Jim Andris, Facebook

Network of Progressive and Alternative Businesses and Establishments

The "Euclid Strip"

One of the most important roots of the 1980 Celebration of Lesbian and Gay Pride in St. Louis is the complicated fact of how there came to be tolerant and even accepting areas of the city with attendant bookstores, restaurants, bars, residents, visitors, and streetside haunts. Don Conway-Long was asked in an interview how Left Bank Books supported the 1980 Walk for Charity, since he worked for this independent bookstore for many years and was a member of the collective which ran it. The conversation that ensued identified significant defining institutions in the area known in the 1970s as "The Euclid Strip" or "The Central West End" (even though the actual Central West End is quite a large area which contains Euclid Avenue as a small but significant part of it.) The map in Figure 1 identifies one such important haunt for not only lesbian and gay people of the time, but artists, musicians, poets, people in search of good restaurants or novel entertainment, sex workers, progressives, hippies, warmed-over bohemians, well-connected society people, and the list could go on.

Progressive establishments on the Euclid Strip, 1980

The very name "Left Bank Books" strongly suggests avanté garde interests, since one important site of the Beat Era in 1950's Paris was that very southern bank of the river Siene, a place where poets, artists, expatriates, and revolutionaries—and homosexuals—met in coffee houses. The business moved to the Central West End location in 1977, where a collective of four individuals ran it: Kris Kleindienst, Barry Liebman, Justin James and Alan Levin. At some early point Levin left, and Don Long was hired. Asked about the progressive character of Left Bank Books, now Conway-Long replied

"… the progressive causes idea, it certainly pervaded the entire atmosphere of Left Bank. There was a very clear orientation toward supporting LGBT, there was a special section for literature and social science work on it. Eventually it had probably one of the first trans sections in books that Kris put together; I couldn’t tell you what year that was, but I do know that we did have a separate section on that. And certainly a huge section on women’s literature and black studies and, you know, just generally political orientation on the history of political science, economic sections, that’s all the orientation that Left Bank had."

For decades the entrance to Left Bank Books has contained large bulletin boards on either side of the corner entryway to the shop. These boards are open for all sorts of postings, including progressive causes. It's almost certain that information about the 1980 St. Louis Lesbian and Gay Pride Celebration was posted in this very public place, and people in the community of the time knew to look there. But there was still another, more specific connection of Left Bank Books to the lesbian and gay community of the time. Kris Kleindienst was one of the original four members of the Left Bank collective who saved the business from bankruptcy when it moved from its former location on Delmar Avenue in the Loop. Kris also had been an important member of the Lesbian Alliance, which published the newsletter Moonstorm starting in 1973 and certainly through 1980. Missouri lesbians had strongly fought back against the Anita Bryant terror campaign, Save our Children, in 1977-1978, and other important causes in the 1970s, such as ending violence against women and the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. So Kris and others were very well tuned in to the important publications of the day addressing LBGT issues from the progressive perspective. Kris, in fact, had attended the 1979 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, along with as many as 30 other St. Louisans.

Conway-Long and Andris agreed, though, that there was a much larger network of establishments on the Euclid Strip that were friendly to various progressive causes, and that Left Bank Books was a pivotal node in that network.

… you were asking about the links between Duff’s, Left Bank Books and Sunshine Inn, which I do think was pretty strong for quite a few years. … Left Bank was certainly the political center, but the Sunshine Inn did pretty well by itself, even though it was the foods establishment, as the center for information and support for the community just as Left Bank did. And Duff’s did its own work in this area, Duff’s being perhaps more diverse in terms of types of people employed there. But there was also, let’s not forget, Balaban’s and Herbies. That’s all right there in … a six block range … [of] Euclid Avenue. And well, Balaban’s and Herbies were not exactly political. Herbies was where you danced all night until you passed out, and Balaban’s, it kind of let the rich people show how much they loved gays. And the Duff’s orientation was kind of literary, ‘cause they had the poetry series that went on there for a long time. And Karen Duffy was, you know, a strong political member of the community. So that whole area was key, I think, and information was available in all those places for lesbian and gay activities around Saint Louis."

