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A weekly show from the folks at East Lansing Info breaking down all the news and happenings in East Lansing, Michigan.
Hello. Welcome to East Lansing Insider. This is Dustin Petty. It is pride month here in The United States, and I am a lover of all things history, and I'm a a gay man. So I stole the podcast this week away from Anna and Luke just so I could spend some time exploring the the queer history of East Lansing and the greater Lansing area.
Dustin Petty:I spoke this week with doctor Tim Retzloff with Michigan State University. Tim is from Flint, Michigan. He received his bachelor's from the University of Michigan in 2006 and earned a PhD in history from Yale University in 2014. He has worked a lot in libraries. His engagement with the LGBTQI past began when he was a student at the University of Michigan in Flint when he authored the history appendix for the 1991 study From Invisibility to Inclusion, Opening the Doors for Lesbians and Gay Men at the University of Michigan, commonly known as a lavender report.
Dustin Petty:He has done a lot of reporting and writing about local history, queer history, and I'm just so excited to speak with him today. I'm sorry. I'm gonna be nerring out a little bit. So enjoy if if this is your thing with me. Enjoy.
Dustin Petty:When I was talking with Tim to prepare for this interview, I sent him a few news newspaper clippings, from the Lansing State Journal archives, tracing back or or going back to the, mid nineteen fifties. When you look at the history of the queer community in East Lansing and the greater Lansing area, It is inevitably tied to the to the queer history that of the community that has existed at Michigan State University in all its iterations since its founding. So we start our conversation by discussing the community at MSU, the queer community at MSU, looking for safety and for belonging.
Tim Retzloff:One of the articles you sent had to do with students at Michigan State feeling like gay students, term then gay and lesbian students, outcast and not having a place. And there were actually some, like, more violent instances, graffiti
Dustin Petty:The dorm fire.
Tim Retzloff:Dorm fire and, you know, someone's car was vandalized. So people really felt threatened, and it precipitated a report that was conducted. The Terry Stein report? It was Anita Skeen and Terry Stein, 1992, called Moving Forward. It was one of the, I think it was the first article I did for Between the Lines, the very first issue of Between the Lines.
Tim Retzloff:So I remember interviewing Doctor. Stein coming here and interviewing him as that was being underway. And part of the report was a history that April Allison did, that she actually interviewed one gay male student whose history at State went back to the thirties. Wow. And then, another woman, and now I'm blanking on her name, she was known as Porty.
Tim Retzloff:She had been a grad student here in the forties with her partner and then went on to work for the state of Michigan. She and her partner were together throughout the 50s. There's certainly social networks and people who met. There's certainly bars that people went to even in the 50s. Some of that history is slipping away because, you know, the people who can tell those stories have been passing.
Tim Retzloff:But Portey was actually one of the named defendants when the Michigan Organization for Human Rights challenged the state sodomy law in the late eighties. So she came out in her seventies as lesbian, even though she certainly lived, you know, what we understand as a lesbian life well before that. You know, so there's other, there's this fascinating letter at, in the ONE Archives, ONE Magazine was kind of the first national homosexual magazine in the country that kind of had a surprisingly wide distribution, even though they only printed like 5,000 copies. But, it started in January '53. And and by, I think it's September or October of that year, I mean, this is where you I'm talking extemporaneously and not like looking at, but there was a student here in Phillips Hall who renewed his subscription, thanked them for the magazine, and said that he and his friends here at Michigan State College read through every issue cover to cover.
Tim Retzloff:Wow. So that, you know, it's a glimpse that we don't often get. Yeah. And we think that, you know, everyone was isolated and targeted, and that's not always the case.
Dustin Petty:The oldest article I sent you, I think it was from '55, in which they named four or five young men who police entrapped in the embassy of Union in the bathrooms there. One of the individuals, I think only two or three were associated with the university, the rest were community members. One was a teacher in Holt. Right.
Tim Retzloff:Married, if I remember. Yeah.
Dustin Petty:In my research into their lives after that, it really destroyed some lives. Can you comment a little bit on not only that police practice, which obviously lasted into the 80s because then we had the rest stops, but also, I don't know, just how the community dealt with that.
