Gay in Buffalo
By Anthony Chase
All photographs in this article © Jim Bush.
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Dancing at Club Marcella.
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San Francisco, New York, and Miami are cities known for their gay life. Buffalo is not.
Our city, the Queen City of the Great Lakes, inspires images of a glorious industrial past, stalwart ethnic communities, and grand old buildings, but not the fast-paced scene and pulsating night life associated with gay Meccas like the Castro district, Chelsea, and South Beach. We are not on the gay party circuit, and people do not move to Buffalo “to be gay” except maybe from Arcade and Olean.
What Buffalo is, however, evolved from what Buffalo was, and that extends to gay life here as well. The roaring giant of Buffalo’s past translates today into grand infrastructure: avenues too wide for the traffic, and cultural monuments and institutions greater than the population. In terms of the gay landscape, Buffalo similarly boasts an abundance of riches, easily taken for granted.
At 66 years old, Danny Winter has a broader perspective than most. As we sit and talk at Spot Coffee on Elmwood, he recalls the old days of gay Buffalo, and compares them to Buffalo in 2000.
“I remember that people used to cruise by Lafayette Square and Washington Street. That was considered the gay area. And there are people who will tell you that Allentown is now the gay area. It isn’t. For me, this is the gay area, the Elmwood Strip. I find plenty of gayness here,” he says with a laugh.
Actually, Buffalo has no true “gay area.” There are shifting enclaves of bars, and neighborhoods that are more “gay friendly,” but no real Church Street—the famed “gay ghetto” of Toronto where almost all the residents, all the stores, all the bars, and all the people are gay, and same-sex couples walk hand in hand in the street. But Winter explains what he means. It’s an issue of tolerance.
“You could walk into Spot Coffee in full drag in the middle of the day, and nobody would bother you. They’d look, but they wouldn’t bother you! And a lot of gay people do live in the neighborhood.”
The gay landscape of the city shifts regularly. A 1993 Buffalo News article about Buffalo’s gay culture specifically cited the Elmwood Strip as an example of what is not gay.
“‘This is a very non-gay city,” a friend was saying the other day,’” wrote reporter David Montgomery. “‘You feel it when you walk down the street.’...The image of [my friend] stepping around the rutting college alcoholics on the Elmwood strip some Friday night came instantly to mind.” (Buffalo News, April 16, 1993).
The rutting college heterosexuals—who in gay circles are synonymous with what is NOT hip—have migrated to formerly seedy Chippewa Street. Elmwood has evolved into a chic urbane bohemia, anchored by a stable neighborhood, Buffalo State College, and the museum district. As for the presence of gay residents, Tim Tielman, executive director of the Preservation Society maintains that all people without children—empty nesters and homosexuals alike—are the lifeblood of a healthy urban community. Look to Buffalo’s most attractive neighborhoods: the Elmwood Area, Linwood, Ashland, Richmond, Norwood, North, Lexington. You will find gay people.
The “gayness” of any city is a geography—a mix of landscape, politics, population, and culture. And anybody looking for “the scene,” begins with the bars.
Winter remembers hopping a bus from his family’s home at Fillmore and Utica, and heading downtown to Ryan’s Hotel Niagara in 1953.
“I don’t know how we heard about it,” says Winter, “but it was a place where gay people would go. The building no longer exists, but it was in a square at the foot of Main Street. It was a long narrow place with the bar along one side, and no attempt at decoration at all.”
Buffalo in the 1950s was known for its gay bars. In those days, people would come to Buffalo from Toronto to be part of the scene.
Madeline Davis, a longtime leader in Buffalo’s gay community is most celebrated for being co-author with Elizabeth Kennedy of Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, their seminal study of a working class lesbian Buffalo from the mid 1930s to the early 1960s. The book won a number of major national awards, and is universally recognized as the definitive text on a working class lesbian community—the standard by which all future scholarship on the topic will be judged.
