Our Queer Southern Heritage
Remembering and recording tales of gay Houston in the ’60s and ’70s
by Jim Sears

"Southern history is never simple and seldom straight," writes Jim Sears in his introduction to Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South. A professor at the University of South Carolina, Sears is slowly and thoroughly documenting all that is lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered in the South. Published in August 2001 by Rutgers University Press, RRR is the second in a multi-volume series in which Sears intends to portray the whole chronologic sweep of queer Southern history, woven from the stories of people who lived it. Many of Sears’s stories are from Houston, which he dubs the "San Francisco of the South." We present here excerpts from Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones.

Houston 1967 The Tumblebugs Take on City Hall

Tape measures and pencils crowded her pockets. Tools hung over her left shoulder. Rita Wanstrom trudged upstairs. It had been one of Houston’s insufferable summer days when even the hardiest workers found themselves frequenting the five-gallon bucket of ice and lemons....

Inside the apartment [she shared with her partner, Ricci Cortez], Rita kicked off her boots and rested for a spell. Rita had been setting up and serving drinks at the Roaring Sixties for three years. It had become a "family" operation. Peaches, who was known for his flawless interpretation of "My Way," choreographed the drag queens. Leo, who could rise from alto to soprano in a single refrain, bartended. And Ricci, who flawlessly stripped, held court while Rita greeted guests beneath her oil portrait.

Known as the homosexual playground of the South, Houston was already home to a dozen gay bars and clubs when the Roaring Sixties opened on June 23, 1967. Unlike Mafia-controlled bars of many Northern cities, gay clubs in "Space City" were often owned by straight women. There was Effies’ Pink Elephant (which had been around since the ’40s), catering to older gay men; Verlon’s Surf Lounge; the Round Table on Westheimer, owned by Dorothy; Rocky’s, a hole-in-the-wall working-class club on West Dallas; and the Desert Room, whose famed Sunday afternoon tea dances were guarded by Hazel with a watchful eye for the police and an agile thumb set to flicker the lights.

With its checkered tablecloths, crimson drapes, and ruby walls, the Roaring Sixties was a place that a lot of folks called home.... In addition to lesbian regulars like Dee Dee, who’d waltz in with slacks, cuffs turned up, hair slicked back, and tanned Mexican shoes, there was a one-armed guy who’d shoot pool with Rita for $20 a ball. Rita used one of her matched pair of San Toeos; he used the end of a broomstick–and "cleared the table."

Rita awakened as Ricci gently removed her pocket tools. "It’s okay, Poppa Bear. Just go back to sleep. I’ll set up for tonight’s crowd."

In 1967 Rita, celebrating her fourth year with Ricci, opened the Roaring Sixties. "A lot of club owners back then said women couldn’t come in if they didn’t turn their pants around" or wear dresses, remembers Rita. Two months after her club’s opening, Houston’s vice squad came to visit.... Separating out the more butch-looking patrons, an Irish sergeant barked out commands. "You get over here. You get over there." Twenty-five lesbians were hauled to jail for wearing clothing of the opposite sex. "The enforcement of the ordinance, of course, was directed only at those people perceived to be gay," underscores Rita. Used for police harassment and extortion, it was also a convenient excuse for some bar owners to restrict lesbians. "Everyone got mad," remembers Rita. "But what could you do?" Rita paid all of the $25 fines and hired an all-girl band, led by "little butch" Sandra to "pump our business back up."

A month later there was another raid. As in Stonewall, something snapped. "I don’t think the other bar owners could see what was happening," swears Rita. However, she "saw the need for someone to speak out on behalf of this community." It was an unjust law that "deprived me of my right to do business."

Wanstrom sought out the help of Percy Foreman, whose legal fee matched his status as the preeminent lawyer of the Southwest. Foreman was willing to represent Rita when another raid befell her club. As Rita headed down to the Roaring Sixties that evening to rally folks, "I happened to see a little tumblebug. Now, a tumblebug will just lay there until somebody turns it over and helps it back on its feet." And so, as the summer of 1967 receded into history, the Tumblebugs were born.

Selling sweatshirts, hosting benefits, and sponsoring drag shows, the dozen or so women who made up the Tumblebugs raised Foreman’s $2,500 fee.... In challenging the city ordinance, Rita hoped to get "people to think for themselves about what was happening to us and what we needed to do to take the heat off." However, Houston had precious little of what might be called a "gay community." Aside from the mostly straight-owned gay bars and the hundred or so "A-list" gay men who hosted the Diana Awards, a parody of the Oscars [for which Rita designed some of the costumes], there were mostly homosexual closeted individuals, some of whom displayed the Southern fondness for eccentricity.

One Diana member operated the Four Seasons on Market Square. "He had a beautiful house on Choclafile Road with a swimming pool on the second floor and live peacocks running on all of these acres of land," discloses Rita. Four bungalows surrounded the house. Here Rock Hudson and other closeted celebrities would come to party and bring their tricks....