Tim Retzloff:That's where there are so many gaps. I mean, our our source for that, because we don't have those individuals to talk to, Our source for that is the Lansing State Journal. Yeah. Not necessarily neutral, and certainly the law enforcement officials that are also prosecuting these cases, you know, was you know, up until basically 2003, in the state of Michigan, if you engaged in an act of sodomy, you could get up to fifteen years in prison. If you engaged in an act of gross indecency, you could get up to five years.
Tim Retzloff:Imprison sodomy is basically anal sex, gross indecency is basically oral sex. And then there were like lesser infractions like accosting and soliciting, which was a miss tended to be a misdemeanor if it's a first offense and then became, you know, a higher charge if you're a repeat offender. Mhmm. So there's just kind of that's going on. So then queer activity, if not being queer itself, was criminalized.
Tim Retzloff:Mhmm. It was considered a sin by the major denominations, and then it was also classified as a mental illness. So there's kind of, you know, three strikes against these people who are just wanting to be themselves and live their lives and, you know, find, you know, if they're men, Mr. Right or Mr. Right Now.
Tim Retzloff:I mean, so certainly in the 1950s, this is the tip of the iceberg. Mhmm. This is what everyone who engaged in same sex attraction and acted on it or were gender transgressors in some way faced from society. So at the federal level, it was a time of the Lavender Scare. More people lost their jobs with the federal government because of homosexuality than for communism.
Tim Retzloff:So that's going on at the federal level. There's kind of this ideology that's being stoked. And yet, you know, even though it's technically illegal to operate gay bars at the time, even though there's strong social taboos among, I think, many straights. We don't know how many, but many. There's awareness and maybe even a tolerance, and for some, maybe even an acceptance.
Tim Retzloff:You know, certainly my work in Detroit, Metro Detroit, it's surprising to me that there's a certain number of people whose family were in the know, and to varying degrees accepting. One guy kind of braced himself when his parents were gonna go shopping and they they they came back unexpectedly. I guess they forgot something or or not and found, found this guy interviewed. This is Dearborn. Found him in the bathroom, you know, getting it on with the neighbor across the street.
Tim Retzloff:And so so he describes, his mother just kind of, you know, going and sitting and staring blankly in a chair in in the living room as she kind of chain smoked. And she just, she said, I just don't want the neighbors to find out. And then the father wanted to talk to him on the garage, and he just kind of braced himself. No, actually it was in the basement, so he had a bar in the basement. So he braced himself, like, And he goes down to the basement, the father puts up two shot glasses, they have a shot, and the father says, I just wanna know who you're with.
Tim Retzloff:You know? Obviously, you know so he basically was able to go out once a week and explore himself even as a teenager. This kind of story is blowing your mind because it's not what you expect. And yet, I don't, you know, in some ways it makes sense because how could we have survived as a community if everyone, not everyone bought the program.
Dustin Petty:Tim, one of the articles I sent you was, from 1976. It spoke about how the Michigan State University and University of Michigan were both doing what they call sex change operations. We would call them gender affirming care. I really had no idea that, first of all, that kind of technology or medicine existed in the 1970s. But also, didn't know that they were doing it here at these universities.
Dustin Petty:The article spoke to both the physicians who were carrying out the gender affirming care and also people who were against it. What was the attitude towards these kind of operations and perhaps towards the early trans community as well?
Tim Retzloff:Yeah. That was new to me. Oh, it was? Okay. But but there were I mean, I knew about the efforts at Michigan.
Tim Retzloff:The the kind of the the early incarnations of a gender identity clinic were already in play in the mid seventies. This is as taboos are being lifted a little bit. I mean, Christine Jorgensen had come out in the early 50s, but kind of her life story and also popular cultural presentations like Myra Breckenridge, we're kind of putting it kind of in the air. So people who are kind of experiencing the feelings of wanting to address what may what what outsiders may see as a mismatch
Dustin Petty:Yeah.
Tim Retzloff:They're kind of jumping at the opportunities. And that was was going on even, you know, as far back as the thirties and forties, if there were any kind of publications, there were people who were, you know, clamoring for where I where can I where can I get this done? What can I how can I you know? Mhmm.
