2026-10-20T23:05:52+00:00 Zend_Feed_Writer https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/ WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY https://lgbtqworcestertour.com 2019-08-31T13:57:04+00:00 2019-08-31T14:38:54+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/30 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team As the LGBTQ+ Christian community expanded, the Metropolitan Community Church sought out their own space for fellowship, social, and support programming. While they continue to use other formal church spaces for religious services, this large brick apartment house gave the Church “a space of its own.” Reverend Nancy Wilson and Heather Anderson organized a branch of the MCC in Worcester in 1974, operating both out of their home at 744 Main Street and conducting services at United Congregational Church at 6 Institute Road, for which they each earned a salary of fifteen dollars a week. There were about thirty people in the congregation. The organizers hoped that the spiritual community would provide an alternative to the bars, which they saw as connected with a high rate of alcoholism in the community. The pastors also expressed concern about homosexual prostitution on the streets of Worcester. A 1975 advertisement in WPI’s student newspaper, Newspeak, announced that the MCC sponsored a “gay rap session” and a meeting of “Alcoholics Together, for gay alcoholics,” as well as a “smorgasbord supper.” In addition to working with St. Vincent’s Hospital on treating alcohol abuse among gays and lesbians, the MCC helped establish Worcester’s first Gay Pride parade in 1975. Back in Worcester in the 1970s, the church celebrated that it had a new resident pastor, the Reverend Shelley Hamilton. The congregation moved to a new location, a converted apartment on Wellington Street in the Main South area of Worcester, with “office space in the front, while two rooms with the wall removed served as both chapel and drop-in center.” Chrysalis, the church bulletin, featured uplifting spiritual texts, announcements of social events, commentary on local bars, and a column called “Mainly for Women.” Whereas Wilson and Anderson had seen the church as an alternative to the gay bars, Hamilton worked with the local gay bars, which advertised in the newsletter, as did the Women’s Bookstore and other local businesses. Reverend Hamilton saw herself “as much an activist as a preacher,” who was “convinced that society’s sicknesses are largely due to our emphasis on the family as the only viable social unit.” Declaring herself “a proponent of the destruction of the nuclear family,” she insisted that “without gay liberation there will be no liberation. The gay and feminist movements are the key.” Hamilton set up a gay hotline, which she believed was needed because “Worcester is oppressive toward minorities, especial gays and women.” Johannes W. DiMaria-Kuiper took over the leadership of the MCC on January 1, 1980, with a weekly stipend of $50, a monthly housing allowance of $175, and health insurance. Kuiper arrived in Worcester as a minor celebrity. An ordained minister of the Reformed Church, he had first married a woman. After divorcing his wife, he had adopted a child and then come out as gay. When authorities attempted to take the adopted child back, he successfully sued to keep custody. The New York Times reported Judge Battista’s opinion: “The reverend is providing a good home, the boy loves his adoptive father and wants to be with him. Who knows in this world of ours? You do the best you can and hope it works out.” As one of the first openly gay people to publicly adopt a child, Kuiper received considerable coverage, including appearances on the Phil Donahue Show and a write-up in US Magazine. From its foundation, the Worcester MCC pastors sought membership in the Worcester County Ecumenical Council, in vain. When the council rejected Shelley Hamilton’s bid in 1979, it compared the MCC’s homosexuals to “a band of sinning robbers.” In 1980 Bernard J. Flanagan, Bishop of Worcester, voted against admitting the Metropolitan Community Church because it “espouses a moral lifestyle which we hold to be contrary to the revealed word of God as set forth in the sacred scripture.” In 2006 the Ecumenical Council closed down due to lack of support. After the ministries of Wilson and Anderson, Hamilton, and Kuiper, the MCC was less vocal and visible in the Worcester public sphere, although it continued to celebrate Gay Pride and took on a special role in ministering to people with AIDS. E. J. Watkins, Jr., the pastor in 1988, spoke candidly to the press about being an African American and HIV-positive. By this point, the church had given up its place on Wellington Street and was meeting at the Universalist Unitarian Church at 90 Holden Street. Watkins died in 1990 (according to the obituary in the Telegram and Gazette, “after a long illness”). The next pastor, Nancy Lee Alarie, died at age thirty-six, just one year later. At this point the church moved to Cherry Valley in Leicester. For more (including 2 images), view the original article. 2019-08-28T14:03:37+00:00 2019-08-31T14:40:29+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/16 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team Where “after dark, not-so-little boys come out to play.” Known by many names but most frequently “the Block,” the circuit defined by Salem, Portland, Franklin, and Myrtle Streets was Worcester’s most popular zone for gay male cruising and prostitution beginning in the early 1970s. In 1976, the Gay Community News’s A Gay Person’s Guide to New England listed the area by the Worcester Public Library as the place where “after dark, not-so-little boys come out to play.” Ten years later, then Vice Squad Sergeant Philip Dussault speculated that Portland Street was one of the “top ten places” in the country “for homosexual men to meet.” Since the police averaged only about thirty-five arrests a year on the Block, Dussault knew that the Block was about more than prostitution and considered it “mostly a situation with homosexual men seeking out other homosexual men.” As the place where men went to meet other men for sex, the Block attracted those exploring their sexuality as well as those secure in their sexual identity. It also attracted runaways, young drug users, and others willing to turn tricks for cash. The dynamics of the Block remain obscure since newspapers reported only on its illicit nature and those who sought sex and social interaction there left no accounts. Still, in the three decades of the Block’s heyday, a kind of ritual emerged: Potential customers cruise slowly by, the young men lounge in the parking lot outside the public library on Salem Street or saunter slowly around the block. . . . A car stops, a conversation takes place, a young man slides into the passenger seat, and the car drives off. The payoff—sex in exchange for money—takes place somewhere else. Prostitutes also worked the pay phones in the Salem Street Public Library parking lot. “Now and then, one of the phones would ring. A boy would answer, take instructions, and go off.