Davis notes that “in the ‘50s the Buffalo police allowed gay bars to function quite calmly. That was because in those days the police were so corrupt, from the top right down to the cop on the beat, and they could be paid off. People could get hassled outside of a bar if the neighbors complained, but that was about it. It wasn’t until Nelson Rockefeller got into office and began to clean up the corruption that the police began to hassle gay bars. It was during that time that people started talking about building our own community places and working toward political goals.”
Danny Winter’s life experience certainly bears this out. “We are not San Francisco or Toronto. We are hometown USA, and we are very working class. You could move to Toronto. You could be gay in Toronto and straight in Buffalo. But if you stayed, you had to deal. AIDS changed some of that. There are people who left to be gay and came home to die.”
Winter is one of those who stayed and dealt.
“In Buffalo, we were working class faggots, not as sophisticated as in the Castro. I had two gay brothers. We were five boys and one girl. Our parents ran a deli. One of my brothers and I would head downtown for the gay scene. We didn’t do drag, but we’d do gender bender stuff. We’d dye our hair and wear make-up. We’d wear angora sweaters. It was teen rebellion. I was 19.”
Winter recalls that they paid a price for such rebellion. “We were hassled constantly. Getting beaten up was routine. Guys would drive by to see the ‘queers.’ There was a chain restaurant across the street called Deco’s where these guys would sit at the window seats and hassle the ‘queers’ going into Ryan’s.”
The attitude of the mainstream society toward homosexuality forced other hardships and sadness upon Winter. Both of his gay brothers, for instance, committed suicide.
“I think it had a lot to do with their oppression,” says Winter. “The stories of their deaths were very much alike. They were stories of loneliness, not belonging. In both cases, the situation was complicated by alcohol. I’m an alcoholic too. I haven’t had a drink since 1982. But I think the difference between my brothers and me is that they both were beautiful, and I wasn’t. Physical beauty is more important in our society than we like to admit. I think being physically attractive made them more fragile. I was tougher.”
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Danny Winter.
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In Mart Crowly’s landmark play, The Boys in the Band, the most effeminate character asserts that every sissy has to have great courage. Danny Winter provides a convincing example.
When asked if being gay limited his career advancement, Winter at first shrugs and dismisses the notion. “Oh that is so hard to say. It is so speculative.”
Then a powerful memory returns.
“I worked for Niagara Mohawk in customer relations for 45 years. It was a good job. I was ‘obvious,’ and I suffered at work because of it. I couldn’t hide it. Yeah it hurt my career. I nearly lost my job because of it. My best friend at work was arrested at the bus station. That was a place where gay men would go to cruise. In those days, if vice arrested you, they came to your job and told your boss. My friend’s life was ruined. He never recovered from that. They wanted to fire me too. My immediate supervisor intervened and saved my job. It was 1954 and I was 20 years old. It was the mentality of the McCarthy era. If you associated with a communist, you were one too. They were going to purge society of everything they thought was evil.”
Despite episodes of oppression from outside the gay community, Winter’s memories of gay Buffalo itself are very positive. He recalls deriving great happiness from the burgeoning awareness of gay rights in Buffalo.
“My political awareness was formed from the idea that there is safety in numbers. In the 1950s and ‘60s, we were just interested in not being hassled, and in being able to dance with another man. You could be arrested for dancing with another man. You were being a public nuisance.
“Then in the ‘60s there was a paper called 5th freedom, published at the gay center at Main and Utica. There is a McDonald’s there now. It was upstairs over a working tire store. Buffalo was one of the first cities to have one. It was open seven days a week and run by volunteers. We had weekend dances. I have vivid and wonderful memories of the place. It was a wonderful celebration of being gay—something we could not do on the street.
“The first locally produced gay musical was done there. It was called The Faggot, and I remember it as the most beautifully produced Broadway show. It was a first time a gay company in Buffalo did a gay play—I bet Javier Bustillos and BUA [Buffalo United Artists] would like to know about that,” he adds, referring to the Buffalo theater company most associated with gay oriented plays today.
