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By working through a community service center, we
were soon able to hear and see the needs Gay people have
as a
whole
community. It came as a shock to some naive
people that there were Gay people who were not all young,
all anxious for a radical, fluid life-style. We were able,
through much hard work to transform this recognition into
a powerful force, one with a strong sense of Gay sisterhood
and brotherhood.
We started a counselling service staffed by Gay
volunteers. The needs saw
<!S
greatest were aloneness and
communications. By aloneness I do not
m~'an
stcreotypic
Boys in the Band
loneliness- but the aloneness, the
alienation that is omnipresent in urban American society.
Such simple group activities as pot luck dinners were our
first major successes. The dynamic of shared meals
continues to carry enormous weight in our interactions.
Other successful activities were as revolutionary as a
softball team and picnics at local beaches.
Aloneness also brings fear and Gay House's function as a
drop-in center soon proved itself a way to overcome that
fear of aloneness. We became a gathering place where fear
could be overcome by sharing with others. We had put
together a large room of Salvation Army furniture and an
open door without knowing what types of people would be
attracted to try to meet what needs. Within a few weeks, it
became obvious that there would be no "type" of Gay
House person. Without FREE's political and confronta–
tional orientation and with a conscious effort on the part of
both men and women to work together on this particular
project, Gay House attracted some middle-aged, middle class
and working class, as well as the more expected college aged
group. The conversations did become typed enough though
-over and over again the basic exchange was about the fear
of "discovery" by family, friends, employers. It soon
became obvious that the people coming to Gay House were
coming to express these fears and to find strength to
overcome them with positive action.
We also found that there is no special type of aloneness
for Gay people. We have some areas where needs were
intensified, but basically we were called on to do the same
things that every other community service agency in the
Twin Cities found itself doing: taking older women and
men through the maze of welfare, providing emergency
loans for housing and food, smoothing over rifts between
parole officers and parolees, visiting single people in the
hospital, arranging birthday parties for people new in town.
Any Gay group lax in meeting these real needs of the
community should try to increase their effort. It is
precisely because of such areas as these that younger
militant groups seem to find themselves unable to relate to
older people. Our more fluid lifestyles and our youth tend
to help us to superficially overcome basic aloneness and
make us forget the legitimate needs of others.
T
he probll'ms in communication became obvious to
us through those people who sought actual
"counselling" through individuals and groups.
Again the problems were not unique to our Gay
community, but they were intensified. All too often our
only ways to communicate affection, fear, love, loneliness
and anger arc based on American sex roles. One key to
liberating ourselves from sex roles is to find more honest
and direct ways of communicating. It is because of this
observation that group sessions aimed at communication
skills and led by trained group leaders have become our
major form of counseling.
The basic problems seem to come down to the fact that
men and women simply do not know how to relate socially
and sexually to people of lhe same sex and therefore felt
them~elves
alienated even from their own Gay community.
The invalid sex role models of American society became
totally inapplicable to a Gay situation. The problems
seemed most acute in males, but perhaps I say that because
I am male. We simply do not know how to hold other
men's hands comfortably. If men and women are to
overcome sexist stereotypes, they must be given models of
alternatives and avenues where they can develop their own
alternatives with strong support from others.
Once we began the
c?un~sellin_g
work and the drop-in
center, we soon came to fmd a growing sense of humility in
our inability to meet the needs of a community as large as
ours is in the Twin Cities. It has become increasingly
obvious to us that if we were able to meet these needs we
could not just engage in the construction of our own
motive