When I grew up in Green Bay in the 50’s and 60’s there were no gay people in town. Now, anyone with half a brain knows that is an absurd statement. But is it?
Depending on whose statistics you choose to believe, a city with the population of 60 thousand souls will contain anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand gay people. Yet, I can honestly say I never met an openly gay person during my first 19 years in Green Bay. There were no parades, no gay characters on television or the movies, or any gay gathering places in town known to the general populace.
As a result, there were anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand people in town walking around with a secret, that if revealed, would have exposed them to possible physical violence, prosecution, loss of their livelihoods, ridicule, and the destruction of family relationships. So it isn’t surprising that all of these citizens were forced to conceal their true selves and remain invisible in the communities they helped to build.
In 1971, I along with two friends decided to abandon the northern winter and head south to Mexico. Our plan was to travel to Mexico in a 1963 Volkswagen bug, spend as much time in Mexico as our money allowed and then drive up the coast of California where Gary and I would relocate to San Francisco. Don, who had been recently diagnosed with cancer and was in remission, obtained his doctor’s blessing to make the trip.
We took off on a cold Wisconsin morning and drove to Des Moines where we stopped because of dire weather predictions of an impending ice storm. In order to save money for Mexico we sought out the cheapest accommodations we could find and that lead us to the Iowa Inn. It was an old hotel that had seen better days and all I really remember about it was that someone kept playing a song called “Popcorn” over and over for a few hours and a resident who knocked on our door and asked if we would like to see his light bulb collection. Never one to turn down an intriguing invitation, I went with him to a closet down the hall and sure enough, he had a room full of light bulbs.
The next day was cold and sunny. We went out to the car and found it encased in about a quarter inch of ice. We used a small cook stove I was packing to melt the ice in the door locks and then spent a considerable amount of time de-icing the windows before hitting the road again.
Before long we crossed over into Arkansas and entered the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. Around 3:00pm it began to rain and as our elevation increased, the temperature began to drop. Within an hour, the rain turned to a combination of sleet and ice.
As road conditions got worse, we were reluctant to stop because our first day on the road had been cut short and we wanted to get to the Mexican border and warm weather as soon as possible. At one point we came to a steep incline and the old Volkswagen couldn’t make it to the top. Displaying a combination of determination and stupidity, we decided to back down the hill and get a running start to see if we could get over the hill and keep going. Down the hill we backed, and then when we had backed up far enough to get up a good head of steam, we attacked the hill again. We all started to celebrate as we crested the hill when our celebration was cut short by what lie in front of us.
As we came over the hill we saw that the road took a fairly sharp turn to the left with a sheer rock mountainside on the left side of the road. On the right side was a drop where the treetops were about 30 feet below the road. To make matter worse the road was very icy and the Volkswagen’s breaks were bad. There was no going back as we began to spin in a series of 360’s. If I had been given the opportunity to pick a friend to be behind the wheel in this situation, it would have been Don. He was a great athlete and one of those people who could remain calm in the middle of a shit storm. After we had made two 360’s we banged into the mountainside and came to rest about 4 feet from the drop off.
We piled out and examined the damage to the car. Don was uneasy about leaving his car that close to the cliff. I was ready to walk six miles to the next town in an ice storm. As we were debating our options two good old boys pulled up in a pickup truck with four wheel drive and chains on its tires. Don went to talk with them and it was decided that they would attach a chain to the Volkswagen’s front axel and tow it away from the cliff and back on the road. Gary and I wanted no part of this plan and stood off to the side while Don attached a long chain to the front of his car and jumped into the driver’s seat. To make a long story short, the boys in the truck took off and the Volkswagen, with Don behind the wheel, began to slide sideways. It slammed into the mountainside and careened back toward the cliff coming to rest about two feet from the cliff. This experience convinced, even Don, the car was best left where it was until the ice storm stopped.
The good old boys left and we reexamined our options. We were six miles from Eureka Springs and it was raining ice. As we looked around we saw a small house down in the valley and decided to seek help there.
When we got there we found a woman in her twenties with a couple of kids. In a remarkable display of trust she invited us into her home and told us her husband was on his way home and when he arrived he would give us a lift back to town. Before too long, her husband, who turned out to be the editor of the local newspaper, arrived and agreed to take us back to town. We piled into his four-wheel drive jeep and drove the six miles to town.
Our first stop in town was the editor’s office, where he placed a phone call in an attempt to find someone who could help us out so he could head back home to his family. After he made contact with a local artist named Larry, we piled back in his jeep and he took us to a coffee house and introduced us to Larry. The coffee house was full of longhaired young folks and seemed completely out of place in the Ozark Mountains in 1971. Larry greeted us and assured us he would find a place for us to stay. He had some errands to run and some people to talk with about our lodging and told us to meet him back at the coffee house at 8:00pm.