Harper Barnes has written an excellent sketch of the history of Duff's and its connection to the St. Louis arts community on the occasion of its closing in 2013. Duff's was founded in 1972 right across the street and south a couple of doors from the corner location which would become Left Bank Books in 1977. Once it got established it gained a reputation with St. Louis restaurant mavens as a place with moderate prices, good, interesting food, and great wine. Started by Karen and Danny Duffy, in a few years, they divorced, and Karen acquired the restaurant. In time, Karen was joined by Tim Kirby, who had a good knowlege of wines. When Kris Kleindienst and others moved Left Bank Books across the street, she and Karen became fast friends and comerades in business. In 1975, teacher and poet, Michael Castro, started the River Styx literary organization and was in charge of poetry programming at Duff's for much of the next 25 years. Many poets, including St. Louis native son, William Borroughs, read there.

There was an important context of poetry reading in the Central West End that frames Duff's literary connections. Gaslight Square, just a few blocks to the east on Olive, was a "hip" neighborhood that rapidly bloomed, then decayed in the 1960s. Alan Ginsberg read poetry at Gaslight Square; which was, among many other things, a center for the beat spirit in St. Louis. A decade later those St. Louis alternative literary yearnings found the Euclid Strip to be an inviting place for expression. Llewelyn's Pub just up the street from Duff's started about the same time, and later, in 1981, Dressels. Both establishments hosted both jazz and poetry readings. Once Gaslight Square was closed, people looking to indulge their Bohemian longings for jazz, poetry, wine, and whatever could do so easily at the corner of McPherson and Euclid—a location which in the early 1970s also held the gay bar, Potpourri, frequented by gay men and lesbians, some in drag, and not a few "tourists" from West County.

Another mainstay of the progressive community at the time was the Sunshine Inn, a vegetarian restaurant. It was started by Rudy Nickens and Martha McBroom in 1972 and remained open for 25 years. The moral arguments for a vegetarian diet won't be rehashed here, but it is important to understand just why this restaurant became yet another node in an ever-changing network of businesses that supported LGBT and other progressive causes. Many people became vegetarians in the '60s and '70s as a way of showing their respect for all animal life and not just human life. Others, such as Frances Moore Lappe, who wrote the classic Diet for a Small Planet in 1971, saw vegetarianism as a way to maintain a sustainable planet, since the production and environmental costs of an animal protein-based diet are so high. There are other reasons for going vegetarian, but these are the main two. Still, there is a lot more to becoming a vegetarian than just going off meat; you must be sure that your dietary needs are being met. The Sunshine Inn was the premier St. Louis establishment in the 1970s that not only supported the purposes of a vegetarian diet but also provided that diet competently at a reasonable price. In fact, Robert Nussbaum, the founder of Imagine Foods, also had a hand in founding the Sunshine Inn and used the venue to experiment with inventing non-dairy approaches to food. To this day, people are still pining for the Creamy Vegetable Soup, Golden Lion burger, Garde of Eden salad, Broccoli Blossom, Fried Rice and Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Dressing that populated the menu and sold like healthy hotcakes.