Like Winter, Madeline Davis recalls the gay community center above the tire store, and the beginnings of gay liberation in Buffalo. She remarks that what Buffalo’s gay scene may have lacked in sophistication, it made up for in political acumen. The legacy of that is, she says, “a community of some of the most politically astute gay people I have ever met.”
Davis lives with her partner, Wendy Smiley, in the house her parents bought in 1957. Smiley serves as president of the hugely influential Bell Atlantic gay and lesbian organization. The two were married at Temple Beth Zion in one of the very first gay marriages performed in a Jewish house of worship in Buffalo.
As we sit talking in the living room, in the company of her Keeshond dogs and assorted cats, Davis recalls that one of the elements that distinguished Buffalo from other gay communities was the easy mixing of men and women.
“More men were ‘out’” she says, “but women were powerful and active in the community. Actually, I know of few gay and lesbian communities where there is so little class stratification. Even though we went through the inevitable gender wars, lesbians and gay men in Buffalo socialize together and will go out together. We do have a lesbian book club, and some private clubs, but public places are more than tolerant, they are welcoming. That internal sense of a need for mutual support is, perhaps, working class.”
Davis observes that nearly everything about Buffalo’s gay identity and the momentum for its gay rights movement had working class origins.
“The gay rich in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s would not generally be out in the bars. There was too much risk involved. They would be in the arts societies, the Girl Scouts, the university world, on the faculty of women’s colleges. They would have private parties. They would go to New York City. No one made a fuss about pairs of women. They inherited businesses. They were not forerunners of gay liberation. They are fascinating people. They learned to network. But they did not set the stage for rebellion, or take a public stand against the establishment.”
In his play The Dining Room, which is set in Buffalo, playwright A.R. Gurney offers a picture of upper class Buffalo’s attitude toward homosexuality that substantiates Davis’ observation. In one comic scene, pandemonium breaks out in the home of a wealthy Buffalo family when the father gets word that his brother has been called a “fruit” by another man in the steam room of the Saturn Club. After the father heads out to defend his brother’s honor by challenging the insolent club member, a man half his age and twice his size, to a fight, one of the children asks, “Is it true about Uncle Harry?” and mother responds, “Well, it may be, sweetheart. But you don’t say it to him. And you don’t say it at the club. And you don’t say it within a ten mile radius of your father.”
The older people in the Buffalo gay community provide a wealth of insight into the gay community we have today, and a greater appreciation for it.
Winter recalls memories of Halloween, the one night when full drag was acceptable, even in the 1950s. The importance of Halloween to gay people continues to this day. In cities across the globe, from Toronto to Bangkok, Halloween is gay Christmas. The Halloween parade in Greenwich Village attracts more people than the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and Buffalo’s gay bars are brimming to capacity on Halloween night.
Indeed, Danny Winter, like any gay Buffalonian his age, has seen a huge evolution in the gay life of the city. He likes the changes he’s seen. “The Internet has connected us to a gay world beyond Buffalo in a very immediate way,” he notes. “I wish I was young when it comes to the Internet.”
Asked if he feels he has made a contribution to the relative comfort gay people enjoy in Buffalo today, Winter replies with an emphatic, “Yes! I feel pride in that my life has been useful and beautiful.”
Like most of American society, many gay communities in this country harbor disdain for the elderly. South Beach, for example, is a major youth culture. Buffalo’s gay world, by contrast, tends to celebrate its elders. A young gay man showing disrespect for an elderly man in a Buffalo gay bar is likely to be rebuked by a half dozen people.
“Hey, your life is easy because of him!”