Feeling glum after a shortened first day and the uncertainty of our current situation, we sought out a bar to drown our sorrows and plot our next moves. The bar we found was a classic old time bar that had been designed for drinking and shooting the bull and very little else.
As we walked in the bar, we couldn’t help but notice the clientele. There were the seed cap guys, hippies, and real back woods types spread out along the bar. It was such an odd combination of people that we couldn’t help but wonder what planet we had landed on. After a couple of beers our spirits lifted slightly and we began to see we were lucky to be alive and whatever came next was better than having plunged off a cliff in a Volkswagen bug.
We were definitely feeling better after our third beer when we heard a commotion down at the other end of the bar. A guy in bib overalls with a magnificent head of curly hair down to the middle of his back and a beard that covered a good portion of his upper chest, had come into the bar, and engaged most of the various denizens in a lively conversation. The most striking thing about the guy was his incredibly high falsetto voice. He only stayed a few minutes and when he left we asked the bar tender “who is that?” He told us his name was Glen Wallace but everyone around Eureka Springs called him the Hairy Fairy. He apparently had a weekly column in the newspaper entitled “The Hairy Fairy” and from what we could tell, he appeared to be on speaking and joking terms with all sectors of the population of this weird place.
As 8:30 approached we walked back to the coffee house and met up with Larry. Larry told us he had secured lodging for us but first he wanted to take us on a walking tour of the town. He grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels and we headed out. By now the ice had turned to big, beautiful flakes of snow. The town itself was incredible. It was on three levels with all kinds of Victorian buildings. It was like something out of fairy tale, especially with the snow falling and the intermittent slugs off the Jack Daniels bottle. Larry explained that Eureka Springs had once been famous for its hot springs and had been a place that had, at one time, attracted the rich and famous. The population of the town had wildly fluctuated over time until the hot springs had dried up. Now it was a small town with all of these incredible structures nestled into the Ozarks. Larry said the place’s natural beauty had attracted artists and hippies and that they had somehow come to live in peace and respect with the locals and the hill people who lived in the surrounding countryside.
Larry led us up an incline toward a huge three story Victorian house. The house sat on a hill and we learned later it was known as “Yeller House” and all you had to do to get a letter there was address it “Yeller House, Eureka Springs, Arkansas. As we made our way up the incline a second story window opened and an extremely high pitched falsetto voice called our “Larry, is that you?” Yeller House was where we were going to spend the night.
We entered the house and the Hairy Fairy directed us to a room on the second floor. We sat there while Larry and our host talked in another room. While we were waiting we looked around the room and noticed that everything in it looked old but in very good condition. I can’t speak for Gary or Don but I have to admit I was feeling a bit uneasy. Gary, who had taken an interest in ballet at the University of Wisconsin, opened up a coffee table book about the career of the famous ballerina Margot Fonteyn. When Glen joined us he saw that Gary was looking at the book and he was instantly delighted that Gary knew who she was and that he had recently taken a ballet class.
We were pretty exhausted with everything that had happened that day and Glen took us to a big second floor bedroom and left us for the night.
The next day Glen was busy and we sought out the local mechanic because we had decided we needed brakes on a several thousand-mile journey and wanted to replace the master brake cylinder on the Volkswagen. We also wanted to see about pulling out a couple of the dents the car had suffered as it pin-balled off the mountainside. We tracked down the town mechanic and he told us he would do the job but it might take him some time to get to it. We had already observed the pace of this place and really weren’t too anxious to find out what “some time” meant in Eureka Springs time. The garage owner asked if we could fix the car ourselves. Don knew how to do most things and he felt he could fix the brakes if he had the right tools. With that, the mechanic threw us the keys to his business, and told us to lock up when we were done. The rest of the day, Gary and I handed tools to Don as he fixed the brakes.
That night we sat around Yeller House with Glen. I have to admit I was still not completely at ease with this very different individual. But then we began to talk and he turned out to have a great sense of humor, was a great storyteller and such an obviously interesting person that all the unease vanished. It was like sitting and talking with a guy who looked like Grizzly Adams but sounded like Julia Childs.
He told us he was from Little Rock and had been a student in the high school where the famous integration battles had taken place. His skill at making the narrative come alive really gave me a sense of what those times were like as opposed to reading a dry account in a newspaper. He told us about his time as a hairdresser in Memphis and how he had once been summoned to cut Elvis’s hair. He also told us that he had been a chef at one of Memphis’s first upscale vegetarian restaurants. As the night went on he asked us about life in Wisconsin and fully endorsed our trip to see what else was out there. We ended up spending a very nice and very interesting evening getting to know each other. As we were getting ready to call it night, he told us that he wanted to cook a vegetarian meal for us before we left because he wanted to prove to us that vegetarian meals were not all boring.
