After
I arrived
in
Madison, the
capital of Wisconsin,
during the Fall of 1979, ahead
of my family in
Warwickshire,
I found
myself drinking
in
the seedy
corners of the
Rathskeller and then
in the 602 Club
with two thoughtful
new
Jewish friends, identical
twins
from Queen’s, New York. Peter,
a graduate student in history,
advised me that this
tiny
bar
on
the edge of the UW campus was
of historical significance since
the front half of the premises had once been used as a gay bar. I
was intrigued by the pictures of
the frightened faces
lining
the wall.
In
1981, rare diseases such as Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneunocystis
pneumonia were
reported
among gay
men in California and New York. Scientists began to suspect that
an
unidentified ‘disease’ was the cause. In
September 1982, the ‘disease’ was named
Acquired
Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
On
8 January 1982, Lysistrata,
a feminist co-operative bar on
Broom and Gorham Streets
in Madison, the capital of Wisconsin, was destroyed
by fire,
having
opened on New Year’s Eve, 1976.
It had served as a space for feminist activists, women, and lesbians
to socialize and meet in a supportive environment.
A
month-long investigation concluded that the cause of the fire was
arson.
Fortunately,
Kathryn Clarenbach (1920-1994),
an early leader of the modern feminist movement in the United States
and
the first Chairperson of the National Organization of Women, had
already fought long and hard for gay and lesbian rights. Her
husband Henry Clarenbach was a delegate for Eugene McCarthy.
Their
son David Clarenbach took up the banner in
Wisconsin,
against
stern
opposition from the fundamentalist ‘Christians’, led
by the moral
crusader Rev.
Richard E.
Pritchard,
who’d
been ordained in 1944 in the old Welsh (Calvinist Methodist)
Presbytery in the Presbyterian Church. Maybe
the most bigoted, unChristian
person I have ever had the misfortune to meet,
Pritchard was of similar Ilk to the TV Evangelicals
of the day such as Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and
Jerry Falwell.
On
25 February 1982, Lee Dreyfus, the Republican Governor of Wisconsin,
signed Assembly Bill 90 into law, with Leon Rouse and David
Clarenbach at his side, making Wisconsin the first state in the
U.S.A. that provided
anti-discrimination laws that protected gay, lesbian, and bisexual
people in housing, employment, and public accommodations. In
1983, Wisconsin legalized private non-commercial acts of sex
between consenting adults, and thereafter
became known as the (first) Gay Rights State.
Leon
Rouse and another student Eric Jernberg at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee asked their school to adhere to the spirit of
Assembly Bill 90 by suspending participation in
the Reserved Officers
Training Corps (ROTC) program
if that program continued to violate the terms of the statute. Their
motion was passed by the Faculty Senate, but voted down at a
subsequent meeting of the general faculty. They
however inspired Rick Villasenor, a student at UW Madison, who in
1985 started trying to do much the same thing to the ROTC (Army,
Navy, and Airforce) program
on the Madison campus
I
(Tom)
was born in Plymouth, Devon
in 1948 into a military-minded lower middle class family, with
a least one gay uncle, where
I grew up
kitty-corner from my Chicago-born cousin
‘Auntie’ Audrey, whose
look-alike granddaughter is the lovely
Anglo-Canadian BBC Asian
Editor Celia Hatton. Under the influence of Auntie Audrey and her
elderly
parents whose
photography business in Chicago had failed during the Al
Capone era,
I also lived the ‘American Dream’ while unaware of all its
misleading
falsities.
After
visiting the American
College Testing Program in
Iowa City during 1971 and 1972, I worked
as an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics of the
University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1979 to 1995, with
full tenure
from 1980. My
department was housed in the Computer Science building on West Dayton
Street, but
for the first four
years I
was expected to work
part-time at the infamous
Army Research Office funded
Mathematics Research Center (MRC)
close to Shorewood Hills.
MRC
had retreated,
with its director J. Barkley
Rosser and in the wake of
the 1970 bombing
of Sterling Hall,
to
the isolated eleventh
and twelfth floors of the
WARF building at the far
eastern extremity of the UW campus.
