I Remember Julius
BY John D'Emilio ON December 10, 2014
One of the things that I like about knowing lots of history is that it makes the present overflow with opportunities to recall and reflect on the past – both my own past and a larger social and cultural past. This past Sunday, for instance, I was scanning through the wedding announcements in the New York Times Style Section [yes, I am a critic of the campaign for marriage equality, but yes, I also love to read the love stories embedded in wedding announcements]. I noticed that one of the male couples was getting married at Julius, a gay bar in the West Village in Manhattan.
Julius! It advertises itself today as New York’s oldest gay bar. And it was the scene in 1966 of a “sip-in” by members of the New York Mattachine Society. They went in, announced that they were homosexuals, and asked to be served. They were challenging a New York State Liquor Authority policy that prohibited establishments with liquor from serving homosexuals. The bartender dutifully supported the protest by refusing to serve them, and the SLA responded by publicly announcing that, contrary to the charges of the protesters, it did not prohibit serving homosexuals. The demonstration had the effect of reducing significantly police raids of gay bars in New York and, in a sense, can be said to have helped provoke the Stonewall rebellion three years later. By 1969, enough bar patrons had come to expect that they would be left alone that, when the police raided the bar that June night, all hell broke loose as patrons and people on the street fought back. The rest, as we say, is history.
But Julius also brought up memories of my own queer history. It was the first gay bar I ever went to, as a 19-year-old in the fall of 1967. I was taken there by Jim, an “older” gay man [he was 26!] whom I had met while waiting on line for standing room tickets at the Metropolitan Opera House. That summer, I had for the first time fallen passionately in love, with a much older gay man [he was 29!], who worked as a travel agent, sang in the choir of St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, and was as passionately in love with opera as I was with him. So, as part of my determination to win his heart, I rapidly developed an interest in opera, and discovered that the waiting line at Lincoln Center for standing room tickets [the line for a week of standing room tickets started forming at about midnight on Saturday, and grew until the box office opened mid-morning on Sunday] was like an outdoor gay community center. Masses of opera queens gathered there, gossiped about their favorite divas, and meanwhile cruised everyone there. Jim befriended me and for a couple of months acted almost as an older gay brother as he introduced me to this new world that I knew very little about. We went to some operas together; we walked the streets of Greenwich Village together, which I had never before experienced; and he took me to Julius.
All this came to mind as I paged through the wedding announcements. The lesson is clear: learn history, and your lifetime of memories will be so much richer and more vibrant!
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