Dustin Petty:Even then, would that have been, like, the ultimate taboo, like, sex or gender at the time, would that have been even more off? You said you said people don't want to
Tim Retzloff:talk So about sex that's, you know, there's a there's a tricky aspect to that history because there are ways in which society was more accepting of Christine Jorgensen in the fifties. Because in some ways she was seen as a technological marvel.
Dustin Petty:Really? Like science fiction?
Tim Retzloff:And she also went on to have like a nightclub career, where she was accepted and drew audiences. Now obviously some of those people in the audiences were probably there for the novelty of it, or you know, maybe even more of a more menacing take on it. But, you know, she was playing, like, major nightclubs, and she herself was very disapproving in the fifties of homosexuality.
Dustin Petty:Really?
Tim Retzloff:She was morally wrong, and she only came to kind of evolve in her understandings, kind of along with the homophile movement and then the gay lib movement.
Dustin Petty:That's amazing. You probably already knew about the East Lansing history of the protections in the seventies.
Tim Retzloff:Oh, of course. Yeah, of course. I mean, I've interviewed some people who were involved in that.
Dustin Petty:Yeah. East Lansing loves to loves to share that. Were
Tim Retzloff:ahead of
Dustin Petty:the curve and all that. Can you talk a little bit about you said you interviewed some of them. What did it take for them to be open about who they were in the workplace and then work towards those kind of protections?
Tim Retzloff:Well, I think the key to understanding what was going on in East Lansing is the emergence of get live on campus. Mhmm. And that is kind of a a direct outcome of Stonewall in New York in 1969. By 1970, a Detroit Gay Liberation Front is formed in January. In March, on Ann Arbor Gay Liberation Front is formed.
Tim Retzloff:And then by the end of nineteen by the end of the school year, I think in April so they were trimesters, so the school year is going to June. So in April 1970, some students came together and formed the gay liberation movement. Front was a little too radical for them. They wanted to and so they're getting a foothold on campus as part of this Millikan upsurge of gay activism. And some of the members there were already setting their sights on kind of political change.
Tim Retzloff:So Elise Eisenberg and Don Goddard were two of the key founders of that, and they both ran for school board. In East Lansing? In East Lansing around that time. And then they began pushing for an ordinance. They first got through, I think it's March '72.
Tim Retzloff:They pushed through this city council approval of protections within East Lansing government. Now some people tout that as the first ordinance. It wasn't kind of the first sweeping ordinance. Ann Arbor has dibs on that. In July 1970, they passed the first ordinance.
Tim Retzloff:Activists in East Lansing continued to work on that. And then the ordinance, the kind of sweeping ordinance, still one of the first in the country, was passed in April '73. So part of that and there's articles in the state news. The state news is is a better source for this than the Lansing State Journal, but also East Lansing had a had a The Courier. The Town Courier.
Tim Retzloff:So there's some articles in there about kind of this slow process underway of pushing for that. One of the key kind of pivots was so the ordinances, both versions, I think the job protections and the wider ordinance had to go through the human Yeah. Committee or Committee or commission or something, which was chaired by an Episcopal priest. Mhmm. Now one of the key activists in the MSU GLM, Gay Liberation Movement, was Alex McGee.
Tim Retzloff:Alex McGee actually hosted the Miss Capital City pageant, which was part of MSU's Gay Pride Week events for the first Pride in Michigan. And they all went to Detroit, you know, after that. The winner of Miss Capital City actually led the parade down Woodward, was a six foot black queen named Aretha. I've heard about Aretha. Okay, so, and Aretha worked at Long's Restaurant, later worked at Shaw Hall here at MSU, And then, you know, even into the nineties, was performing at Club five zero five.
Tim Retzloff:Wonderful Yeah. Story that, you know, which this is the kind of issue you wanna uncover because Aretha didn't leave the kind of
Dustin Petty:Yeah.
Tim Retzloff:Aretha's Aretha, the the Aretha's nonstage name was Mike Scott Yeah. Which was published in the free press, and we can talk about that a little bit more. But anyway, Alex Magee was son of the Episcopal Bishop of Michigan, the incoming Episcopal Bishop.
Dustin Petty:Oh, yes. And he just recently died.
Tim Retzloff:Died a few years ago. Yeah. McGee, H. Roman McGee. He had come in, and he was kind of there's a whole complicated history there that had to do with the Detroit GLF being evicted from their meeting space at St.