This May, for instance, the Underground, a gay bar on Delaware Avenue hosted an appearance by Tangarra, a drag performer active in Buffalo from the 1930s to the 1960s. Tangarra is now 87 years old. Backed up by a chorus of young drag performers, Tangarra performed a number from his days in vaudeville and burlesque. Then to raise money for the PACT clinic at Children’s Hospital, the bar auctioned a vintage burlesque poster featuring Tangarra’s picture. The poster fetched over 700 dollars.
Friends attest that Tangarra’s longevity is not due to good living, but to the supportive nature of the Buffalo community. Even at 87, he/she was raring to go all night.
“Oh it was a wonderful night,” he enthused by telephone. “And they raised so much money with that poster, I could hardly believe it! I got a lovely letter from Children’s Hospital. We went to Club Secrets for a while after the show.”
In her female persona, the great Tangarra had told of a fabulous life of travel and intrigue, starting with birth in Bordeaux, France and a transatlantic voyage at the age of six. A few days later as a man, he spoke of a working class Buffalo family, including policemen, firemen, and the occasional professional—“My mother was from England and she was a teacher. My grandmother’s brother was a judge in this town.” Tangarra herself lived in Buffalo’s fruit belt for a long time.
“I was born in Buffalo, but I have performed all over the country.” He then recalled a litany of theaters and bars, local and from New York to California, with names like the Bijoux Theatre, the Moroccan Village, and Finnocchio’s.
“I’ve performed from coast to coast, and would even have performed in Panama, but they quarantined the boat! Years ago I was even Little Egypt at the first Hamburg Fair! I was quite a good dancer when I was younger.”
Tangarra is a legend and a living reminder of much of Buffalo’s gay history. The respect and prestige she enjoys in the community is both deserved and unsurprising.
The notable lack of stratification Madeline Davis observes in Buffalo’s gay community continues to fuel its evolution.
Joey Marcella, owner of Club Marcella thinks the city should tap into the capacity of the gay community to break down barriers between groups.
“I’ve seen a lot of change in Buffalo over the past five years,” says Marcella as we talk in the basement of his club, the thump of the dance floor vibrating above us. “When I came here there were people who tried to convince me that I had to be discreet and fearful. That’s not what I’m about. We are so open here that people try to tell me we’re not a gay bar! Anybody who comes in here, gay or straight, knows we’re a gay bar. Look at our web site. Look at our shows and parties. We’re a gay bar that’s open to everybody.
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Madeleine Davis.
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“25” comes the answer.
“What’s the difference between working in a straight club and a gay club?” asks Marcella.
“No difference.”
“Would you have worked in a gay club when you were a teenager?”
“No way!” laughs Dave.
“You see,” says Marcella. “Things are changing. Anywhere I go, if people know Buffalo at all, they know Marcella’s. I get into trouble by saying what nobody wants to hear, and that is that Buffalo’s major problem is racial. The city should do everything it can to attract gay people into the city—people who enjoy city living and who don’t have kids. People who will invest in their homes, and spend money in the city. Give them a huge tax break to start. But if you go to any attractive neighborhood in the city, you’ll find gay people there. In Rochester, that’s how they saved Corn Hill from becoming a slum.”
In another example of barriers crashing, recently a bartender from one local gay bar, took over another gay bar and transformed it into a straight bar, which he runs with his lover and his parents. Now it’s a typical Buffalo Mom and Pop bar in downtown Buffalo, but a lot of the customers are gay.
Donna, the owner’s mother describes the journey she has traveled.
“At first it was hard. Very hard,” she says, referring to her realization that her son, the former high school quarterback, was gay. “But that was over surprisingly quickly. Once I got to know his friends, all those myths I had in my head about gay people just melted away. We commute into Buffalo to the bar every day, and when we pass that sign that says, ‘City of Good Neighbors,’ I think to myself, that refers to the gay people of Buffalo. They are the good neighbors.”
Anthony Chase is the Theater Editor for Artvoice. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, and his comments on theater can be heard every Friday morning on WBFO.
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