When I arrived, its
recently appointed
director, one John Adolph
Nohel, was
still forcing
faculty on academic research
contracts to
involve themselves in
secret activities
for the military that
were illegal under state law,
e.g concerning firepower
and nuclear weapons,
including Pershing missiles
that were tested three at a
time to satisfy the whims of
each branch of the military.
In other words, MRC was
actively
engaged in the same sort of ‘Army Math’ that they were involved
in during during the Vietnam
War era and which motivated
the courageous
bombers of Sterling Hall.
See ‘The Struggle against
Army Math’ by Madison FstP, Science
for the People, 1974,
Vol 6, No.1, pp24-35.
The
illegal activities and
homophobic attitudes at MRC
were to partly
motivate my attitude towards
the gay discriminatory attitudes expressed
by the UW Madison ROTC
which was housed opposite
the Computer Science building on
University Avenue. I
believed
that whenever an institution such
as a Church, a political
organisation, or the U.S.
Army behaves homophobically,
it is more
likely to be multi-phobic
and to be cruelly repressive
in all sorts of socio-
political ways e.g. towards indigenous peoples,
the mentally and physically impaired, and those
made vulnerable by poverty.
In
1991 (during the Gulf War)
I exposed the Mathematics Research Center’s illegal activities in
an article in
the Daily Cardinal.
I heard over
the
Department of Statistics lunch table that
Barry Goldwater went spare in Washington, and that John Nohel was
hauled out of bed to explain his
insidiousness, but I have
been unable to confirm this.
Anyway,
MRC, a
relic of what it previously was after
the Army funding was moved to Cornell,
quite thankfully ran
out of money
and vanished
from Wisconsin forever.
I
was finally
promoted to full professor at
Wisconsin shortly
before I left in
August 1995 to assume the
Chair of Statistics at the University of Edinburgh (1995-2001).
I
believe that I was hounded
and seriously discriminated
against at the University of
Wisconsin,
e.g. during 1985, because
of my perceived
gayness, neurodiversity,
and propensity to speak the
honest truth.
I learnt
in 1993
from a less-than-accepting
colleague that an
eminent Statistics
professor had been
hounded and ‘deserved
everything he got’
when he ‘left his wife to live with a guy’ before leaving
the department (prior
to my arrival)
to work at
a university in
New York City.
The bisexual professor
died
tragically
from complications from AIDS
several years later.
In
contrast, a
prolifically
heterosexual All-American
associate professor who
publicly and unashamedly
dated girls
attending his undergraduate classes and
took them to faculty receptions, was
only given a rap on the
knuckles once, and
that was when he dated a
black student!! In 2021, he
expressed his approval of the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot
two black people dead during unrest in South Eastern Wisconsin, and
shocked
me during
a Facebook discussion by asserting that
the white teenage assassin
‘deserved
another chance’.
My
experiences in Wisconsin followed the cruel homophobia and ableism
meted out by two alpha-male
Evangelical Christians in
the Department of Statistics of the University of Warwick (I972-79),
which I’d co-founded in
June 1972. This
mental cruelty
led to my departure from
England and to my
year of suicidal ideation when
a multi-phobic (e.g
notoriously anti-semitic)
honorary professor at Warwick pursued me to Madison
in January 1981, at the
invitation of John Nohel,
and came after my guts. In
1982, Nohel tried
to pressurise
me to involve myself and an
impressionable
Japanese-American
graduate student in a project concerning the firing of rockets at
nuclear silos. I
pulled out of the project, and left MRC in 1983, after which I worked
full-time in the UW
Department of Statistics.
I
believe that some of the worst discrimination against gay people in
academia comes from some
alpha males and the more
extreme of the closet cases,
rather than well-balanced
heterosexuals. I suspect
that I and the Statistics
professor who died from AIDS
both suffered at
Wisconsin at the whim of the
same suspected closet
case who was appointed to
the Statistics department during the highly repressive 1960s. This
same suspected
closet case was also responsible for attracting overseas scholars to
the Statistics department
with strong intimations that tenure would be granted after a visiting
year, but without seeking
approval for the tenure intimations from the Department
of Statistics
Executive Committee. One Eastern European scholar with
an outstanding publication record
consequently moved to the
U.S.A. before finding
himself without a job in Wisconsin at the end of his visiting year.
