Meet Me At The Diamond    Excerpt

Michael Scott White

GLB Publishers , e-book                 San Francisco

Foreword

For several years The Diamond Bar was my hang out in Omaha as it was for a large number of gay men in the city, and for good reason, for many years it was one of only two gay bars in Omaha; before that it was the only as well as the first gay bar in Omaha. This is why I've chosen the title that I did for this book. "I'll meet you at the Diamond" was a familiar parting comment between gay friends planning a night out with their friends for more than four decades.
     I wanted to give back to the Omaha gay community a little bit of what it was like to come of age in Omaha during the late sixties. It was definitely a different place then. Much of the material included in the following pages comes from my own memory and the memories of friends that I have interviewed. Different people gave me little pieces of information so I brought all of these interviews together and created fictional characters based on their actual experiences. This is a history of gay Omaha from the perspective of these fictionalized characters. The events and places described are real.
     Writing about gay history in Omaha has been a very difficult task as there are no written records of gay activities or prominent gay people leaving diaries or letters for us to read and use in research. Most evidence was destroyed purposely by the participants of this history to avoid embarrassment and rejection by families and society. Everything that we know of Omaha gay history is from word of mouth, stories passed down from one generation to the next. This is the first known attempt to write down a piece of that history for future generations to read and to study.
     There are over sixty years of memories gathered in these stories. I have tried to capture the serious as well as the frivolous moments of our collective history in Omaha. To those who have lived through the time period written about in these pages, I say, enjoy the memories; for the younger readers, read and understand where we as a community came from and maybe it will help you learn about where we may be going. Meet Me at the Diamond.

1. Square State Culture

     All of my life I have heard from those people that have left Omaha at some point in their adult lives that Omaha is, "A nice place to be from", or it's a, "Great place to raise a family". All but a few years of my life have been spent living in Omaha. I was raised, educated, fell in and out love, made money and lost it all in Omaha. I know every street and every neighborhood in the city. Certain sites of Omaha are etched on my mind and I am happy that they are there. I have great memories of Omaha.
     Omaha is a great city to grow up in, not too small but not so large where one has difficulty breathing the air or getting from place to place. It's generally a safe city. Omaha has culture too: great symphony, ballet, opera company; it has more small theater than any other city in the United States. Unfortunately, Omaha and Nebraska are in the Midwest Bible Belt that stretches from the Dakotas to Texas. The region has a numbing affect on the imaginative spirit; the sameness of the landscape is mirrored in our social lives in the Midwest. The status-quo is king here, anything progressive or new is immediately suspect. Nebraska is one of those red states that have banned any form of gay union. Seventy-some percent of voters supported the amendment to the Nebraska constitution. The day after that election I realized that I no longer felt at home in Nebraska, I felt that I wasn't wanted here; I began looking for a place to enjoy a quality life.
     Omaha is a great place to be from…especially if you are white, middle-class, and heterosexual. Then it's the best place to be! Omaha has never been a city that welcomes diversity very willingly; I think it comes from the prairie values of the central plains. Omaha is comfortably bland, like the unbroken plains surrounding it.
     The city that we know of today as Omaha is quite different from the frontier community that sprang from the plains in 1854; that city was described as a cesspool of iniquity and a lawless refuge. Omaha in the 1850's and for many years after, was dirty, rough, and fresh. Everything was new with many people passing by and more than a few who stayed, were here to start over, to build a new life, to escape unsuccessful lives in the more civilized environs back east. In the beginning, for a brief moment in time, Omaha was a town on the edge of the western civilized world. As was true throughout western frontier communities, those that were the trailblazers of civilization tended to be of a lesser character, by established standards of the day, than the later settlers who were interested in establishing community over exploitation and greed. Unlike many other frontier communities that remained on the frontier longer, the area around Omaha City developed quickly into an agricultural region and with the coming of the farmer, the family, the churches, schools, and merchants, Omaha's rough edges were hammered out, but not completely. The tawdry and "sinful" elements went underground.
     Two types of immigrants populated Nebraska during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: farmers from Germany, Sweden and Czechoslovakia, and laborers coming to Omaha from Ireland and eastern European countries to work on the railroads and in the packing houses. The German immigrant farmers, especially, formed tight, clannish communities that tended to be socially and religiously conservative, fearful of outsiders, and sexually prudish. The immigrants settling into jobs in Omaha tended to be Roman Catholic (i.e. religiously conservative except regarding alcohol!). These conservative Christian attitudes would affect Nebraska's social mores throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries.
     Being situated in the center of the continent, Omaha and the Midwest were buffered from events and causes that swept the larger metropolises and coastal regions. As generations of farmers and ranchers passed lands down to the next generation, a sense of stability and a fear of change, especially radical change, came to characterize the Midwesterner, whether a city dweller or a farmer. Conservative social values became entrenched and were hard to alter unless severe adversity upset the status-quo. In no other part of the nation was change so avoided. There tends to be, even today, a general distrust in the Midwest of any cultural changes blowing in from the coasts.
     Three events in our national experience tore at Nebraska's conservatism between 1890 and 1940. The populist movement, Prohibition, and The Great Depression greatly changed Nebraska. The populist movement arose over farmer anger over the excessive prices charged them to transport goods to market by the railroads. Issues dealing with banks and public control of utilities were a part of their agenda. Nebraska was in the front of that political firestorm during the 1890's and many of those issues supported by the Populist Party were later incorporated into progressive reforms of The New Deal. There was a sinister side to populism; many populists were racist and anti-immigrant. The Populists tended to be rural people that were afraid of the changes that were sweeping the nation at the time, and as progressive as some of their issues were, in many ways the populists wanted to return to a by-gone era when farmers had more say in the national agenda.
     No social issue so stirred the people of Nebraska and the nation at the turn of the century as liquor. The issue of prohibition of alcohol became a dividing cultural issue with farmers and rural communities generally supporting prohibition, while urban voters swollen with thirsty immigrants opposed prohibition. For many in the cities it became an issue of personal liberty. Omaha political boss, Tom Dennison, started his career in politics (behind the scenes) over the prohibition issue. He and popular Omaha mayor, Jim Dahlman, rode to power on the anti-prohibition issue.
     Along with saloons and drinking, social conservatives in Omaha were very concerned for the moral fiber of the youth of their community at the turn of the twentieth century. A system of controlled vice had arisen which channeled the "legitimate" brothels and other unsavory activities such as gambling into an area of Omaha known as the "Burnt District". This extended from Douglas Street six blocks north to Cass and from the Missouri River west to Sixteenth Street. One man owned most of the properties in this area, M.F. Martin, who benefitted from a cut of the profits from the brothels and saloons in his district. Besides the brothels there was an area called, "the Cribs". The Cribs sprawled through the alleys of Capitol Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Streets. As retold in "A Dirty, Wicked Town," former prostitute and Madame, Josie Washburn, described it as follows:
     Each crib consists of two small rooms about six feet high; a door and a window forms the whole front.
     Each crib has a projecting corner, and a casual glance down the line gives it a scalloped appearance,
     which is meant to be artistic.
Washburn later quotes from a 1907 grand jury report that included the following:

