MICHIGAN

With its scenic countryside and decaying cities, its union-supported liberalism and church-based conservatism, and its strife and cooperation between African Americans and whites, Michigan has mirrored significant trends in U.S. history. A Midwestern state shaped and defined by the automobile, which also shaped and defined American life in the twentieth century, Michigan has likewise mirrored important trends in America's queer past. Since World War II, the experiences of LGBT Michiganders have reflected and often influenced major social and political developments among LGBT people nationwide.

Pre-Stonewall LGBT Life

As the state's largest city and the "Arsenal of Democracy" during World War II, Detroit served as an early focal point of gay life in Michigan. By the 1950s, the Ten Eleven, the Gold Dollar, the Sweetheart Bar, La Rosa's, the Palais, and other white working-class bars clustered near the downtown radius from which the city's main roadways fanned out of the city. As the African American population grew and many whites migrated to the suburbs, gay bars such as the Woodward and the Brass Rail spread out along the city's thoroughfares. The Escape Lounge, a dance club that opened in a shopping center miles from the city center in the mid-1960s, attracted a more middle-class crowd. The Interchange, with easy access to the nearby Lodge Freeway and Interstate 94, opened in 1969 and soon became home to Detroit's first leather groups, the Tribe and the Selectmen.

In the deeply segregated city, African American LGB people developed a separate queer culture. Black gay men found safe space in female impersonation revues at popular nightspots like the Club Casbah and Uncle Tom's Plantation during the drag craze of the early 1950s. From the 1940s through the 1960s, lesbian Ruth Ellis provided an important social outlet for black women and men "in the life" through private house parties at her Oakland Avenue home.

During the 1950s in Flint, at the time Michigan's second largest city, widely dispersed gay and bisexual men utilized the very automobiles they helped manufacture to reach downtown gay meeting places like the tearoom at the Greyhound bus station, the parking lot of Herrlich's Drug Store, and Melva Earhart's State Bar on Union Street. The car functioned not only as a vehicle for reaching queer locales, but also as an important gay site itself, used for cruising pedestrians and other drivers, its cushy seats a convenient place for sexual encounters. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, less populated Michigan cities proved large enough to support such long-lived lesbian and gay bars as the Flame in Ann Arbor, Papa Joe's in Grand Rapids, and Dutch's in Saginaw. The small town of Saugatuck, an old artist's colony on the coast of Lake Michigan, became a popular summer retreat for gays from Chicago.

As with Cold War attacks on homosexuality throughout the United States, Michigan politicians and police targeted still largely hidden LGB communities during the 1950s. As part of a nationwide sex crime panic, Democratic Governor G. Mennen Williams appointed the Governor's Commission on the Deviated Criminal Sex Offender, which recommended harsher laws for sex crimes—laws promptly enacted by the state legislature. Detroit police harassment of gay men culminated in the high profile "morals" arrests of African American cult leader Prophet Jones at his home in 1956 and pop singer Johnnie Ray outside the Brass Rail in 1959.

Meanwhile, administrators at the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor pressured lesbian students to withdraw from the university and cooperated with police in widely reported raids on homosexual activity in campus rest rooms. Similar crackdowns took place at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing and at Wayne State University in Detroit. Despite the harassment by university officials, Michigan college campuses proved to be crucial settings for the creation of LGB friendship networks of students and faculty alike and, consequently, for organizing for social change. Ten years before the Stonewall Riots, Wayne State students Hal Lawson, David Brewer, and Jai Moore led a short-lived Detroit chapter of the Mattachine Society from 1958 to 1960.

Gay Liberation and Lesbian Separatism

Inspired by the explosion of radical activism that followed the Stonewall Riots, gay liberation groups achieved noteworthy institutional and legal breakthroughs in Michigan in the early 1970s. LGB campus organizations emerged at smaller public universities such as Western Michigan in Kalamazoo, Central Michigan in Mount Pleasant, and Grand Valley State in Allendale, as well as the larger Wayne State, MSU, and UM.

Ann Arbor, the home of Students for Democratic Society and a sizable anti–Vietnam War movement, was a particularly fertile ground for the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). In defiance of UM President Robben Fleming, GLF held a conference on homosexuality on campus in 1970, followed over the next few years by various protests, guerilla theater, and "zaps" of unfriendly bars, all aimed at ending the silence of LGB life. In November 1971, activists helped secure the establishment at UM of the Human Sexuality Office, reportedly the first such office in the country, with GLF member Jim Toy and Radicalesbian Cyndi Gair hired as the first "gay advocates."

Collegiate rival cities Ann Arbor and East Lansing enacted pioneering nondiscrimination ordinances in 1972, the same year that Nancy Wechsler and Jerry DeGriek, Human Rights Party members of the Ann Arbor City Council, came out of the closet and became two of the earliest openly lesbian and gay elected officials in the United States. Gay hippie activists in Detroit founded the Gay Liberator in 1970 and in June 1972 held the state's first queer march down Woodward Avenue. Two years later, Detroit voters approved a new city charter that included civil rights protections for lesbians and gays.

Separate from the male-dominated gay liberation movement, influential pockets of lesbian feminists in several Michigan cities engaged in community building throughout the 1970s, founding cooperative businesses such as A Woman's Bookstore in Ann Arbor, starting publications such as Lesbian Connection in Lansing, and advancing women's music through radio programs such as "Face the Music" in Flint. In 1974, Marilyn Frye began teaching a feminist philosophy course at MSU, and in 1978, lesbians across the state mobilized financial support for the successful court battle of Margareth Miller to keep custody of her daughter Jillian. Inspired by the Boston Women's Music Festival, Lisa Vogel and friends organized the first Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MWMF) in 1976. The internationally renowned celebration of women's culture drew thousands of pilgrims to 650 acres of land in northern Michigan each summer.

Political schisms within LGB communities demonstrated that community beliefs were far from uniform. How best to challenge patriarchy was highly contested: for example, many Radicalesbians in Ann Arbor decried the prevalent use of drag by gay men as sexist, yet others did not. Some lesbians who worked in a local massage parlor mobilized local sex workers in the late 1970s to protest working conditions and to decriminalize prostitution; other lesbians found this objectionable. Two decades later, the MWMF saw its policy of admitting only biologically born women come under fire. In response to the expulsion of transsexuals, a number of transsexual women and their allies set up Camp Trans outside the gate to the festival in 1993 to protest. The following year, festival producers altered their stance, announcing that the decision of whether attendees were womyn-born womyn would be left to the individual. This, in effect, permitted entrance to transsexuals who felt they had always been female.

Into the Mainstream

The liberation impulse subsided in the mid-1970s as LGB people in Michigan increasingly entered the mainstream. The Association of Suburban People, founded in 1975, became the first notable post-liberation LGB organization in the Detroit metro area. As the number of LGB bars in Detroit doubled in the 1970s—several, like Bookie's and Menjo's, locating along Six Mile Road—white gay men created a gentrified enclave next to Palmer Park. Then, over the next two decades, gays all but abandoned the area as many gay men died of AIDS and others moved to suburbs such as Royal Oak and Ferndale, returning to the Motor City only to bar hop. Ferndale emerged as the new nucleus of Detroit-area LGB life by the late 1980s, when Affirmations Community Center, the Midwest AIDS Prevention Project, and Cruise magazine all located on the other side of Detroit's Eight Mile Road boundary.

Elsewhere in Michigan, LGB people asserted a more visible presence within smaller municipalities through Metropolitan Community Church congregations, chapters of Dignity and Integrity, and various political social organizations like the Lansing Association of Human Rights, the Celery City Men's Club, Ann Arbor Front-runners, and Friends North. Following the 1987 March on Washington, a group of Grand Rapids organizers founded a community center called the Network, soon hosting weekly discussion groups and raising funds for a building on the city's northeast side. One Grand Rapids lesbian remade her neighborhood by purchasing and renovating nearby houses, then renting them to lesbian and straight female friends. She discreetly reshaped her residential street based on a vision of sexual identity and community while purposely resisting white flight to the suburbs.

In October 1977, gay men and lesbian women from across the state came together to form the Michigan Organization for Human Rights (MOHR), which during the 1980s targeted oppression through traditional political mechanisms such as a partially successful court challenge to the state sodomy law and an unsuccessful effort to include sexual orientation in the state's civil rights laws. When MOHR disbanded in the early 1990s, the Triangle Foundation stepped in to continue the quest for equal rights. Triangle's executive director Jeffrey Montgomery played a national role in fighting hate crimes, lobbying Congress, and monitoring the 1995 Oakland County trial of Jonathan Schmitz for the murder of Scott Amedure after the two appeared together on the Jenny Jones Show.

The first known cases of AIDS appeared in Michigan in 1982. A year later Evelyn Fisher, an infectious disease specialist at Henry Ford Hospital, joined with a group of concerned gay men to form Wellness Networks, later AIDS Partnership Michigan. Volunteerism and government funding soon supported HIV and AIDS service organizations elsewhere in the state. Responding to the need for AIDS services specifically targeted to African American gay and bisexual men, the Detroit Health Department initiated the Community Health Awareness Group in 1985.

Leaving behind the invisibility afforded by private house parties, Detroit's African American LGB people during the 1980s and 1990s created numerous formal organizations, from the Men of Color Motivation Group and the A. Lorde Collective to the annual celebration Hotter Than July and Kick! magazine. In 1984, Off Broadway East opened on Harper. Renee McCoy, executive director of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, became founding pastor of Full Truth Unity Fellowship Church in 1989. Still largely segregated from their white counterparts, queer blacks nonetheless pursued similar avenues to mainstream acceptance through social, cultural, and religious institutions.

As fear of AIDS and stigmatization of LGB people gave way to increasing, often begrudging, tolerance, Michigan queers gained new political savvy. In the early 1990s, a Colorado-like anti-LGB ballot proposal launched by a Bay City fish farmer failed through a successful counterattack by the Michigan Campaign for Human Dignity and because Republican Governor John Engler opposed the measure; he feared a loss of tourist dollars. Although Lansing and Ferndale voters overturned nondiscrimination ordinances in the late 1990s, Ypsilanti's ordinance twice survived efforts to repeal it by ballot initiative in 1997 and 2002.

Perhaps the most significant mainstreaming of LGB life in Michigan occurred in the workplace, particularly within the automobile industry due to the shifting attitudes of corporate brass and within the United Auto Workers. While a few gay and bisexual men expressed their sexuality in the shop even before Stonewall—through cross-dressing, flirtation, and trysts—most gay and bisexual men remained closeted at work throughout the 1970s and 1980s. A series of events, including the coming out of retired Ford Vice President Alan Gilmour in Michigan's LGBT newspaper Between the Lines in 1996, persistent agitation by queer employees like Ron Woods, and pressure from shareholders, led the industry to include nondiscrimination clauses in union contracts in the late 1990s. In 2000, the big three automakers went a step further, extending domestic partnership benefits to its white-collar and blue-collar workforce throughout the United States.

Bibliography

Allison, April. "A Rich Heritage: The History of Lesbians and Gay Men at Michigan State University." In Moving Forward: Lesbians and Gay Men at Michigan State University. Vol. 1. East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1992.

Chauncey, George. "The Postwar Sex Crime Panic." In True Stories from the American Past. Edited by William Graebner. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Frank, Miriam. "Coming Out at the Point of Production: Queer Male Auto Workers." Paper presented at the 21st Annual North American Labor History Conference, Wayne State University, 17–19 October 2002.

Lavender Information and Library Association. Artifacts and Disclosures: Michigan's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Heritage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan School of Information, 2000 [cited 1 November 2002]. Available from www.lgbtheritage.org

Peake, Linda. "'Race' and Sexuality: Challenging the Patriarchal Structuring of Urban Social Space." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11 (1993): 415–432.

Retzloff, Tim. "Cars and Bars: Assembling Gay Men in Postwar Flint, Michigan." In Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian,Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories. Edited by Brett Beemyn. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Retzloff, Tim. "Gay Liberation: When Michigan Tore Out of the Closets and Into the Streets." Between the Lines (June 1994): 10–11.

Rubin, Gayle S., with Karen Miller. "Revisioning Ann Arbor's Radical Past: An Interview with Gayle S. Rubin." Michigan Feminist Studies 12 (1997–98): 91–108.

Thorpe, Rochella. "'A House Where Queers Go': African American Lesbian Nightlife in Detroit, 1940–1975." In Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America. Edited by Ellen Lewin. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Thorpe, Roey. "The Changing Face of Lesbian Bars in Detroit, 1938–1965." In Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories. Edited by Brett Beemyn. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Tsang, Daniel. "Ann Arbor Gay Purges." Midwest Gay Academic Journal 1, no. 1 (1977): 13–19.

Tim Retzloff

see alsobrant, beth; femmes and butches; hart, pearl; jones, prophet; legg, dorr; lesbian connection; music: women's festivals; tsang, daniel.