Unlike the Scollay Square bars that were ostensibly straight but frequented by gay people, these bars were expressly for gay people. The Punch Bowl, Jacques, the Napoleon Club, and Mario’s were all within a few blocks of each other.
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And if you were down on your luck or too drink to go home, you could spend the night at the Rialto, a 24-hour movie theater where men met for sex.Īnd then there was Park Square. Gay men and sailors could meet at one of these bars and take a room at one of the cheap, nearby hotels. There was one stripper named “Countess Bareassity.” After the shows, we’d go to the bars.”īoston was a more active port of call for sailors then and they where regular visitors to Scollay Square bars, especially the Lighthouse, Half Dollar, and Silver Dollar. It wasn’t sexy for us but it was exciting. It was dirty comedians followed by strippers. They took us to the old Howard and the Casino. We never said anything but we all knew they were gay. “There was a group of gay guys in my high school who dropped out to move into town. grew up just outside Boston in the 1950s, and recalls the burlesque houses as an introduction to Boston nightlife. Located where Government Center is today, the area attracted gays to its bars, burlesque houses and theaters.
Scollay Square still existed then, though its years were numbered. With the exception of the late 1970s, the variety of gay nightlife during the McCarthy Era in Boston, has never been equaled. But for those who went to bars, nightclubs and restaurants that attracted a gay clientele, Boston gay nightlife was rich, varied and even glamorous. Sure, it was risky and certainly underground. Given all of this, you would think 1950s gay life in Boston was a depressing combination of secrecy, loneliness, and self-loathing. The young medium of television portrayed heterosexual life as noble and natural, driving gays more underground then they were a decade before. In the 1950s, suburban neighborhoods sprouted throughout the country, teeming with new families, who had fled the cities.
(The military continued to interrogate and fire LGBT people until the practice was outlawed on September 21, 2011.) Johnson writes in his book, The Lavender Scare, that a 1958 study estimated “one in every five employed adults in America had been given some form of loyalty or security screening.” But it was lesbians and gays who were singled out and fired. The roundups soon spread to state and local governments and even to private companies. Photo: Nishan Bichajian, Courtesy MIT Libnraries, Visual Collections. In the 1950s, the Waldorf Restaurant across from Park Street Station buzzed with gay people after the bars closed. Afterwards, some committed suicide, many others took lower-paying jobs in more accepting occupations like hairdressing and food service. By the end of the 1950s, over 5,000 federal workers were fired or forced to resign for being gay. To complain to a newspaper reporter about forced interrogations and firings, meant admitting to being homosexual, something few people were prepared to do. Unlike some of the accused movie stars and writers with leftist pasts, gays were easy targets because they could not retaliate. Lesbians and gay men soon joined suspected Communists as the hunted. Within the federal government during the Cold War and extending into the 1970s, the assumption was that gays could be easily blackmailed by foreign agents who threatened to expose them as “sexual deviants” unless they provided secret information. Much less known was the mass interrogation and subsequent firings of thousands of gays and lesbians during this same period often called “The Lavender Scare.” Labeled, “The McCarthy Era,” this period is a staple of high school textbooks as an object lesson in governmental persecution. Reputations, careers, and lives were ruined.
In the end, McCarthy never produced a single one, but the fearful, repressive atmosphere his accusations created, hung over the country for years. Over the next few weeks, his list of names fluctuated between 10 and 57 Communists. The members of the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling were rapt as McCarthy dramatically claimed to possess a list of Communists working in the State Department. To his audience, the barrel-chested former Marine was a welcome contrast to the effete Washington politicians with their East Coast superiority and secretive ways. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) strode onto the stage with the down home confidence that endeared him to regular folks. The temperature reached 48 degrees in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 20, 1950. Photo: Nishan Bichajian, Courtesy MIT Libraries Visual Collections.Īrticle published in Boston Spirit Magazine September/October 2014