Hidden History
A new book tells the tale of gay Nevada Tom Ogg was a leading Nevadan in 1979. He headed curriculum development for the Washoe County School District. In that position, he had expanded foreign language instruction into summer sessions, upgraded academically talented courses, set up alcohol and drug education, and coordinated Joint Arts in Education programs with the Sierra Arts Foundation. He also chaired the Nevada Council on the Arts, which oversaw a million-dollar grants budget. He had been president of the Washoe Community Concerts Association. He had grown up in Reno, participated in student oratorical contests, was an SAE at the University of Nevada. Then, in 1979, he made a pass at an undercover cop in a park, and his life was annihilated. He was prosecuted, forced out of his schools job and all his volunteer posts. He may have left the state. We have been unable to learn what happened to him. Just like that, the good works a fine man could give were lost to Nevada. It has been ever thus until recently in the Silver State. Fred Alward was almost the perfect Nevada success story for the Depression years. An Australian who immigrated to the United States, became an attorney, traveled to Nevada to work on the Boulder Dam project when times were hard—he put down roots. In 1930, he was elected to the Nevada Assembly, named as speaker in his second term. In 1934, he was elected lieutenant governor, reportedly the first Clark County resident elected to statewide office. His intelligence, soft Australian accent, and friendly demeanor made him an appealing candidate, and he seemed destined to become governor. Then he left politics, blackmailed out. For good measure, he was prosecuted by his enemies for refusing to abide by the State Bar of Nevada’s shady price-fixing scheme for the divorce trade. He drifted away, settling in a small South Dakota town. A few years later, an instructor at the University of Nevada in Reno was critical of some campus policies. He was threatened by a high administration official with outing. It wasn’t the only reason he left Nevada, but it was a factor. Nevada has steadily lost talent and skills this way. But in recent years, the gay community has stood its ground and claimed its place in the state. How Nevada got from there to here is told in a new book that was
by Dennis Myers
released this month, Out of the Neon Closet by Dennis McBride.
Lost history The history of gay Nevadans is not easy to find. Most of it is not in the usual places— diaries, say—but in criminal proceedings. Those who wrote it did not wish its subjects well. What little they recorded, and what little survived, historians must read with an awareness of the hostility that colors it, the same difficulty they face when researching black or tribal history. McBride plowed through those obstacles and found some revealing things, including early indications of how ignorance can drive policy. Anti-gay laws were present from the start. An “infamous crime against nature” statute was enacted by the first legislature of the Territory of Nevada in 1861. Who some people are was basically made illegal. One early case showed how it could be misused— in a shooting dispute between consensual lovers, one was charged with sodomy because the other accused him of rape. Years in prison for the innocent man would pass before the accuser admitted there had been consent, and his victim was released. Though there were occasional signs of enlightenment, more common were comments like this, written by an Elko prosecutor in 1915: “The physical appearance of this defendant Gorsuch is evidence of depravity and of perversion.” Or this, from a Clark County district attorney: “When examining Hommel in the office concerning his past life, he informed me that he served several years in the Navy. This might account for his present biological tendencies.” Oddly, the state tolerated some gays in some circumstances. Couples like Elizabeth Babcock and Hannah Clapp in the 1800s, and Charles Clegg and Lucius Beebe in the 1900s, were well known as gay but served their communities and were even honored for their services. Babcock and Clapp ran a school, and Clapp taught at Nevada State University, training teachers in a state that needed them. Clegg and Beebe drew moneyed easterners like themselves to the tiny and mostly forgotten mining camp of Virginia City in the 1940s, eventually reviving the Territorial Enterprise and mailing it worldwide, further publicizing the town. Even the trappings of gay life could be tolerated, such as a Las Vegas drag club
during World War II. “When the Kit Kat opened is lost in time, but drag revues were being advertised there as early as 1943,” McBride writes. “That the Kit Kat was gay was made absolutely clear in double-entendre advertisements for its 1944 revue, the Kit Kat Follies, where the club was noted as ‘Nevada’s Gayest Night Club’ and ‘Nevada’s Gayest Nite Spot’.” But at any given time, tolerance could give way to danger and tragedy. The gay bashing murder of William Metz in 1994 by a Reno skinhead who mutilated the body shook the community (“When hate comes to town,” RN&R, Aug. 20, 2015). As late as 1996, a Las Vegas school principal killed himself by hanging after the Las Vegas Review-Journal outed him. Again, much history is not recorded, but there is no reason to assume Nevada was different from other states. Through much of the 20th century, gays were entrapped and brutalized by police, brutalized by young thugs, rejected or discharged from the military (and brutalized if discovered before discharge), adjudged to suffer from a “disorder” by professional mental health societies, denied the right to marry or adopt, and portrayed as threats to society. A U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1950 described gays as a threat to national security.
Gay power In law, gays weren’t even supposed to exist. When they formed organizations, those groups were raided and broken up by police. When outed, gays were seen only as gay. If an engineer was arrested in a police raid of a bar, he would thereafter be thought of gay—not, say, as a moviegoer, a Baptist, a Kiwanian, or an engineer. How many straights are defined by society solely by their sex lives? Demonizing and fearing someone is a lot easier if that person is just one thing. “Until recently, many straight people could not separate gay from sex, so that the notion of a gay identity, a gay sensibility, or a gay community was impossible for them to understand outside a sexual context,” McBride wrote. The way some people could not look beyond that factor sometimes
reached the absurd, as when a state attorney general denied a driver license to a gay man. Before the term gay evolved, nearly every label applied to homosexuals—including homosexual—became an expletive. Some readers may find McBride’s own free use of the term queer jarring, rather like a black person using the term nigger. It would be nice to be able to report that when change came, it was a result of good people coming to an understanding of the issues, a spreading enlightenment, and human progress. In fact, the biggest changes came because gays acted for themselves and sustained the fight for many years. McBride, a resident of Las Vegas, knows that part of the state best and carefully tracks the way gays built a presence in Clark County, through bookstores, bars, baths and other commercial activities. Washoe County’s gay community, with its reputation for being more heavily closeted, was less visible and thus made the author’s research more difficult, though some readers will find things they did not know about Northern Nevada. Some Nevadans think of the state as libertarian because of its history of making activities that were illegal elsewhere legal in Nevada—prizefighting, gambling, quick divorce, prostitution. But the state has never been particularly libertarian. It usually made exotic activities legal because the state is resource poor and needed businesses. Prizefighting was made legal during the long economic depression in the state after the Comstock boom declined. Gambling and shorter divorce residencies were made legal during the Depression. As most libertarians would argue, there is a difference between acting from economic desperation and acting from principle. Nevada was the first state to enact an antidrug law, which is hardly libertarian, and waited until other states embraced marijuana to act itself. The small counties tend to be more libertarian than the large counties, and when change came, it tended to be in the large urban counties, which contain most voters
HIDDEN HISTORY continued on page 12 02.16.17
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