Tim Retzloff:Joe's Episcopal Church by the preceding bishop, but the preceding bishop nonetheless, on the way out, established a committee to kind of study homosexuality in the church. 1973, it was kind of one of the early landmark studies. Jim Toy from Ann Arbor, strong lifelong Episcopalian, was involved in it, as well as the Reverend Ann Garrison, who was involved in you know, I remember attending a gathering at People's Church in the eighties with her and meeting her a few times Yeah. When I would visit a friend on campus. So anyway, so the question is, have one version not told by Alex that that his father may have intervened in nudging this chair of the human relations committee to kind of, you know, move the move the ordinance along.
Tim Retzloff:Wow.
Dustin Petty:Two other articles I sent you, one from 1955 and one from, I believe, '86. It lists the names and, I believe, the addresses of men who were caught at different instances in compromising situations, I guess you could say. In the 1955 article, four men were arrested at Michigan State College, at the at the union, in the men's bathroom, by undercover police who, said that they were, looking for sex, I I guess we would say. And in the '86 article, it also dealt with same the same thing, only it was at a rest stop, I believe off 01/27. The newspaper in both instances, thirty years apart, the Lansing State Journal chose to print the names and I believe the addresses of the individuals.
Dustin Petty:Is it in the pursuit of honesty or is it? Like- That's a good question.
Tim Retzloff:I mean, it's not I mean, there was also, you know, five years later, a famous case in Adrian, Michigan, where they had, you know, undercover surveillance of a city park, and they published all the names and addresses of everyone arrested. And the addresses. And the addresses. And it was later, some of them later appeared on Donahue, the daytime talk show at the time, just kind of like, are officials doing this? Because it's a misdemeanor.
Tim Retzloff:Yeah. Right? So, you know, we don't publish the names and addresses of, you know, all the people who were arrested for carrying a concealed weapon or, you know, there's any number of misdemeanors or felonies for that matter, that we don't kind of have that kind of exposure. So there is kind of this stoking of sex panic, because sex is, you know, the lightning rod for all kinds of attention. It it has proven to be politically expedient to kind of scapegoat people who are different Mhmm.
Tim Retzloff:For the purposes of people who want to gain and maintain power. Yeah. What
Dustin Petty:role did the HIV AIDS, situation play in that stoking of the, sex panic?
Tim Retzloff:It's probably a strong role. I mean, it's certainly '86 is different from 1980 when there was a series of arrests of men leaving tramps in Jocobello. Yes. That was one of the early galvanizing events for the Lansing Association for Human Rights. There's some interesting write ups about that.
Tim Retzloff:But people actually, you know, like I said, working on the story with Leo Kaplan a couple Fridays ago. We were actually in special collections and looking at the report that they submitted to city council. Lansing City Council? Lansing East yeah. Lansing City Council, to kind of protest it.
Tim Retzloff:So I think the diff so the difference between 1955 and 1985 would be that people push back.
Dustin Petty:Yeah. That
Tim Retzloff:there is a movement, not just a community, not just a gay world already in place, but a movement already in place to kind of push back and offer a counter narrative and kind of challenge kind of that those kind of practices. I know, you've written a
Dustin Petty:lot about queer spaces like bars. Right. You know about Cabelos and Tramps and those spaces on Michigan's Avenue or whatever they called it. What was the importance of these kind of spaces in the sixties, seventies, eighties?
Tim Retzloff:I mean, they were hugely important. Think, you know, I mean, people may come of age kind of having certain desires, certain inclinations, if you want to use that word, that they may or may not act on. But bars, at least for some people, typically white, served as entry points into a wider world, a community. People who socialized together and kind of had a sense of self and a sense of that there was nothing wrong with them. It is fascinating, this kind of these two big bodies of cases in Detroit, one of which were people arrested, generally around bars and not in bars.
Tim Retzloff:Would meet the undercover cops, but then the undercover cops would wait till they were outside, ostensibly because these were straight on bars and they didn't you know, why why interfere with the business of someone who's straight? Yeah. Whatever. But so they would arrest people. And so it was just kind of, you know, the the prosecutions I looked at, they were, you know, maybe close to a 100.
