2026-10-20T22:07:24+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. 2019-08-31T13:44:28+00:00 2019-08-31T13:50:32+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/29 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team The first home for Worcester fledgling LGBTQ+ Christian community in the 1970s. Long before other Worcester religious groups became accepting of LGBTQ+ people, the United Congregational Church opened its doors to the community. In 1975, the city’s fledging chapter of the Metropolitan Community Church hosted services, spaghetti suppers, and support groups there. Later in 1988, Supporters of Worcester Area Gay and Lesbian Youth (SWAGLY) starting meeting in the Church’s basement. For more (including 2 images), view the original article. 2019-08-29T19:45:14+00:00 2019-08-31T13:38:07+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/28 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team The old pharmacy turn café served as the favorite spot for a bite to eat after the gay bars closed across the city. For more (including 2 images), view the original article. 2019-08-28T14:26:55+00:00 2019-08-31T13:40:58+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/22 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team Gay pornography could be found on the magazine racks of this adult book stores and its coin-operated peep show booths offered another space for furtive sex or hook-ups in the city. For more (including 2 images), view the original article. 2019-08-28T14:25:03+00:00 2019-08-31T13:40:02+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/21 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team A rack of gay porn magazines made this spot a destination for cruising on the backside of The Block. For more, view the original article. 2019-08-28T14:07:24+00:00 2019-08-31T12:46:48+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/19 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team In 1967 the Paris took up residence in the old Capital Theatre, a 1920s movie palace that had seen better days. A year later the owners unveiled “Worcester’s first theater within a theater,” Paris Cinema 2, built on the balcony atop Paris Cinema 1. Although originally promising to offer foreign and art films, the Paris started to dabble in controversial films like the Swedish I Am Curious (Yellow) in 1969 and Oh! Calcutta! in 1972. Eventually the management rechristened the upstairs Paris Cinema 2 as the Adult Penthouse, screening Deep Throat in 1974 and then Behind the Green Door. Paris closed for the first time in 1977. When the Paris reopened in June 1982, it adopted an adults-only format, showing X-rated films geared toward a heterosexual audience in Cinema 1 and “Adonis films” or gay pornography, in Cinema 2. Sitting right on the circuit of Salem, Myrtle, Portland, and Franklin, the Paris emerged as an important node on the Block. Cinema 2 with its gay films soon became a rendezvous point for anonymous and solo sex. From this point, the Paris Cinemas spiraled through a string of closings, code violations, and license restrictions. By 1989 the city required that to secure a license, the Paris had to patrol its viewing areas every twenty minutes to guard against “disorderly conduct.” In March 2005 the Paris Cinema found itself caught up in the city’s larger urban revitalization agenda. Envisioning yet another downtown Worcester “renaissance,” city officials accused the cinema of “harboring illegal activity [such as drug dealing and prostitution] on the block that faces Worcester Common, in the shadow of City Hall, painting an ugly picture of downtown.” City Manager Michael V. O’Brien favored seeking “the best ‘market use’ for the property, considering the renovations of other buildings downtown,” which were bringing in millions of dollars of new investment. O’Brien authorized “a multidepartment attack on the theater” to force the owners to clean up or shut down. After warning the management to curb illegal activities, in January 2005 the Worcester Police Department staged four stings at the Paris Cinema that resulted in the arrest of twenty men “allegedly engaging in sexual acts inside the theater, some in groups and others by themselves.” District Attorney John J. Conte then brought formal criminal and civil nuisance complaints in Superior Court against the cinema’s parent company, Can-Port Amusement Corporation, seeking to close the business “as an entity maintaining prostitution or acts of lewdness.” At the same time, the Department of Code Enforcement investigated the theater for building violations and necessary repairs, while the City Licensing Commission explored whether the Paris possessed the appropriate certification to operate. The commission’s chairman, Francis X. Sena, revoked the theater’s license to show X-rated movies, complaining, “Are we going to have a haven or sex mecca for deviants who come here?” And although Sena himself would resign in 2007 under a cloud of suspicion for alleged corruption and kickbacks, his view of the Paris Cinema as a blight on Worcester’s moral landscape was shared by many. 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. 2019-08-28T13:56:44+00:00 2019-08-31T12:08:59+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/13 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team When the old Bancroft Hotel reopened as the Worcester Sheraton, this stylish cocktail lounge attracted gay bar hoppers with its swanky décor. For more, view the original article. 2019-08-28T13:43:04+00:00 2019-08-31T02:58:03+00:00 https://lgbtqworcestertour.com/items/show/8 The WHEN MAIN STREET WAS GAY Team The Loft first offered regular LGBTQ+ nights before becoming a full-time gay night club. It changed its name to A-Men and then moved to Foster Street. For more (including 3 images), 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.