The next morning, he asked us if we would like to take a guided hike through the surrounding countryside. We agreed and shortly thereafter we headed out into the forest. The temperature had risen into the mid to high thirties and it was a bright sunny day. The snow remained from a couple of nights before and it was a beautiful place. We saw a lot of cardinals that day and their red feathers set off against the white snow added a dash of bright color.
As we walked Glen told us about the land we were walking through. He pointed out the “homes” of the hill people. These were shelters that had been built with any and everything they had found lying around. Tar paper, corrugated tin, logs, all tacked together to make a shelter. Glen explained that “hillbillies” still lived in these hills and that family feuds were not a thing entirely of the past. A couple of weeks before we had made our appearance in Eureka Springs, a shoot out had occurred in town reminiscent of the Hatfields and McCoys.
I must admit I have struggled with the “hillbillies” label. I’m not sure, but my guess is it is considered derogatory. I considered “hillwilliams” but that conjured up images of San Francisco butlers, so I settled on hill people.
Glen led us up a mountain to the base of the Christ of the Ozarks statue. This is a famous landmark that you used to see on post cards back when people sent postcards. The story behind the statue was an interesting one. The statue was much more impressive from a distance. Once you got up close it looked like someone had placed Christ’s head on a giant milk carton and the spread-out arms looked unnatural. There was a small wrought iron fence around the statue and hymns were playing on a continuous loop. There was a gravesite for the man who had erected the statue and his wife. The wife was buried there and the plan was for her husband to join her when he kicked the bucket.
The man behind the Christ of the Ozarks was Gerald L. K. Smith. Smith had purchased a mansion on the hillside outside of Eureka Springs and lived there. He was the owner of the annual Passion Play of the Ozarks that was a very popular stop for tourists in the Bible Belt. He hired the locals to play roles in the passion play at minimum wage and made a lot of money. The woman you bought a candy bar from at a corner store might have spent last summer as the Virgin Mary.
Gerald L. K. Smith was an interesting fellow. He was an early right-wing radio personality who mixed extreme racism and Christianity. In the thirties he became a mover and shaker in a group called the Silver Shirts which were modeled after the Brown Shirts that were terrorizing Germany at the time. Apparently his racism was so virulent that he made even run-of-the-mill racists uneasy and he became isolated politically. He then turned back to religion and made a nice living helping white people find Christ.
Gerald is now buried with his wife at the base of the Christ of the Ozarks statue. I have a fantasy that his plot is really a barbeque pit and he turns on a spit over an eternal flame reserved for racist Nazi sympathizers. But that’s just me.
Glen explained that Gerald had plans to cut down much of the forest we had been walking, in order to build replicas of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. I am happy to report that those plans never came to fruition and that beautiful piece of land survived.
The next evening Glen prepared his vegetarian meal for us. Now, I know this will come as a shock to many of you, but I am not a foodie. There are few, if any, meals that I remember unless they were so bizarre or awful as to be unforgettable. I was a meat and potatoes guy and, in my opinion, a meal with out meat was definitely missing the best part. When we got back to Yeller House the next evening, the table was set and the house smelled of freshly baked bread. The table settings were all antique (it turned out that everything in the house was antique) and we sat down not knowing what to expect. Everyone got their own, individually baked loaf of bread fresh out of the oven and everything was really good. I don’t have a clue as to what went into the sauces Glen had prepared but I ate all I could stuff myself with and ended up with a new appreciation for the possibilities of vegetables.
That night we told Glen we were going to turn in early because we were going to get up early and hit the road to try and make up for lost time. He told us he hated good byes and said he would not get up to see us off. The next day, bright and early, we packed up our stuff and quietly headed down the stairs to leave. Just as we started down the stairs we heard that falsetto voice call out “I love you”. We paused on the stairs and we, three straight boys from Green Bay, in unison croaked back, “We love you too.”
They say first impressions are important and I have come to conclude, who ever ‘they’ is, they are right. The first openly gay man I ever spent any time with turned out to be an interesting, funny, kind man. As we spent those days together the fact that he was gay and his flamboyant style faded away so completely and we were able to see him as an individual worth knowing and respecting.
As I think of him now, I think of how brave he was to insist on living his life in his own way. Maybe he was so flamboyant that it would have been impossible for him to live it any other way. Regardless, I will always remember the first gay individual I actually got to know and be thankful that we got to spend some time with the Hairy Fairy.