Tim Retzloff:There's a comparable number of arrests in Rouge Park. Okay. So the bar arrests, people are just soliciting. They're not caught in the act. Yeah.
Tim Retzloff:People in Rouge Park caught in
Dustin Petty:the act.
Tim Retzloff:Yeah. They go there to Yeah. And kind of the typical thing was they were there and never said a word to each other. They just met, and it was like, you know, eye contact or some kind of gesture. That being caught in the act and gross indecency generally is a felony.
Tim Retzloff:Mhmm. McCausing's not a felony. Mhmm. Of the 80 plus cases I found of men caught in Woodridge Park, only one of them did jail time. Okay.
Tim Retzloff:And that's because he broke probation. So he was given probation, he broke probation. About a quarter of the people caught in bars, where you socialize, you meet, they're kind of engaging and kind of maybe embracing an identity, saw jail time. And sometimes, you know, even if they got probation, they might be required to go see a psychiatrist or, you know, there's strings attached and fines attached. It's not like and, you know, it didn't affect the lives of the men caught in Rouge Park.
Tim Retzloff:Mhmm. You know, many of whom were married, many of whom worked in the suburbs. I'm sure it did. Mhmm. But they weren't behind bars.
Tim Retzloff:I'm
Dustin Petty:sure there's gonna be some straight people that listen to this. Can you explain to those who say, well, don't they just go get a motel room? Or why don't they go to their home? Why do they have to go to a public space like a park?
Tim Retzloff:I mean, that's certainly a valid question and criticism, particularly today when when public sex continues and cruising areas continue. I guess I would say that not everyone would be able to afford to get a room. Not everyone would dare show up at a room and put their name on the register. Mhmm. Certainly not gonna bring them home with risk of being caught, particularly if they're married.
Tim Retzloff:I mean, it's just it's a complicated question. It's it's sometimes tricky to get inside the heads of individuals who, who gave it. I would also say, I mean, Belle Isle and Detroit had a leverage lane. Drive in theaters. All kinds of heterosexual people engage in public sex too, but they don't face the kind of targeting and public wrath that that queer people have.
Tim Retzloff:Yeah. So I know I asked this already a
Dustin Petty:little bit. You mentioned Cabela's. I was reading an article. I think his name was Joe. He said, I did not create this gay bar.
Dustin Petty:They chose this location. Would you say that's a 100% true for most in that era, most bars or places? Or, did
Tim Retzloff:did anyone have that part? Mean, one, I mean, it's important to understand Cavello was a straight man. Yeah. And it was, still it was kind of the the tail end of the era where most skate bars were straight owned. Mhmm.
Tim Retzloff:So in my understanding from documentation, including, Greg Kamm's diary, is they used to meet at the circ club, and they were kind of kicked out. And so, they approached Cabelo, and he was fine. Yeah. Come on down. The Rustic was also a gay bar, later became Stobers.
Tim Retzloff:Oh, okay. Yeah. And so, that even proceeded in kind of the sort of club they were having, drag competitions, pageants, in the early seventies for sure. And it even after it became sober, it continued, as kind of a a gay disco, until maybe the mid to late seventies.
Dustin Petty:Throughout the country, Tim, we're seeing a decline in queer spaces. Particularly, I know that the number of bars for lesbians is reduced immensely over the past twenty five years. When I was an undergrad here at MSU, I believe we had two or three gay bars in Lansing. And I think there's just one now. Why are these spaces, leaving us?
Dustin Petty:Are they less important? Have, the queer community found other, more mainstream, spaces to meet? What do you think about that?
Tim Retzloff:So one, I mean, the the decline of traps and cabelos in the eighties, I I it's hard to speak to the extent to which AIDS factored into. I'm sure it played a role. Mhmm. Historians tend to to not like one single cause. We like multiple causes.
Tim Retzloff:We kind of understand things as having multiple things going on. My memory, you know, of the nineties is there was kind of a flourishing of bars in Lansing, and then things tapered off. I think a few things are going on today. One, of course, is kind of the wider acceptance. So the kind of need for an entry point into a queer world is not quite the same as it would have been, you know, in the eighties when I came out in the seventies when lots of other people you know, you've also got kind of this bubble of the baby boom who were born 46 to 64, coming of age from the mid sixties to the mid eighties.