There is still another important cultural reason why the Sunshine Inn fit so well into the Euclid progressive network. Many people in the newly developing New Age culture were vegetarian. The flower children of the 1960s, living back in the woods, listening to Janis Joplin and smoking pot, experimenting with sexuality, wanted to get clear away from the dominant, rigid, triumphalist Christian culture. But human beings are spiritual beings, and something was bound to rush into the void created by the rejection of the image of Christian soldiers marching onward as to war as their guiding model for moral behavior. All manner of things did. One was the "wisdom of the East," including both Hindu and Buddhist thought. Many of these life patterns included radically alternate dietary choices, and people who were rejecting the McDonalds approach to nutrition were trying them. Into the midst of this developing consciousness stepped The Golden Grocer in 1972. This was one of the few places in St. Louis where you went—if you wanted to or needed to do your own healthy vegetarian cooking—to acquire the necessary raw materials to do so. Tofu, tahini and tamari and other staples of vegetarian cooking, including bins of rice and other whole grains and local organic vegetables were just not available at National or Schnuck's at that time. Originally, the Golden Grocer was located in the same block on Euclid as the Sunshine Inn, but later moved up the street just north of Herbies, where it remains open to this day.

It seems ironic in retrospect that side-by-side with the mantra-chanting, carrot-munching peace workers frequenting the Sunshine Inn and the Golden Grocer near Laclede and Euclid Avenues on the south side of the strip were leather sporting bears and male-male one-night stands having a late breakfast at the Majestic Cafe on the southwest corner of the intersection. Run by a Greek family since 1951, this was defintely a blue-collar establishment that had adapted to the evolving diversity of the surrounding area. It's not quite fair to classify this place with the corner tavern atmosphere a "greasy spoon," because inexpensive meals were available there that tasted and smelled like home-cooking. But if, contrary to the alternative food community, you wanted your daily bacon and eggs and biscuits with sausage gravy and several cups of black coffee, you would find it at the Majestic. Along with many Central West End denizens, the gay male community flocked to the Majestic in droves. In 1980, when I lived down the block, one frequently encounted there community pillars such as Roy Birchard of the Metropolitan Community Church, some day to be Mr. Drummer, Woody Bebout, and highly regarded photographer and Mandrake Society founder, Will Wegener. Not the least aspect of the blue-collar but tolerant attitude found at the Majestic was a fleet of waitresses known for their sharp tongues, their fierce competition for customers, and their tough, yet nurturing supervision of the young men (and some women) they were serving. Once you got a waitress, you had better not sit at the wrong table when you came in. I fell under Janice's domain and had my ears boxed once for sitting in the wrong place, but Rhea and others just as zealously guarded their own troops. One wouldn't suspect it, but the Majestic Restaurant was also part of the network that supported lesbians and gays in their struggle to live authentically and well.

Just down Maryland Avenue half a block from the location of Herbies' Disco was the drive-around fountain embedded in cobblestones, part of a project by Mayor A. J. Cervantes in the middle 1970s which converted the elegant old three-story brick houses on the north side of the street into commercial property, and added a fleet of trendy businesses on the south side of the block. Maryland Plaza remains a tourist attraction in St. Louis, and was an appropriate setting for Herbies. Colin Murphy has given us a scintillating description of Herbies Disco:

The iconic nightclub was St. Louis’ own Studio 54 where the beautiful people boogied late into the night atop the trademark dance floor suspended from the ceiling. Herbies’ was an award winning restaurant from 4:30 til 9 p.m. and destination-disco from 9 til 1:30 a.m. and owned by the colorful Herb Balaban (of Balabans Restaurant fame) and managed by his wife, the irrepressible and equally lovely, Adalaide. The latter held court at the door complete with large, street-level windows. The glass and chrome hot spot located at the corner of Euclid and Maryland was the queer haunt of choice throughout the 1970s and early 1980s and ground zero for the Central West End Halloween celebration.

The place was indeed a state-of-the-art, upscale restaurant and disco. For years you could get a prime rib dinner with baked potato and salad for $7.99 downstairs, and wait for the opening of the second-floor disco with its flashing lights and occasional glitterati patrons mounting the dance floor. The men wore bell-bottom slacks, wide-collared flashy acrylic shirts open at the neck with big patterns and gold chains, and platform heels. Think John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. When you stood out on Euclid Avenue across the street, the music was loud and you could see your buddies dancing with their boyfriends through the uncurtained ceiling-to-floor windows on the second floor. In addition to donning this required dress, I, myself sported a red afro at least 3 inches deep. And I do recall that one Halloween night, out of the milling crowd of 500 revelers on the Plaza came swirling toward me a magnificent six-foot drag queen in white face and gray-green eye shadow batting incredibly long eyelashes. The place was truly hip, however, and though in the minority, straight couples were also there coolly dancing.