Few Houston homosexuals harbored any expectation of organized political activity. Wanstrom declares, "If we’d have had a parade down Westheimer in 1967, we would have been stoned.... We were," Rita continues, " a lost people who needed to come together."

Two nights before New Year’s Eve, a sergeant and his men of the vice squad rushed into the Sixties and found women "dressed in men’s pants, men’s shirts, and men’s shoes."

Rita reminisces: "They lined people up and started questioning. One woman who was asked her occupation said: ‘I’m a weenie peeler.’ That just broke everyone up. More cops came in and they made her repeat it. It turned out that she worked in a meat factory and when the weenies came through she would peel one to make sure it was stuffed right. So they put all of the butches in the paddy wagon."

This time, though, things were different. Amidst a bevy of "not guilty" pleas, a shocked magistrate stared down at the Tumblebugs as their celebrated attorney asserted: "This will not be a test of the law.... It will be a test of the vice squad’s concept of the law."

Meanwhile, pugnacious activist Ray Hill worked for change behind the scene.... Ray was summoned to "come through the back door of City Hall and walk up three flights of stairs to the mayor’s office." At the appointed hour, Ray remembers climbing the stairs, entering through the fire exit, and meeting with the mayor’s assistant, Larry McKaskle, in a converted maid’s closet. Ray wrenched from McKaskle a promise that City Hall would indeed "check into" the lesbian bar raids.

On the day of the trial, Rita and her "girls"–wearing dresses and makeup–appeared before Judge Raymond Judice. The cases against the 11 were dismissed due to the failure of the vice officers to appear. The sergeant, however, announced that he "definitely intended" to refile charges and to continue to enforce the ordinance. Inexplicably, however, he was transferred to the Narcotics Division. Rita affirms, "They never bothered us again!"

1973-74 Seventy-Five Lesbians

Put someone else’s name down!" read the sign-in sheet.

Scribbling "Pokey," the five-foot-three social science major, recently arrived from college in Florida, walked into Just Marion & Lynn’s. Wearing a pleated skirt, her brown hair trailing to her waist, Pokey Anderson stepped up to the bar and ordered a ginger ale. The bartender winced, as if to ask, "Do you know where you are?"

Identifying herself as a feminist and a lesbian, Pokey was neither a separatist nor "out" in early ’70s Houston.... While living in suburbia, Pokey occasionally sneaked downtown to walk along "Peculiar Street" in the Westheimer Colony. Houston was "on the cusp of change from the bar lesbian to the lesbian-feminist," Pokey explains.

The lesbianscape was a set of loosely networked communities of women.... Not-so-closeted lesbians played fast-pitch softball at Memorial Park and relished the annual International Softball tournament at summer’s end. Meanwhile, the "A-List Lesbians" enjoyed outings like Easter egg hunts on Lake Japhet and Halloween parties.... Most, like those frequenting the Roaring Sixties or Just Marion and Lynn’s, "had lived this existence in the closet for all of these years reciting the mantra ‘If you don’t rock the boat, you’ll be okay.’" But, a new lesbian wave, generally unaware of an earlier generation of activists like Rita Wanstrom and her Tumblebugs, was about to tip the boat of Houston heterodoxy....

As 1973 began, Pokey attended the first National Women’s Political Caucus convention held at the Rice Hotel. "Sissy Farenthold, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem were all there–right in front of me!" exclaims Pokey. But the caucus was "very straight, although there were people in the closet"–including Pokey–who "kept sneaking off" to a sexual orientation workshop on the top floor. There she learned about the Montrose Gaze Community Center that had officially opened three months earlier, inspired by the Dallas gay pride parade that past June.

A few days later, Pokey parked her VW bug near the corner of Fairview at Whitney.... Inside the bungalow she found a couple of dozen people, mostly men, hanging out. Funded by the bars, there was a pool table and space for rap groups and dances.

Pokey also tracked down Integrity/Houston, which evolved from a small Dignity group at Holy Rosary Church three years earlier.... "But, again, it was all gay guys," Pokey said, "mostly older, conservative, closeted men." This self-described "fellowship for homophiles" included founders Bill Buie, Mark Barron, Hugh Crell, and Keith McGee. As an unaffiliated political group, it provided gay speakers, sponsored VD screenings, and supported political candidates....

Later Pokey wrote a children’s fable, "Star and the 75." This is a story of Star’s love for Laura, who abandoned her for a man. Star, wondering if she was "the only woman in the world who thought women were important enough to love for real," went to the Center: "But there were mostly men there. So, as a joke, she would always pretend there were really 75 women there. Her friend John would say, ‘Oh you just missed them. The 75 just left.’ And Star would always say, ‘Darn, I missed them again.’"

Pokey explains, "Back then, it was a total fantasy to find 75 lesbians anywhere in Houston, except for a bar."