Tim Retzloff:So you've got a bubble of, okay, that's your kind of prime bar going
Dustin Petty:years
Tim Retzloff:in your twenties and thirties. They're aging out of bar going to bars. People, you know, you interview people from those generations and they're like, they're out every night. This was their home away from home, and they were out to meet people, to hang out with their friends. You get to be 40, you're not going have to go out every night.
Tim Retzloff:I mean, that's just kind of the life cycle reality. So kind of the demographics aren't there to sustain them. I think AIDS had an impact. Certainly in more recent days, I'm sure the smoking ban had its own impact. So there's just lots of things going on.
Tim Retzloff:And there's alcoholism and the reality of LGBTQ plus people facing down issues of substance abuse and kind of being aware of that. And it's like, is this really where we want to spend all of our time? So they don't have the importance, they don't have the role that they once did. I would still argue that there's just kind of a palpable difference between engaging with people in person than engaging with them online. I mean, it was an absolute the other thing, the dynamic of people meeting online and, you know, you know, got someone on Grindr and never have any other interaction.
Tim Retzloff:No one ever has to know. Yeah. So, you know, there's kind of like the slipping back into a level of secrecy that's kind of creepy. Yeah. At the same time, you know, there's other things that are basically, there's sometimes a preference for, you know, one time big events.
Tim Retzloff:So we've got, you know, Prides are just kind of in a moment of thriving, you know, Meridian Pride, East Lansing pride, Lansing pride, Saint John's pride. So that's just here. Yeah.
Dustin Petty:Thereare there any moments of important history or anything in the last seventy five years for the area that I know, knowbig questionbut is there anything I missed that you want me to make sure we touch on?
Tim Retzloff:Oh, well, I mean, there's just kind of whole strands that we could I know. Touch on. I mean, certainly the huge importance of Lansing's lesbian community and kind of the role that they played in kind of making Lansing in East Lansing a center of lesbian life.
Dustin Petty:Is that because of the magazine? In part. Okay.
Tim Retzloff:In part because of the university, in part because, you know, Marilyn Fry taught here. Yeah. But they're just kind of a focal point that people were drawn here at a moment and finding each other. And I that's that's just an area that that really deserves a lot more attention. It's not just lesbian connection and the lesbian center and people who wanted less to do with men.
Tim Retzloff:There's still lots of people who continue to interact with men. There's kind of changing dynamics and understanding of what it meant to be lesbian or same sex attracted. And, you know, even there, there's kind of complicated history, certainly degrees of acceptance or rejection of trans people. But that's not just a lesbian thing, that also takes place in the gay male community, too. You know, it does not cease to be fascinating.
Tim Retzloff:And there's always new I, you know, as long as I've been you know, since the late eighties when I first started digging into this, I'm still delighted to find, you know, new nuggets and kind of deepen my understanding. Yeah, I'm just I feel lucky to be able to do it.
Dustin Petty:Why is it important we study our queer history or understand?
Tim Retzloff:We need to know where we came from, in order to know where we're going. We need to understand what it has meant to be queer so we might understand what it means to be queer now. I mean, did just, you know, I don't know. We I'm not you talk to a historian. We we we wanna get at causation and a deeper understanding.
Tim Retzloff:But it's just it's also a really important lens into what it means to be human in general.
Dustin Petty:And that concludes my interview with Doctor. Tim Ratzloff. If you've made it this far, welcome. You are a history nerd like me. I would be remiss not to add that an exciting development to try to tell the the LGBTQ history of the greater Lansing area is underway right now.
Dustin Petty:On Saturday, June 20, between eleven and noon, at everyone I'm sorry. At Everybody Reads in Lansing, Michigan, there is a gathering to collect, stories, photos, memories, timelines, art, and local history for a community made zine, to tell the the queer history of the area. You do not need to be a historian or professional writer to join. They welcome all storytellers, artists, researchers, organizers, readers, designers, and anyone who cares about preserving and sharing local queer history. I hope to see you there if you, like me, are a fellow history nerd.
Dustin Petty:Have a wonderful week ahead. Happy Pride to all who observe. Goodbye.