Oklahoma City has an extremely twisted history when it comes to accepting or rejecting those things outside the norm. At least that is what I saw and what I gleaned from life-long Oklahomans when they filled an out of stater in on what life was like before I got there so that I would know how things might be while I was there. There is a lot of oral history as no official histories are written about things not in the wheelhouse of the majority, and the veracity of the story sometimes depend on who told the story, how many details were consistent no matter how many times you hear a story from multiple sources, what jives with experiences, along with unsolicited information that just slips out in casual conversation.
So, although I know some details may be loose, it’s the kernel of the story I am conveying.
There was plenty of racism and Jim Crow, but, when it came to interactions between and among consenting adults, Oklahoma City’s attitude was somewhat fluid up to the moment when politics changed that.
The city may have decided where Black people could live in the city, what schools, churches, stores, public swimming pools, amusement parks etc. they best stay out of, and may have forced Chinese residents to live under the downtown area in a subterranean community, but it had allowed the creation of the Bonco Alley, a red light district that moved like an amoeba around the downtown area over the years, where all manner of adult entertainment was available. What happened there stayed there, and like the Combat Zone in most major cities, drinking and sexual activity of any kind was easier to control by having it freely available in one area apart from the less sordid parts of the city. The city, which began as a collection of pop-up saloons during the Land Runs had a relatively open attitude toward those things that would become targets for elimination when it became clear that if you wanted to win political office it was an easy tactic to create an enemy and be the only protector against it.
In OKC this meant the adult entertainment places, rather than be corralled in one controlled space, spread throughout the city bringing the unseen and unsavory into areas where they were the unwanted interlopers when breaking up the Sodom and Gommorah became a political tool aided by the Baptist Church which never liked that area from the beginning.
In Curious Case of Benjamin Button style, the city went from being tacitly accepting of differences (except racial ones) with a wink and a nod, to slowly reversing that, so it became a slide that continued for years as politicians saw the effectiveness of the tactic.
The laissez faire attitude of the city took on tones of convenient persecution when election season began, and to attract the votes of the majority, of course those threats to the “normal” were the “pervs”, and being in the shadows for protection made Gay all the more scary, especially when preferred politicians got help in their candidacy from the pulpit where the Baptists pastors aided them by misusing the Bible in Jesus’s name.
The Gay Community was left largely alone unless someone got uppity, like Mr. Arnold Lee who ran a Gay nightclub and arranged for his Drag Performers to reserve some of their weekend tips to bail him out after the bar was raided as it frequently was. Mr. Tony Sinclair was featured in an ad printed in the local conservative newspaper, lounging on a fainting couch inviting people to see the shows at Lee’s Place.
Eventually, a Gay District grew in the city and many of the bars, quietly spread throughout the city, relocated to, or newly opened in a more friendly environment, but which had the negative affect of having all the Gays bars conveniently near each other to facilitate bar raids, during one of which a friend was arrested for lewd behavior in public for kissing another man inside the privately owned bar.
Over 30 years ago, as in the rest of the country, the Gay Community in OKC wanted the inequality and mistreatment to end, and people began to rise up to get the rights they should have had from birth.
Part of the move was to hold a Gay Pride Parade and Festival in the very Buckle of the Bible Belt, presently the Reddest State in the Union.
Along with getting permits and facing the expected difficulties, objections from the “good Christian people”, and threats from the KKK, the organizers were also unsure if anyone would march or if anyone would even be there to watch whatever type of parade it turned out to be.
On the day of the parade, there was indeed a crowd, so large that the pick-up truck of Klansmen left quietly having not carried out the threats they had made toward those involved prior to the parade.
However, because of the fear of lack of on-lookers, and assuming that most likely the people in the parade would be the only ones who could see it, ingeniously, the organizers got permits so that the parade could walk on one side of the boulevard’s median in one direction, pass the street that led to the Gayborhood without turning on to it, and make a U-turn further So, here are some methods to heal your condition in quite natural way- Waking up early and buy cialis india going for the walk. Each sip, cipla viagra a pleasure trip. It’s a neurotransmitter that is thought to be cialis samples standard strength for treating chronic form of erection disorder. What are actually The Disadvantages of Working with These products? For many women, using these improvement pills offers a possible option to surgery, and a lot of them have been proven to have other health benefits like maintaining cholesterol level, reducing body weight, preventing gastric ulcers and improving the flexibility of body muscles. discount viagra up and march back toward the intended street so that if no one else was there, at least the people in the parade could see the parade before the parade became one long line into the Strip at 39 and Penn.
Thus, this unique feature of the OKC Pride Parade that remained for many years was born.
Nowhere else in the world does a parade make a U-turn so people in the parade can see the parade and cheer each other on, especially in the early days when marchers had no idea what they might encounter along the parade route.
Times have changed, and the knowledge of history has gone with it.
In recent years, Festival and Parade organizers have found the U-turn to unnecessarily lengthen the time from step off to arrival at the end of the parade and did away with it so that when they first arrive at the correct street, marchers make the left turn and no longer see the other people in the parade to cheer them on or see the whole parade themselves.
I was told by one of the people responsible for this erasure that since there were no spectators in the area where the parade passed itself, there was no reason to include it.
However, there were spectators. The marchers were the spectators.
Apparently, no research had been done beyond an empty observation.
Something with a history, something that made the OKC Pride Parade unique in all the world, has been ended for convenience. The history of the first Parade with its actually being organized, its preparation to face the Klan, the possibility of arrest if someone found anything, no matter how innocuous, violated community standards, and the tribute to the history of the OKC Gay Community has been blindly removed.
There are two things about the old OKC Pride Parade that took your breath away as you marched.
The first was being able to actually see the parade while marching in it and cheering the other marchers and being cheered by them.
The other is the point on 39th Street entering the Gayborhood when, after marching pass the smattering of people along the way, upon cresting the final hill, there from that point until beyond the end of the parade are thousands of people crowded along the street. The experience is overwhelming for those in the parade for the first time, and still emotional for others no matter how many parades they have marched in.
So, for those to whom the history is lost, removed by those who do not see the significance both in its uniqueness and its true meaning, the connection to the people who gave those who removed the U-turn the rights they take for granted but for which the originators fought, and in some cases died before they could have what they fought for is broken.
Unfortunately, for future generations of the Gay Community coming along, the history and the people responsible for the U-turn is lost, and the Community culture and history become less.
The Gay Community erased a part of itself.
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