The Wider Surrounds of the Euclid Strip

In Figure 2 is a larger map that shows the urban context in which the Euclid Strip is placed. An analysis of this map helps to clarify the evoluton of this haven for at first gay males and drag queens and later lesbians and transgendered people. In the diagram, the purple line marks out the start of the 1980 Walk for Charity planned and organized by the Magnolia Committee from the starting point at the Maryland Plaza Fountain, one block down Euclid then west on Lindell Blvd. along Forest Part for 2 miles, and ending with an afternoon Rally at the Washington University Quadrangle.

Gaslight Square, The Euclid Strip, The Walk for Charity and Washington University

Back around the turn of the 20th Century, the most swinging place to be was Chestnut Street fairly close to downtown St. Louis. This is where ragtime great Tom Turpin had his famous bar complete with "cribs" on the second floor where the "ladies of the night" took their tricks. St. Louis is after all one famous location for ragtime, and the levee with its steamboatin' life always had its entertainment, gambling and sex workers. Eventually that all closed down and was demolished. However, when the tornado ripped St. Louis apart in 1959, it took out some bars and entertainment venues near Olive and Boyle. St. Louis leaders came together, disaster funds were acquired, and the redevelopment of the Gaslight Square strip along Olive got underway. The City of St. Louis even installed fancy gas streetlight replicas of the byegone era. Along with the legacy of ragtime and stride piano, the new force vying for entertainment space was the beat era with its appurtenances: cool jazz, poetry, drugs, and all that hip stuff. Gaslight square gained national attention as the entertainment center to visit in St. Louis. But why did this happen where it did, other than that the tornado was a catalyst?

It surely has something to do with the fact that some forms of American music—ragtime and jazz in particular—have grown fastest on the slightly clandestine borders between white and black, rich and poor. Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, Delmar Avenue was literally a dividing line between black and impoverished North St. Louis, and the sometimes colossally wealthy inhabitants of private developments just to the south. Olive Street in the area of Delmar had become seedy by 1950, and it was just far away enough and isolated enough from potentially "high-minded," relatively wealthy neighborhoods that it could offer less than "high brow" entertainment and activities without so much fear of having the joint immediately closed down by city police on some charge. Cities always make these kind of compromising arrangements, mainly because there is always a real force seeking expression from the supposedly less desireable but numerically significant elements of society. And of course, most gays and lesbians of the 1960s, who dared not engage in public displays which could link them to their sexual and gender orientations, looked for just such areas of the city where they might find a bit more tolerance of their divergence from the cultural ideals of the period. There were bound to be gay and lesbian bars operating occasionally in just these social margins, and their presence could form a catalyst around which a community mght start to build.

Notice that a large part of the bottom half of the map in Figure 2 representing nearly two square miles is Forest Park. This park was built during the 1904 World's Fair, and contains some of the City's most appealing and popular venues for activity: the St. Louis Art Museum, the History Museum, the Zoo, the Jewel Box and later the Municipal Opera (MUNY), the Planetarium, the Boat House and a golf course. Not only that, but the miles and miles of trails, woods, and the public restrooms were the site of much cruising activity. Socialist Laud Humpfreys study of "tea room sex" in Forest Park catapulted to fame in the early 1970s. The City has always maintained the park relatively well since its inception. This vast space of well-maintained public property serves as a major anchor to make the grand old streets just surrounding the Park highly valued as urban residential possibilities. These two things, the well-maintained, large city park, and the elegant surrounding dwellings and towering Gothic churches provided anchors against encroaching decay and gradual possession by poorer, less advantaged would-be inhabitants. And thus a kind of restless stability existed in the Gaslight Square and later in the Euclid Strip, a frontline in a constant battle between mainstream, "normal" society and alternative lifestyles.