At night these cribs are brilliantly lighted, the shades are never drawn, and through the glass front or large windows therein, that which transpires on the inside may be observed from the street. High school boys and boys of tender age are allowed to visit the district and here take their first step in vice.

     The Dennison political machine was not unaware of the vice district; they were in fact profiting from it! They controlled who could operate in the district and the Machine profited off of the payoffs paid to keep the police out of their operations. Throughout this period of time, concerned Omaha residents and citizen groups would demand that something be done about the vice district; for awhile, the Machine would allow the police to make a few showy raids and round-ups of "undesirables" that would satisfy the Omaha World-Herald, the Omaha Bee, and the concerned citizen groups for awhile, and then everything would go back to normal.
     While there is no known recorded evidence, we can assume from what was going on in other Midwestern cities during the late Victorian era that any public homosexual gatherings for social or sexual reasons probably would have occurred in the same vice district as described above. There is evidence in New York and Chicago that men in drag, called "he-she's", would provide sexual services to men in a rather macabre turn in the brothels.
     The third event that altered somewhat Nebraska's conservatism was the Great Depression of the Thirties. Nebraska's population had been in decline since its peak in the early 1890's; the Depression quickened the pace of people leaving the state for jobs elsewhere. Many of the New Deal programs were aimed directly at the needs of rural America; interestingly, it was rural America that would turn so adamantly against and be distrustful of government programs in future years. By the end of the Depression, Nebraska's demographic trends had become similar to what they are today: a story of generations of landed power in large farms and ranches—isolated and conservative. The rural population of Nebraska began its trek to urban areas. Statewide, a brain drain as well-educated young people left the state in great numbers. A stable, older population of white, middle-class people were fearful of ideas and people that were different from their parochial world-view.
     Economics, demographics, and geography aside, Nebraska is a part of the Midwest Bible belt. This accounts for much of the state's patrimonial attitude toward the "Sinner Culture" of sex, booze, and gambling. We've already seen how Prohibition affected Nebraska; in 2004, Nebraskan's had a chance to legalize casino gambling as three of our bordering states have done; the voters defeated the proposal, and the Nanny state survived in Nebraska. Conservative Christian dogma has a great deal to do with Nebraska and how it looks at its gay citizens.
     "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; such a thing is an Abomination." Leviticus 18:22 (The New American Bible)
     "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives."
Leviticus 20:13 (The New American Bible)

"…and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity."
Romans 1: 26-27 (The New American Bible)

These quotes from Jewish and Christian scripture found in the Bible have been chiefly responsible for the condemnation of homosexuals for over two millennia.