“ For more, view the original article. 2019-08-28T13:36:09+00:00 2019-08-31T14:44:29+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/7 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team A stylish new bar becomes the center of LGBTQ+ life in the early 1990s. David Marshall, who had invested in the Mailbox and other gay bars, went on to establish Club 241 at 241 Southbridge Street, which quickly became one of the centers of gay life in Worcester for over a decade. A lavish opening party took place on September 9, 1987, with invitations that looked like passports and entry tickets that looked like boarding passes. Club 241 advertised heavily in the Boston gay press. While the club tried to maintain some of the more intimate community-building aspects, such as a “sing along with Walter” at the piano on Sundays, a “pasta night to raise money for selected AIDS projects” on Wednesdays, and karaoke on Thursdays, the 241 also featured standard fare for big dance clubs, including male strippers on Mondays and dancing until three a.m. on the weekends. The dance group Black Box performed there in 1995. Jordan Sorrell (Rich Guskey), the first Miss Gay Worcester, hosted the Saturday Night “Striptacular,” with the tagline, “Anyone Can Enter—Anyone Can Win.” Weekly prizes were one hundred dollars, and the grand prize was five hundred. In her column “The Roving Eye,” the drag queen Kandi Kane reported in 1996 that the “North East Calendar Men” appeared on Friday nights at the club: “Some of the hottest guys in New England and they take it all off.” These professional strippers were not eligible for the Saturday night amateur competition. For more (including 7 images), view the original article. 2019-08-28T13:17:05+00:00 2019-08-31T14:39:46+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/3 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team The place that brought big city style to Worcester's LGBTQ+ nightlife in the 1970s With the rising visibility of gay culture throughout the country in the 1970s, a string of gay bars opened in downtown Worcester. John Coleman, a lawyer from Manhattan, opened one of the first, the Exit Two, at 282 Main Street in September 1972. According to Jim Jackman, “some of the Ports O’ Callers visited Exit II and were amazed. There were at least three times as many faggots here as they thought there were. Where did they all come from?” “The new Exit II was elegant,” continued Jackman: “Wall-to-wall carpeting, Victorian design, a disco, little café tables.” A group of investors bought the Exit Two and rechristened it the Mailbox, broadening its appeal to white-collar clients: “It was as if an expensive Boston bar had been transplanted here and all the wealthy closet cases were finally admitting it by being seen within.” The Mailbox would become a center of gay activity in Worcester for decades; its descendant, the MB Lounge on Grafton Street, is, as of 2019, still an important gathering place for the LGBTQ+ community. Worcester-based singer and entertainer Dale LePage described the Mailbox as “flashy,” with “an incredible dance floor and disco and DJ booth and they had incredible music acts, like Laura Branigan, Eartha Kitt, and Grace Jones.” In a word, it was “Vegas.” LePage recalled a bartender “wearing the most fabulous, fabulous, outlandish, wonderful outfits. At any given night he could be wearing an earring full of water with a goldfish in it. I mean, he was fabulous.” The Mailbox hosted a number of community-building events, including a softball team and the first Miss Gay Worcester competition in 1983. For Rich Guskey, who would go on to win that first Miss Gay Worcester competition, the bar was like a home away from home when he came out in the 1970s: “Every weekend, I was at the Mailbox. . . . All of a sudden I have this whole community, and I’m going to people’s houses for parties.” This sense of security was particularly important given that the era’s homophobia made it dangerous to approach the bar: “You had to be careful on the streets because you were going to get beaten up. . . . People knew what the Mailbox was, and you would get cat-called when you’d go. . . . So you had to go quick, and you had to get in there.” For more (including 6 images), view the original article. 2019-08-26T20:52:53+00:00 2019-08-31T14:39:12+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/2 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team How a bar owned by two Irish sisters became a hub of Worcester’s LGBTQ+ life for more than two decades. Located at the corner of Wellington and Main Streets, the New Yorker (renamed the Ports O’ Call after 1967), provided shelter and comfort to Worcester’s LGBTQ+ community. In his 1973 story on Worcester’s gay bars for the Evening Gazette, Frank Magiera reported that the Ports O’ Call had been in operation since 1929, “but was not known as a gay bar until about 20 years ago.” When the bar finally closed in 1977, Ken Barr commented in the MCC bulletin that it “had done the impossible by surviving into the seventies.” While Barr was writing for the local LGBTQ+ religious community (download a pdf of the article below), Worcester native Jim Jackman published a beautiful elegy for the Ports O’ Call in the radical Boston-based gay newspaper the Fag Rag (which was printed in Worcester, although it otherwise did not have many connections with the city). Jackman noted that the place was “the gay bar here for almost a quarter of a century.” Jackman’s essay achieved national distribution when it was reprinted in Allen Young and Karla Jay’s influential 1978 anthology Lavender Culture (download a copy of the original article from Fag Rag below). For more (including 2 images), view the original article.