By Charles ALexander
When I was 19, if I slept with a guy twice, I was "in love," and T.D., the lanky stud I met outside of the downtown Hub Grill gay teenager hangout, soon became my first summer-of-coming-out romance.
Tall Dick — Richard Bowdy — was 25, lived in an upper flat with a gay couple, butch Hank and port-a-belly Rick, and worked nearby at Highland Park General Hospital as an orderly.
Our first night alone T.D. played "Music For Lovers Only," a monaural LP with Jackie Gleason's easy listening orchestra, and I took on a sentimental glow that kept me lighthearted for days. Unfortunately, the summer euphoria soon became flat fall champagne.
Some time during July, T.D. and I, Hank and Rick went sailing on the Detroit River. There was a patchouli-scented breeze, and I sat in the back of the boat, held lovingly by T.D. I was content as we drifted serenely past Belle Isle and the Seven Sisters landmark smokestacks.
Screw what the world might think. I was happy to be gay, energetically glad to be alive. Soon I would be 21.
As September neared, T.D. and I saw less of each other. He spent a lot of time with Eleanor, a straight friend his age. They became Ayn Rand Objectivism groupies and planned to move to New York — its center. Fountain Headers.
T.D. warned me I shouldn't get 'swoony.' "You're young, Al. Someone will bob along, really worth your time." (The usual distancing technique that I, decades later, would use for ending my own misalliances, mostly because I drank too much.)
Our fledgling affair vanished Halloween Night when the Farmer & Bates streets were cordoned off so hundreds of "tourists" could watch the parading of drag queens, glamour gowns, hand-sewn costumes, glittering show people — swishing, traipsing, bowing, blowing kisses, to rounds and rounds of straight applause. Oohs and aahs.
(In 1968, the year the Tigers won the Baseball World Series, the straights began throwing rocks. Catcalls. Threats. The Halloween parade, which had been a decades-long annual event since the late-1940s, was over. The bar scene began to flee north.)
As I watched from wooden street barricades — trying to pass for a tourist — T.D. stopped grandly, unexpectedly out of the crowd, turned and kissed me neatly on my blushing cheek. I didn't recognize him at first. He was dressed all in feathers and a tapered silk-and-sky-blue sequined gown.
Graceful. Lovely to look at. Simply stunning. (I felt totally betrayed. A drag queen! How could he? That was that! Not my, don't-look-too-gay scene.)
During Detroit's glory days a half century ago, Washington Boulevard was the setting for exclusive shops, upscale restaurants, stretching sedately from the swank Statler Hotel at Grand Circus Park to the prestigious Sheraton Cadillac on Michigan Avenue.
Both hotel bars catered to a discrete, well-heeled, happy-hour, "piss elegant" clientele. Good manners were expected. No camping it up. No swishy behavior. No untoward touching. No two-shots-and-a-beer buddy-buddying. Pass for straight. (Well, reasonably straight.)
At the Statler, offenders were handed a succinct note: "Your patronage is not wanted here!"
For those who engaged in the covert pastime of dalliance in the sensual stalls of chance, circumstance and occasional low-life charity, the nearby Tuller Hotel restroom was notorious, as were the Telenews theater balcony, two Brass Rail Bars (where popular singer Johnny Ray was arrested for soliciting an undercover washroom vice cop) and Grand Circus Park's busy, non-stop underground loo.
Soon my gay dance card included other venues. New opportunities for love. And rejection. Toledo. Cleveland. Chicago. New York. Gay life was larger than I had imagined. Or, hoped. I gladly put shiny dimes in my penny loafers.