Despite
all the extreme pressures,
academics of gay orientation are frequently highly creative in
scientific terms in manners which break with existing conventions.
Alan Turing (Bletchley Park
and University of Manchester)
and Florence Nightingale David (UCL
and UC Riverside) were key
examples of renowned gay statisticians with such talents, and
I wouldn’t be able to name several others without unfairly outing
them.
During
1983, scientists at the Louis Pasteur Institute in Paris identified
the virus linked to AIDS
and called it lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV).
Also
in 1983, Evelyn Torton Beck,
a member of the Madison Jewish Lesbian Group, was
editor of Nice
Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, a
compilation
of poems,
essays, reminiscences and short stories, believed to be the first
published collection of works by lesbian Jewish women in the United
States, and a far cry from the Zionist culture that was prevalent in
Israel.
Indeed,
my three
Jewish colleagues
in Statistics didn’t regard Israel as a nice place. They
were also very accepting towards gay people.
In
her introduction,
Evelyn
wrote,
“Jewish invisibility is a symptom of anti-Semitism as surely as
lesbian invisibility is a symptom of homophobia.” Born
in Vienna, Evelyn
was a professor of women’s studies, comparative literature and
German at UW Madison. The anthology
was critically acclaimed except in the Jewish orthodox press.
I
came out at the age of 35
on Madison’s gay scene during October 1983, shortly
before Halloween, on a hypomanic high, and in a desperate, confused,
and messed up state
following the departure of my wife and children to England and
a break-up with my American
girlfriend.
The
first lad I ever kissed was
a very
compassionate
22 year old barman called
Michael M.,
who worked in Sam’s
(now Jordan’s
Big Ten Pub) on
Regent St, and that was all
we did. Michael
left sometime afterwards
for another city where he reportedly
died from complications
due to
AIDS.
The
first gay customer I’d talked
with in Sam’s
was an aspiring Republican politician who
advised me that being gay cuts across all class and socio-political
boundaries. How then, I
wondered, can gay people achieve equality, when there are so many
divisions among them? This
makes it very difficult to think in the usual political sorts of ways
when contemplating
LGBT equality, not to forget the complications involved when gay
neurodiverse people are trying to think through the politics. Some
of us simply think differently.
During
this period, I haunted Rod’s,
a historically significant gay leather
bar concealed
in the basement of the Hotel
Washington on West Washington Avenue, and
a short walk over the railroad tracks from the UW campus. Previously
a
low-rent half-way house, the
hotel was created at the
Milwaukee Road railway depot in 1885 as
the Commercial Hotel and was
destroyed by fire in 1996 while
an unaccepting
fireman celebrated on the street and the transgender people
frantically
escaped from the upper floors.
The huge,
eerie building was
purchased by Rodney Scheel in 1975, who converted it into an
intriguing multi-level
complex.
A
metal frame was installed
somewhere between Rod’s
and a speak-easy bar dating from the Prohibition
called the Barber’s
Closet. While
I heard
tales
about how the much-celebrated metal frame was used in the ‘Halcyon’
days prior to my arrival,
I am unable to confirm the mind-boggling
stories as my main
source died
from AIDS.
The
Club de Wash
and Café
de
Palms on the ground
floor catered to a mixed
clientèle,
and the New Bar,
a classy,
teen friendly gay dance
disco on the first floor
served as the best haven in
town for gay women and trans people, where they mixed
well
with the gay guys.
A
jolly lady
called Cheri and her demure
partner ran a
lesbian bar called
Emily’s
on
East
Wilson
Street before retreating
to Back
East. They
weren’t
treated well by the
authorities,
and ultimately left town. According
to my information, they may
have been
‘run
out of town’.
Emily’s
was situated between the Essenhaus,
a gay-friendly
German -style
restaurant
and the high quality, gay
friendly Cardinal
Bar and Disco owned and
managed
by the Cuban-American LGBT
activist Ricardo Gonzalez,
who in 1989
became the first openly gay
Latino elected to public office in the United States when
he
was appointed to the Madison
Common Council. Foremost on
his agenda as
alderman
was the revitalisation of downtown Madison.
The
Hotel Washington Organization, run by Rodney Scheel with the help of
his
brother Greg, was important in
organizing gay pride events in the Madison area,
including
the annual
not-so-magic picnic in
Brittingham Park where
people
looked
different in daylight and the food was dour.