And so, during the 1970s, gays and lesbians, and especially gay men just by moving nearer to the somewhat more tolerant Euclid Strip, built a strongly gay neighborhood in the surrounding area. One of the biggest attractions for this living site for some gay men was accessibility to Forest Park. It's easy to oversimplify this and say that this was all about obtaining sex. However, that is not really the whole story of how parks have been used by the gay male community. Before the early 1970s, city parks were rather another social venue for gay men in a city that had few social venues for them, and to be sure, recreational sex was a part of that, but only a part of it. In a recent interview, Jim Thomas offered this reflection:

I was thinking about … this intermixing of sex and organizations and trying to invent new ways of being— … the park scene, in Forest Park, where there were huge gatherings of young people on … McKinley Drive or back there by Kennedy Forest. There was a lot of sex going on there, and so people assumed it was just one big sex scene. But if you ever really went up there, lots of people were just there hanging out, talking, it was a community. And there was much more than simply people going back in the woods and having sex. It was a real, there was real community in that place that was an outlaw place.

And so, access to the park, gay-friendly progressive establishments, gay or gay-friendly bars and dance venues, and access to city streets where one might meet either one's assignation for the evening, or a partner for life, all these, and more, made the area surrounding the Euclid Strip a prime location for gay male residence. And places to live were plentiful, in all price ranges. Right on on Kingshighway facing the east end of Forest Park between Laclede to the south and West Pine to the north were the beautiful and elegant so-called ABCD Condos, some of them 3000 sq ft and grand bay windows overlooking the park. Several professional gay males owned residences there, music teachers, health workers, city employees were some of them. But just around the corner were the Ellsworth and many other quite affordable old apartment buildings. Will Wegener lived just off Laclede on Buckingham Court and took his meals at the Majestic Cafe. There was a hair salon just south of the cleaners on the corner of West Pine and Euclid where Jim Massey worked during the day. By night, he was a well known drag performer. Roy Birchard regularly had his hair cut there by Jim, and caught up on community gossip. Just up the street north of Lindell at 243 N. Euclid was the Daily Planet News, where you could get The Advocate, the national gay newspaper, the current bar rag and often magazines bordering on gay male porn—and maybe cruise a bit.

The 1980 Walk for Charity Parade Route

Given all these considerations just discussed, the route for the 1980 Walk for Charity planned by Glenda Dilley's Magnolia Committee was extremely logical. The starting point, surrounding the fountain in Maryland Plaza, was literally at the center of at least the gay male community, and certainly the entire LGBT community had rallied around the Metropolitan Life Services Center near the McPherson/Euclid intersection during its three year existence from 1975 to 1978. Glenda's vision for the Magnolia Committee was to construct a widely attended and publically visible demonstration by lesbian and gay people that highlighted, on the one hand, the need for attention by the City and its residents to the needs of the lesbian and gay community, and established, on the other hand, the LG community as itself a helpful and well-intentioned resource. It is hard to over-emphasize, though, the level of fear and concern that many gays and lesbians felt for their jobs, their relationships to their birth families, and even their very existence when they contemplated this public display.

The route for the Walk for Charity through the Euclid Strip was really very short, in fact, just three fourths of the way around one very short block: down towards Herbies from the Fountain, turn right, south on Euclid past the Daily Planet to Lindell, and then right on Lindell and one long block to the Chase Park Plaza Hotel. After that it was across Kingshighway and two miles west with the walkers hugging the north edge of Forest Park all the way. Thus, in fact, most of the people who needed to see this demonstration of gay pride never saw it—way less than 1% of the city's population. Demonstrators, estimated at around 500, clearly outnumbered observers. But it was a safe, relatively non-confrontational route. The City Police too needed a lot of convincing before they came on board with the plan, no doubt quite tentatively. It is the concern of the police which in part determined the end point of the walk: the Quadrangle on the Washington University Campus itself.

