Like most political movements in Boston, the support for Gay Marriage began in the bars.

The bars of the city have historically supplied common meeting places and owners with pockets deep enough and minds progressive enough to lend money and support for legal and public actions. They also accommodate large groups of people.

Every vacation when I returned home to family for Christmas, I would take one day and go to the various bars I had once patronized when I lived in the Boston area. I would talk with the bartenders and compare things as they were evolving in Boston with where I lived at the time.

Each year there were fewer Gay bars in the city, and during one conversation with a bartender of one of the remaining bars I got the explanation.

First, let me point out to the young-uns that the world was not always as relatively accepting as it is now.

Entering a Gay bar meant that first you had to know where it was, and, second, get into it without someone you knew seeing you because it could mean your job, family, and reputation. There was always the possibility of a raid whose main purposes were to humiliate the patrons and give the few corrupt cops their jollies as they roughed up bar patrons, get a missed payment from the owner, and instill the fear that the people in the bar could lose everything with their names and personal information published in the newspapers.

Then there were those who got their jollies out of bashing Gay men as they headed home after a night out.

For protection Gay ghettos sprung up where Gay men and women could live among friendly people and could be themselves while there, while assuming another more public and “acceptable identity” in the greater society.

In one place you could be yourself; in the other you had to pass as Straight.

If you didn’t live in the ghetto, you had no idea what the people who did were like. And outside the ghetto, passing as straight kept Gay people hidden.

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Reality about Gay people to Straight people was what they saw on television and in the movies, or what someone in a position of authority told them.

Then after years of gentrifying some of the city’s most run down neighborhoods, the people in the Gay ghettos of Boston, like the Fenway, the South End, and the Back Bay, found they were pricing themselves out of their homes. Rents and taxes went up to where living in the very neighborhoods they had saved became unaffordable.

There was an exodus to the suburbs, and with that came the death of the mystique.

Anything could be imagined about how Gay people lived their lives, spent their time, and entertained themselves when they were secluded into ghettos and not obvious in mainstream society, but reality could not be hidden when it could be seen.

What had been thought of as a life of fancy parties, perfectly coiffed hair, impeccable clothing, gourmet dinners, tiaras, sequined gowns, and dancing til dawn, was seen in the clear light of day as yard work, sometimes leaving the house unkempt, dirty and torn work clothes while working on either the house, the yard, or the car, lots of eating at home, lights out surprisingly early most nights, going to a real job with regular hours every day, and the noticeably occasional night out.

When facing it, reality showed the Straight people in the suburbs that there was really no difference between Gay and Straight when it came to day to day living.

Without the mystique, Gay people were no longer aliens to be wondered about, but regular people to be identified with.

And so, change came.

When I asked the bartender who or what single thing or person he consider to have been the most influential when it came to GLBT progress in Massachusetts, he answered in one word,

“Lawnmowers”.