"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness".
Freud, 1937.

It would take another four decades for his fellow psychiatrists to accept this attitude toward homosexuality, but the importance of Freud's attitude toward homosexuality in this quote cannot be overlooked. This was the beginning of a long overdue rebuttal by the scientific world to the biblical condemnation of homosexuality.
     These beliefs were firmly entrenched in our western civilization and the few voices crying out for reason and acceptance regarding homosexuality were not heard by the majority. In this atmosphere, a gay culture was able to establish itself only in major cities of the United States.
     To understand the culture of the Midwestern city, one must realize that unlike larger, coastal cities, the Midwest urban population mostly comes from the farms and farming communities around the cities. As mentioned earlier, rural life was centered on the church—in many Nebraska communities that would be a German Lutheran church. Author Will Fellows looks at how gay rural young men came out in the Midwest in his book, Farm Boys; his research is revealing. The German cultural influence created rigid gender roles, social isolation, and ethnic homogeneity, suspicion of the unfamiliar, racism, religious conservatism, sexual prudishness, and limited access to information. Religion was not the only factor that helped create this cultural strait jacket; the open, seemingly endless plains, the sudden, powerful summer and winter storms, and the small and scattered population helped to create a sense of smallness and powerlessness. It also contributed to the insular culture of the small communities. The rural communities were areas of strict conformity; non-conformity was not tolerated.
     In this atmosphere, it is hard to understand how a gay person living in 1939 rural Nebraska ever was able to cope with their sexuality in an atmosphere of intolerance. There was no place in their rural world to go to find out about being gay. In 1939 there were no P-FLAG organizations, no gay bars, no Queer as Folk. If you heard anything about homosexuality it was more than likely a negative comment from your peers or relatives, the coach at school, or even your doctor. And as for your pastor….you were off to hell! Many were unable to cope with this situation and they were the ones that escaped to the cities; for many of them, that was Omaha.
     Omaha in 1939 was no bastion of gay life but it was a city of about 250,000 people, a place in which gays from the farms could hide themselves. Eventually these young people would come across other gay people in their everyday activities. Those gays that became involved in traditionally gay-friendly work communities were more likely to meet and socialize with other gays. These people might meet at a certain lounge in a hotel; there were no exclusively gay bars in Omaha, but Omaha gays began gathering in certain bars where they were "tolerated" as long as they didn't act flamboyantly. These bars tended to be in rather seedy establishments that also included prostitutes, both female and male, and other social outcasts of the time such as Native Americans, blacks, and former convicts. For many other gays the only outlet for their sexual frustration and needs would be to check out the street trade or to indulge in tea room sex, both of which could be dangerous. Too many gays of that era went through life "passing" as straights. Those gays that didn't fit the stereotypical screaming queen mode were usually able to live straight: work, marry, and raise a family without anyone ever finding out their secret. Many of these men could be found in public restrooms and on dark street corners at night looking for gay sex. It would take the mobilization for a World War, the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution before American gays began to demand vocally that gays be considered as being equal to heterosexuals. In Omaha, gays are still struggling with self-acceptance, not to mention dealing with discrimination from the community at large.
     Many and possibly most homosexuals in the United States that came of age prior to the Stonewall years never had accepted themselves as worthy human beings, deserving of respect and tolerance of their sexual orientation.
     These gays had been raised to believe that being "queer" or a "fairy" was the lowest thing one could be in society. Young and old homosexuals would hear their family members that they loved, denouncing homosexuality as abhorrent and sinful or disgusting. Gays were regularly turned away from families if the truth of their sexuality became known. With this came a self-loathing among many homosexuals that led to self destructive behaviors such as alcoholism, drug abuse, dangerous or reckless sexual encounters, and the inability to accept the love of another man in a continuing relationship. Despite more openness toward homosexuals, many gays still have a hard time accepting themselves as good people. True liberation must begin within each and every one of ourselves through accepting ourselves first, then we will do a better job of convincing others to accept us as equals.

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