During the 1970s, Joyce Trebilcot, a philosophy professor at Washington University, and with the help of a lot of others, built a strong women's studies program there. Trebilcot herself was a lesbian separatist, but was highly and wisely political in securing a better campus atmosphere for women, including lesbians, on campus. By 1979 Washington University, on the exact same weekend of the 1980 Celebration of Lesbian and Gay Pride, planned and executed a campus-based celebration which would become the template for about half of the 1980 activities. One of the main concerns in 1980 of the St. Louis Police was what would happen when the Walk for Charity and Rally was over. Where would it end? Would there be confrontation along the way, and especially at the end of the demonstration? In fact, then, the Walkers literally walked two miles to the edge of town to attend the Rally, because Washington University is located in Clayton, just across Skinker Boulevard at the west end of Forest Park. The demonstrators could end up off city property and in a place that had already demonstrated hospitality to lesbian and gay demonstrations.

A Very Special Progressive Institution: Trinity Episcopal Church

At the very north end of the Euclid Strip sits Trinity Episcopal Church. Proclaiming itself as a radically progressive church, it serves as an anchor for the neighborhood: providing a food pantry during the week and serving a hot lunch to poor people in need on Sunday, welcoming LGBT people as one of the Diocese of Missouri's several Oasis congregations, and maintaining an attendance of at least 15% black congregants, although two decades ago, the percentage was much higher. Trinity is holding its own and has congregants from all over the city and metro area. Ian Darnell in two articles documents the process by which Trinity became what it is today.

In a phenomenon sometimes referred to as "white flight,"—although the actual mechanisms of this urban cultural change are far more complex—in mid-Twentieth Century large numbers of white city dwellers moved to the suburbs, and property values dropped. At the same time, an influx of primarily poor black people moved into these formerly all-white areas. Most main denomination city churches followed their patrons out of the city. A few of these churches, however, stayed and adapted to changing circumstances. David Hollinger has described how a Twentieth Century movement he calles "ecumenical protestantism" encouraged a few of the mainline denominational urban parishes to stay in the city and embrace the change. Ian Darnell had this to say about Hollinger's ecumenical protestantism

As I read Hollinger, ecumenical Protestantism is in essence a version of American Protestantism that takes an affirmative stance toward ethno-racial, cultural, religious, and sexual diversity—it envisions a Christianity that can encompass many varied ways of knowing God and being human and imagines expansive possibilities for both individual and collective salvation. This differentiates ecumenical Protestantism from evangelical Protestantism, which has a much narrower conception of what constitutes a moral and Christian life. [Darnell, email to Andris, Feb. 6, 2014.]

Darnell carefully documents the precise moment when Trinity Episcopal church followed this lead. Discouraged with the downturn in attendance and surrounding poverty, the Vestry in the early 1950s was ready to throw in the towel, but then Bishop of the Diocese of Missouri, Arthur Lichtenberger asked remaining church leaders to not only stay but also expand its neighborhood program. Led first by Rector Arthur Walmsley, and then by others, over the next twenty years, Trinity Episcopal Church carefully built outreach and service programs for the neighborhood, invited black adults and children into the parish, and even engaged in civil rights activities. For reasons described previously, the area around the church became a growing gay community, especially of men, and some of these men began showing up at Trinity's doors. Fortified by this new openness and a desire to be more inclusive where they were, congregants were encouraged to extend their hospitality to yet another unfamiliar group of people, and they did, by and large.

