard "Street Sweep" Protest. Courtesy of the GLBTHS.

1. ↑ “Excavating the Postwar Sex District in San Francisco,” Josh Sides, California State University, Northridge, 359.
2. ↑ Vector Magazine, Jan 1966.
3. ↑ LCE News, March 4 1962.
4. ↑ Orpheus…in-bound, Vector Magazine, May 1968.
5. ↑ No title, c. early 1970s, by Martin F. Stow, Toby Marotta Collection, GLBTHS.
6. ↑ “Orpheus…in-bound,” Vector Magazine, May 1968.
7. ↑ LCE News, May 1964.
8. ↑ Vanguard “We Protest” in Don Lucas papers, GLBTHS.

Vanguard Covers

[Images courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive]