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those days Don Johnson was pretty nearly an unknown and Michael Greer had established himself as a coming star, at least in the gay community, and ‘star” is our game. Nobody does it better.
My first exposure to Greer was on a rainy weeknight in (I believe) 1965, at the Academy, a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. I stopped on a whim and found a talent competition in progress. The crowd, a dozen or so besides myself, took to a drag trio lip-synching none too successfully to a Supremes number but I—and I alone—applauded long and loud for the tall, gangly comic on stage.
It was a year later when I saw Michael Greer again. By this time he was starring at a near-downtown bar called the Redwood Room, as lead in a group called Jack and the Giants. The Giants included a then unknown Jim Bailey, who did an eerie impression of Barbra Streisand among others (“Do you like my nose? I had it fixed. It used to be here.”)
The main events of the evening, however, were Greer’s monologues, as the Mona Lisa (“I knew Toulouse Lautrec when he was this high”) or as Tallulah Bankhead hosting a kiddies” television show (“he hid under a toadstool, and toads being such nasty creatures, you can just imagine what their stools are like.”)
I chatted with him afterward and when I reminded him of that earlier talent show he dubbed me his “original fan,” by which title he often introduced me afterward. We had another fact in common as well; we both of us admitted to serious crushes on an SAS airline steward named Anders—a crush we shared, we both understood, with vast numbers of men in several countries. Anders was, shall we say, generous of spirit.
Michael became an habitué of the West Hollywood scene and by this time I lived just off Santa Monica Boulevard, so we met often. As time went by he appeared more and more in the company of Don Johnson.
The Redwood Room show played to packed houses for the better part of two years. Greer did some appearances on Laugh In (not altogether successfully; he really needed more than the few seconds they allotted him to build up momentum). He appeared in an early gay movie, The Gay Deceivers (1969), which is available these days on video, and I think is funny despite the fact that, yes, it does play to gay stereotypes. In 1970, along with Sal Mineo and Don Johnson, he appeared on stage as Queenie in the prison drama, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, with a then infamous gay rape scene.
Sal, by the way, lived right around the corner from me, on Holloway Drive and we chatted often in a neighborly way. Interestingly enough, only a few weeks before he was murdered in the garage of his apartment building, he mentioned surprising an intruder in that very garage, apparently trying to break into a car.
“It’s made me a little nervous,” he confessed. I recommended that he keep his eyes open and exercise extra caution coming in and out at night, but I wish now that I had made my advice a bit more forceful.
At the time Sal was already a star but Michael appeared marked for real stardom as well. Then everything seemed to come to a halt. Part of the problem was no doubt an appearance he made at a fundraising party in a Valley bar, where he made some remarks that were taken as patronizing and were booed by the audience. I must admit I was startled when he announced that, despite what anyone might have heard, he himself was not gay (luckily our sas steward was not there at the time); but if the gay men present would allow him to climb to stardom on their shoulders he would do all he could to pull us up after him.
This was not, by the by, an auspicious night for celebrities. The other “star” in attendance, Barbara Nichols, got so drunk that she literally had to be carried out of the bar horizontally. Her career was short-lived.
Michael appeared at Ciro’s as lead singer to a rather dreadful rock band, and faded from sight. The last I saw him was in the movie, The Rose (1979), where he appears briefly as Baby Jane in the drag-bar scene. Michael died in 2002. Still, I expect audiences somewhere are still laughing at La Gioconda.
Gay bars in L.A. weren’t limited to West Hollywood, however. There was scarcely a neighborhood that didn’t have its bar, some of them nothing more than a hole in the wall selling beer only, some of them quite posh. Spago, overlooking Sunset Boulevard, was St. Genesius before it changed hands and names. I might have sipped my cocktails in the exact same spot as the most famous of stars. I might have even, in the very same spot…oh, never mind, I’m sure nothing racy went on at Spago.
The leather crowd tended more toward Hollywood or the Silverlake district, another gay-popular neighborhood. Lee Majors was said to frequent one of the Silverlake bars. I never saw him, but a friend, whose word I never had reason to doubt, insists they got to be very close friends on one occasion and that he was, in my friend’s words, “built like a beer can.” That strikes me as what authors call “a telling detail.” I can’t imagine my friend would have described the actor’s torso in those words if he had not seen it.
Victor Buono liked the bar at the Gallery Inn, on Santa Monica Boulevard, and was about as pleasant a drinking companion as you could ask for, smart, funny, and unpretentious. We passed many a rainy afternoon sipping the grape and discussing old movies and stars. Victor’s talent was huge, but so was his size, and that was a handicap to stardom, though he did a lot of theater work in Los Angeles, including a sparkling Falstaff at the Ahmanson.
Joanne Worley and Ruth Buzzi, both of Laugh In fame, could sometimes be spotted around town—not together, I hasten to add. Later I heard of John Travolta sightings (à deux) at the bars far out in the Valley, which is to say, off the beaten track. He was also spotted in Big Sur, at the Highland Inn, which of course is not a gay hangout, but he was said to be making goo-goo eyes at an attractive male companion. I wasn’t there, mind you, and can only repeat what I was told—by not one but two generally reliable sources.
“You can tell,” one of my friends put it, “when two guys are looking at one another that way.…”
There were lesbian bars as well, though they were fewer—the income gap which still exists between men and women was horrific in those days and the obvious (or even suspected) lesbian usually was lucky to earn enough to pay for her daily bread, let alone a night out with “the boys.” Still, most large cities had at least one. Elaine’s, in San Francisco, was legendary. In Los Angeles, the If Café on Vermont was ground zero. They did not welcome men, and these dykes could be ferocious. It was a rare Saturday night that didn’t see at least one physical brawl, sometimes punctuated with broken beer bottles.
If you were clearly gay, however, you could get away with accompanying some of the “guys.” I went occasionally with friends, and I made it a point to be as obviously gay as I could. I didn’t use either restroom, since you never knew who might be in one, and ridiculous though it might seem, I wanted no one to suspect I was there to hit on lesbians. I sipped my beer and sat, if necessary, with legs tightly crossed, until time to go home.
Almost every city of any size had at least one gay bar—usually, the owner made payoffs, to mayors, police chiefs, judges—and often to the mob, in the cities they ran. Dayton, Ohio was, I was told, one of the mob-protected cities. There were always one or two secondary bars to visit, but for many years, Dayton’s chief watering hole for the gay set was the Latin Lounge. Oddly, unlike many gay bars, which tended to be hidden away on back streets or industrial neighborhoods, the Latin Lounge was smack dab in the middle of downtown Dayton—cities all had downtowns in those days.
A long narrow bar with a tiny dance floor in the rear, the Lounge was packed on Friday and Saturday nights, a mixed crowd of guys and girls—the two mingled then and there as a matter of discretion. A mixed group going in and out of a bar was likely to attract less attention. Usually, about midnight, one of the regulars would go around the bar collecting money and in a little while, a mountain of pizzas would be delivered, to be shared by all and sundry. I can’t imagine that happening in a gay bar today.
For the most part these bars were safe so long as behavior remained discreet, though election years usually brought raids as candidates vied to show that they were “tough on crime.” We were usually the crime they were tough on. Everyone knew how dangerous we could be.
Sometimes the physical set-up of the bar was a bit strange. In Cincinnati one neighborhood bar divided itself down the middle.