...In Houston, a bevy of newspapers and radio shows, an array of groups ranging from softball teams to motorcycle clubs, and a stable political infrastructure transformed Montrose from an "amorphous cohesiveness" of individuals in 1970 to the "San Francisco of the South" a decade later.

When Integrity was founded in 1970, a local printer, Floyd Goff (under the name Phil Frank), published Nuntius, using money produced from his swinger’s club newspaper and bingo parlor receipts to subsidize the paper. An alternative radio station (KPFT-FM) also started that year, and within a couple of years a live show with taped programs to "enlighten the straight community" had evolved into the show "Out of the Closets, Into the Streets" that aired every other Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Houston women switched from fast to slow-pitch softball, opening up ball fields at Memorial Park to scores of other lesbians. Women formed basketball and touch football teams. Some men formed or joined biker communities. In 1972, the Houston Motorcycle Club held club meetings at Mary’s bar. A year earlier, the Texas Riders, Houston’s oldest motorcycle club, had begun publishing a newsletter. Headquartered at the Locker on Westheimer, these men of leather held Christmas and pledge parties, conducted change-of-command ceremonies, and sponsored interclub activities with local and regional "runs."... The Gaze Center hosted meetings for Christian gays. Eventually this study group, led by Arnold Lawson, would become MCC of the Resurrection.

During the ’70s, the city bar scene grew proportionately with the gay population and its increasing openness.... Among the city’s 30-odd queer bars, the most notorious and oldest was the hustler-friendly, poorly lit Exile on Bell Street (billed as "Texas’ Oldest Western Bar") and La Caja on Tuam, boasting a back patio rife with sexual activity. One of the biggest gay dance halls between the East and West Coasts, the Bayou Landing, opened in 1973 [just off S. Shepherd, across the street from where Bookstop is today]. Both women and men would crowd onto the dance floor on a weekend night. It was there that Pokey learned to do the Cotton-Eyed Joe.

This was also an era, as David Patterson, one of the founders of the Promethean Society, remembers, when "the war on drugs was almost non-existent. It was easy to get almost any drug you wanted: tabs of acid, Quaaludes, pot, uppers." Leaders of Integrity/Houston called on bargoers to practice "enlightened self-interest," reminding them of the frequent appearances of plainclothes vice officers. They distributed silk-screened posters that reinforced the old Mattachine message–"What I do reflects on you. What you do reflects on me. What we do reflects on the entire gay community."

...In May 1973, Billy Walker, Chuck Berger, and Bob Osborne stood before Houston City Council. As leaders of the new political advocacy group formed out of the Gaze Center, the trio politely requested an end to police harassment of homosexuals, a liaison to the Police Department, and a declaration of gay pride week. Mayor Welch walked out, and the infamous homophobe council member, Frank Mann, shouted, "You’re abnormal! You need to see a psychiatrist instead of City Council."

...During the dog days of August 1973, after Lou Reed’s "Walk on the Wild Side" had dropped out of the Top 40, Texas lesbians and gay men also had a shock. The grisly discovery of the bodies of 27 young men, tortured and murdered by Dean A. Corll in his Pasadena apartment with the assistance of two teen accomplices, generated headlines across the nation....

When Mayor Welch chose not to run for re-election that fall, Integrity/Houston invited the three top candidates to speak at a private meeting. Only one accepted: Fred Hofheinz.

Integrity circulated flyers to 25 gay bars on election eve supporting Hofheinz’s candidacy during his runoff election with city councilman Dick Gottlieb. Although his opponent was supported by the mayor and construction interests, Hofheinz won with a margin of about 3,000 votes–allowing Houston gays to claim credit for his narrow victory.

Mayor Hofheinz brought in a new police chief with whom representatives of the gay community met in early February 1974. Chief C.M. Lynn gave the community "a degree of respect and confidence" toward the Houston Police Department. Further, he pledged not to raid bars if no illegal activities occurred....

Although local homosexual political groups were no longer quixotic operations across the South in 1974, they certainly lacked a critical mass of homosexual Southerners, who generally preferred reading a just-released novel, The Front Runner, or a New Yorker gay short story, quietly switching the TV channel from Marcus Welby’s "The Outrage" or Police Woman’s "Flowers of Evil," or weekend dancing to "The Hustle" or "Never Can Say Goodbye." Three years would pass before a former Miss America runner-up and an encyclopedia salesman would square off in Dade County to ignite the second Stonewall rebellion.

From Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South by James T. Sears, copyright © 2001 by James T. Sears with permission of Rutgers University Press.

Meet Jim Sears and learn more about your queer Southern heritage October 1; Sears will be at Crossroads, 1111 Westheimer, 713/942-0147, at 7 p.m., followed by an interview on Lesbian and Gay Voices, on KPFT, 90.1 FM, 8—10 p.m. Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones is available from your favorite local bookstore, Internet bookseller, or by calling Rutgers University Press at 800/446-9323. For more information on Jim Sears’s work, see www.jtsears.com/histgal3.htm.