The hotel was an important
cultural
centre, and served as a
destination and venue for members of the
LGBT
community from throughout the Mid-West. Rodney’s
philanthropy is
celebrated
in the Rodney Scheel House on Hauk St, a facility
for people with
AIDS/HIV. His partner was a
leading consultant psychiatrist working for
UW Hospitals and Clinics.
When
I arrived in Rod’s
during
the Fall of 1983, the
AIDS
scare was intensifying.
So
the
sexual activities were much
less frequent. The
exception was Sundays, when
many
of
the customers took their clothes off and poured cut-price
beer over each other. When
Rodney
died in 1990 after going insane from
the AIDS virus, over 800
people attended his highly
emotive
funeral in
the all-accepting First Congregational Church on University Avenue.
Before
he passed away, Rodney said (See Isthmus,
July 1990), “My customers and friends are diverse, and it is that
happy quality that appeals them
to me...Do everything in
your power to protect yourselves and others from this disease. The
AIDS epidemic is killing hundreds of people every day. We must stop
it! You must
do your part.”
The
clientèle
I met in Rod’s
included many accomplished
citizens, in particular,
(1)
Judge George Northrup:
George
sat on the Dane County bench for 12 years, mainly in juvenile court,
having served 7 years as court commissioner. He came
across
as a fair and respectful judge whenever I saw him on television.
Indeed, he thought that as he was gay it was of
essential
importance
to be fair and
respectful to
all minorities, in
particular those who felt threatened by the system.
In the bar, he was dressed in leather, and was unrecognizable as a
judge.
Judge George A.W. Northrup
died tragically of cancer during September 1997. He was 53.
(2)
Daniel O’Brien.
Assistant
District Attorney for the State of Wisconsin. My
good
friend and
advisor for
many years, he
and his partner visited me in Edinburgh shortly before 9/11.
He and Joe Elder advised me on the content of my speech to a full
faculty meeting in December 1989
when the faculty voted for ROTC to leave the UW campus. While
Joe’s speech was much more classy than mine, Dan thought that I
stuck the knife in,
with
huge
impact on the faculty vote.
(3)
James Koutsky Professor
of Chemical Engineering, UW
Madison,
with
a specialisation
in ceramics and
with an interest in my statistical techniques that used mixtures.
My neighbour on Gregory Street for
ten years,
he
advised
me that ‘The human race will travel to the stars’ and that ‘God
created gay and lesbian people at the beginning of time as uncles and
aunts, for the purpose of providing extra support to traditional
families’. I
refer to this during
religious discussions as
‘Koutsky’s Hypothesis’.
Jim
refused to visit
reactionary cities like Denver since he preferred not to inject the
‘pink dollar’ into their economies. He
much preferred Saugatuck, the gay resort that overlooks Oval Beach on
the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.
Jim
advocated
freedom
from government interference and legalisation
of
recreational drugs.
Jim
died
during a party in his house in
November 1994. He was aged 54.
(4)
David Runyon: Professor
of Art History at UW Whitewater.
Runyon
came
across in
Rod’s
as
a quite daunting, very
cliquey
figure, with
a quirky
entourage who
joked about their warts while organising gay
yacht trips on
the Wisconsin river.
David
over-focussed
on the
outing of
gay
Republican politicians, who
must have been very scared of him.
David
was active
in the very
self-centred
Gay Center that
consisted mainly of his cliquey
acolytes,
but which was quite
successful in helping young gay
people to come out.
Once
they came out, they were treated quite
differently.
David was a founding
member of Madison’s
Gay
Men’s Chorale and
produced
and financed
the
long
running program
‘Nothing
to Hide’
on Community Access Television (WYOU).
Professor
Runyon produced
700 episodes of
variable quality between
1981 and 2001. They are still
being digitized and described by UW Archives. David died
of a heart attack, in
the arms of a boyfriend,
in January
2001
after shovelling heavy snow. He
was aged 70.
(5)
Jay Hatheway. When
I met Jay, he was an
insightful
gay activist who was concerned with outreach into the Wisconsin
countryside,
since he thought that isolated gay people sometimes don’t realise
that there are
