At Kimser's
A Gay Life
In the 1940s
Ricardo J. Brown
(Minnesota)
Only they didn't call them "gay" bars in that era --- and the night life was far different that what we have today. Kimser's was a drab hole- The owners --- Mr. & Mrs. Kimser --- pretended that their clientele was "normal." No affection could be shown. Strangers were treated with suspicion. Everyone followed the unwritten rules, because the crowd was in retreat from the outside world. In those days, if one was accused of being a "deviant" --- for example, by anonymous letter sent to one's employer --- it meant loss of job. For those arrested in flagrante delicto, it meant prison time and a permanent, damaging police record. One of Brown's friends, Red, was caught having sex with a married man in the front seat of his car. The stranger was merely fined; Red not only lost his job, but lost hope, life, joy. He had a new look, and it wasn't a mask; this was the real Red Larson, unmasked, his pudgy, colorless face a dead man's face, embalmed, expressionless, frozen in the past.... Someone should have had the decency to close the dead man's eyes. In later life, Brown worked as a journalist in Alabama and Alaska. He is a powerful writer. His description of life in Kimser's and on the streets of St. Paul not only rings true, it brings back strong memories for so many of us who had to live through those times. There was then a drab triviality in that gay world: no pride parades, no flamboyance (except, in Minnesota, for the weekend of the Winter Carnival --- but by today's standards, it was very tame). Gays had to live under the gun --- and, because of that, they turned mean and petty, turned against their own, became members of a dark world turned inwards on itself. When other gays tried to penetrate the crowd at Kimser's, they were often shunned. One visitor, the only African-American to come into the bar, was seen to be "aloof, almost snotty." The gossip was that he was a dining-car waiter on the Great Northern Railway. But because he was black, eg, another minority, he was scorned by those who should have been his brothers. As Brown says, "He seemed unattractive to most of us..." The most hair-raising part of The Evening Crowd tells of Brown's last month in the Navy, when he was waiting for his discharge. All the "undesirables" --- the bed-wetters, the crazies, the "queers," --- shared a single bunking area. They never talked; one gay tried to kill himself. Everyone detested the man called the "Night Crier:" I hated that guy. He cried every night, into his pillow, muffled, harsh little moans and sobs. Every night he cried himself to sleep. Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night and he was still crying. It was a sound as grating and as frightening as rats gnawing their way into our tomb. With passages like this we know that Brown is a character of his time, having to be macho, showing a loathing for minorities, for weaklings --- like the crier --- and for the very femme gays in the bar, and for himself. There was very little joy in that world, and the crowd at Kimser's and every other similar bar in America gave ironic twist to the word --- not much used then --- "gay." As perceptive as Brown is, as artfully as he captures those times --- one is left with a feeling of self-hate that clouded his vision, poisoned his life and his loves. It's a revealing, poignant journey into a fascinating past, but it is, too, a trip into the desperation that was American gay life sixty years ago.
And Appeasement
Robert J. Caputi
(Susquehanna)
The story of those days is one of high drama and high controversy; a time when some thought it impossible to deal with the Nazis. (Even the prime minister referred to them in his private correspondence as "madmen.") On the other hand, some thought him brilliant:
to undertake the rigours of a difficult journey in order...to put the whole issue on a frank man to man basis, had about it the quality of genius.
Chamberlain often bruited about the word that was to haunt him, "appeasement." It's a terrible word --- more so after he arrogated it to his activities --- but many of his critics forget that a scant twenty years before, according to historian Gerard de Groot, 9,000,000 soldiers and 12,000,000 civilians lost their lives in a ghastly war that never seemed to end. For the English people of 1938, Churchill intoning that one could not and should not treat with the Germans must have sounded like the utterings of a lunatic.
Chamberlain was, according to Caputi, a man with a "strong abhorrence of war, a sentiment common enough to Englishmen who had experienced the Great War and its senseless slaughter." But so blinded was he in his pursuit that he was to write, upon meeting Hitler,
I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.
Chamberlain was turned out of office in 1940, and died a few months later.
A fascinating time deserves a fascinating book. Perhaps one of Caputi's problems has to do with the fact that Chamberlain was a tedious bore. He was a man, according to the author, whose nature was forged not by war or politics, but, rather by losing a fortune in sisal, in Bermuda. Most authors, historians included, will agree that trying to bring a dead man to life --- even a famous and controversial prime minister --- is nigh about impossible.
Still, Caputi's writing should not have to take on the personality of his main character. Unfortunately, page after page of "on the one hand this, on the other hand that" drove this reviewer to an act of personal appeasement: she made a bargain with herself that if the words and the story didn't brighten up by page sixty, she'd dump the whole kaboodle.
Alas, it came to pass.