Gradually, Trinity Episcopal Church became an important node in the growing network of progressive establishments that accepted and encouraged the LGBT community, as Baker and Taylor have documented. Darnell says that it early functioned as a community center for the area around it. That it certainly did in the years before the first St. Louis LGBT Community Center, The Metropolitan (later Midcontinent) Life Services Center in 1975 located itself just one block south of Trinity and down the block from Left Bank Books. In 1969 a group of gay men had gone to a Halloween Celebration in drag and were arrested for violating St. Louis' anti-cross-dressing ordinance. The just recently formed St. Louis Mandrake Society leaped to their defense and helped to raise bail for the men. It wasn't until 1984 that Michelle McCausland successfully challenged that law. However, Trinity Church supported the gay community by hosting subsequent meetings of the Mandrake Society as its ranks temporarily swelled during the early 1970s. There is even evidence that some sort of same-sex blessing of relationships was performed at Trinity in the 1950s as part of a house-blessing ceremony. In 1977, a chapter of Integrity formed at Trinity Episcopal. Trinity's rector, Bill Chapman and senior warden, Adrienne Anderson Fly were present at the Walk for Charity in 1980. Soon thereafter, Trinity employed Rev. Susan Nanny as curate for five years, and many new gay and lesbian members entered the church. Public same-sex blessings began in the early 1990s under Rector Bill Chapman. When in fact ECUSA, The Episcopal Church of the United States began adopting a more and more progressive attitude towards inclusion of same-sex couples into the Church community, it was Trinity parishioner Teri Smith and then Rector Jennifer Phillips in 1997 who helped convince Bishop Rockwell to start the Oasis movement in the Diocese of Missouri. Eventually ECUSA formally approved same-sex blessing rites, and the first public ceremony using these rites at Trinity was conducted by Rev. Anne Kelsey in 2013. Kelsey also began the well-known Mass on the Grass held at Pride Celebrations in Tower Grove Park during much of the 2000s.

This is not to say that there were no other progressive churches representing the ecumenical protestantism movement in the Euclid Strip, but Trinity Episcopal Church certainly is the area's paradigm example in its outreach to the LBGT community.

On the Birth, Life and Death of Gayborhoods

The primary purpose of this article has been to offer vivid snapshots of the living faces of diversity-embracing progressive establishments in The Euclid Strip around 1980, particularly those supportive of the LGBT community of the time. However, sections of the article do deal with the conditions by which this and other such areas emerge in urban areas. Collin Murphy has dealt more directly with this question in his Vital Voice piece on St. Louis Gayborhoods. The article advances both Murphy's and Ian Darnell's suggestions about the forces and attitudes that generate, maintain and destroy these havens of diversity, and is worth careful study. Rather than repeat these suggestions, I will make a few comments of my own on the subject. We cannot understand the life of gayborhoods without keeping in mind these things: 1) the country is becoming increasingly progressive regarding gay acceptance and gay rights, 2) each group represented by the letters LGBTQ has evolved under different rules and assumptions, 3) the question cannot be pursued without considering both the history of other scorned groups and the history of progressive institutions.

Why was the incidence of gay men so high around The Euclid Strip for decades? It was due to a confluence of two social facts. The patriarchal ideal that white men are heterosexual and superior to women and people of color had been at first entirely dominant in the 50s and then increasingly and steadily challenged starting in the 60s. Gay men have always existed, however, and from the 50s, due to mass communication, have become more self-aware, and needed to find a place to stand and be themselves. I believe that in every case of a gayborhood in the Twentieth Century, these two facts completely frame the evolution of gay urban places of congregation. Women mattered less to men, and so were freer to express caring feelings with each other. Nevertheless, lesbians who adopted a more masculine gender presentation frequently found themselves in search of their own space in the same places. But these places for both gay men and lesbians would be just the places where a traditional male would not want to raise a family. So we have then the typical clustering of illegal or "questionable" entertainment, drugs, poverty, alternative poetry and music, and alternative lifestyles. That is not to say that a lot of traditional men did not occasionally or even frequently "sneak out" to these areas.

Another factor in all of this is required to see the picture more clearly, and that is economic motive. This is a capitalist society where economic power is concentrated in the hands of a relative few individuals. Real estate is one of the prime expressions of economic power. It was real estate developers who helped to create the Euclid Strip by driving buyers who wanted a more "sanitary" existence west, as indeed, with the redevelopment thrust of the late 1970s, it was real estate developers who drove buyers back into the neighborhoods that they had been driven out of two decades before, displacing some of the then current inhabitants. It is like a form of planned obscelescence writ large. One generation builds a neighbohood of houses and apartments, another generation uses them and wears them out, and then the developers come in, level the neighborhoods or redevelop them and move a third generation in. This force was going on in Gaslight Square, in the Euclid Strip and in the Grove and Tower Grove areas. The "undesirables" move into a decaying area and then the cycle continues. However, as LGBT people become more mainstreamed, expect to see the cycle have more to do with neighborhoods just cycling through poverty and wealth. It will not change unless we plan to make it otherwise.

But there is still a third factor in the growth of a gayborhood. Those establishments mentioned previously in this article—Left Bank Books, Sunshine Inn, Duffs, Herbies and Balabans, Trinity Episcopal Church, and we could add several others—those are not LGBT establishments. Those are progressive establishments, meaning, establishments which, for one reason or another, look beyond what is considered traditionally proper in society, look beyond stereotypical models of acceptability, and recognize that NO group has a corner on respectability or vision enough to define right behavior for everyone. It wasn't just LGBT people that built the Euclid Strip, it was people looking for a breath of fresh air, looking for some relief from the hypocritical posturing of mainstream society, looking for a place to have a chance to live and grow according to their own standards. And since some may think I have been unduly negative about our society in the U.S.A., let me just note that our Constitution does enshrine various forms of freedom as ideals. Without a society that values and enforces some forms of freedom, there can be little hope for progressive institutions.

One final observation will be offered. Remember the opening scene from the Boys in the Band: Emory, a flamboyant gay man, finds himself on the corner waiting for the light to change with an obese, tough-looking Southern European woman. They eye each other with ill-concealed scorn. Then the light changes, and they go their separate ways. In earlier decades, and still today in some extent, LGBT people often found themselves scorning and being scorned by other minorities. In the case of the Euclid Strip, blacks and gays often, but of course, not always, found themselves playing the parts of the unnamed "fat lady" and Emory. I've encountered it all my life. When in 2008 my partner was in the hospital in danger of loosing his life to a life-threatening (non-venereal) infection, a black man was out in the corridor yelling, "Who do these gays think they are, comparing themselves to blacks?" (The remark was unprovoked by us.) I encountered more than one gay man in the bars of the 1970s who cluelessly and viciously used the "N" word. Like it or not, discriminated groups find themselves in the same lifeboat, and many are not at all averse to throwing their fellow sailors overboard for personal favors. In my opinion, without progressive institutions which look beyond the narrow sectarian interests of individual causes to a more tolerant society, life in the ghetto would be a lot less desirable.

Conclusion

The Euclid Strip is certainly not the only area of St. Louis which nurtured and enabled evolving LGBTQ pride during the 1970s. For example, Glenda Dilley (now Cea Hearth), who conceived and, with the Magnolia Commitee, planned the successful 1980 Walk for Charity, lived in a basement apartment on the north side of Tower Grove Park on Magnolia Ave. Both lesbians and gay men lived in the area around that park contemporaneously with the 1980s Pride Celebration. The area around Tower Grove Park bears some striking similarites to the Euclid Strip, especially with regard to the existence of a network of progressive and alternative businesses and establishments. Another such area is the emerging strip on Manchester Ave. known as The Grove. It would be a rich and rewarding task to compare and contrast these cribs of courage. One of the rewards of such a comparison might be a renewed appreciation of how both intentional and unintended allies of the LGBT community have worked to help us.

References

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