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Friday, January 15, 2010 at 3:00PM Life in the Punch Bowl
Playland, 1950s. From The History Project’s Bar Collection, and part of a series of photos from Jim McGrath who began working at Playland in 1951 and was there for thirty-eight years.For gay Bostonians in the 1950s and 1960s, bars were the only place you could be yourself
Even straight people knew where it was, and what it was. At a time when most gay bars were hidden behind unmarked doors, frosted windows and other trappings of fiercely guarded anonymity, the Punch Bowl sparkled. Its neon sign was a cursive, blinking Park Square landmark. Its windows offered anyone who cared to look inside a glimpse at the benign imbibing at the main bar (all of the truly scandalous stuff was happening downstairs). Every Halloween, it drew a gaggle of drag queens and throngs of gawkers—gay and straight alike. Its Beaux Arts Ball featured klieg lights and police cordons to keep the crowds at bay.
“If you traveled overseas and mentioned ‘Boston’ or ‘gay bar’ to anyone, if they were ever here, they would mention the Punch Bowl,” said Joe McGrath, a 66-year-old Boston resident.
For him and for legions of other gay and lesbian people who acknowledged their sexual orientation in the decades prior to modern gay liberation—when even to dance with someone of your own sex was an arrestable offense—being even remotely out of the closet meant going to the Punch Bowl, or Playland, or Sporters, or 12 Carver, or the Napoleon Club, or the Chess Room, or a circuit of as many bars as you could go to in an evening before heading to an after-hours party or a quick nosh at the Hayes Bickford (the “Gay Hayes”).
In many ways, the Punch Bowl’s heady brew represents that history better than most. The bar reached its zenith just as opinions on sex, sexuality, and homosexuality were starting to bubble to the surface, and it closed its doors for good just as the modern gay rights movement was beginning. Today the gay bar as an institution is on shaky ground, supplanted in Stonewall’s wake by steadily growing social acceptance of LGBT people and a slew of social, sports, religious, and arts venues for LGBTs. The notion of being shunted off to unmarked, mob-run dives that were frequently subjected to police stings is understandably atavistic. But for people who remember the Punch Bowl and the other bars that dotted the city, these places meant a coming together of people who had no place else to go. It meant being gay.
“It was all about the bars,” said Dermot Meagher. “You wanted to be yourself, and bars were the only place where you could be yourself.” In 1989, Meagher became the first openly gay man to receive a judgeship in Massachusetts. Twenty-four years earlier, he was a nervous young man preparing to take his bar exam in a building right next door to the Punch Bowl. On the second day of the bar exam, he remembers today, he looked out of the window, saw the roof of the Punch Bowl and halfheartedly wondered if he could just dump the “law stuff” and head over for a few cocktails.
Meagher, who no longer drinks, tended to frequent Sporters more than the Punch Bowl. Sporters, on the far side of Beacon Hill, was more relaxed, and the Punch Bowl tended to draw what he termed a more “collegiate” type. (Today we’d probably say “South End pretty boy.”) But the upshot was the same, whether it was Sporters or the Punch Bowl. For many people, the first glimpse of gays and lesbians they ever got—in fact, the only opportunity many ever got to see crowds of gays and lesbians together—came when they walked through the doors of a crowded bar on a Saturday night.
“It was very refreshing,” Meagher said.
For 76-year-old Barbara Hoffman, it was an eye-opener. Hoffman has become a stalwart of LGBT activism. But her first look at gay life in any critical mass—years before she came out herself—was when a friend, “Rodney,” took her to the Punch Bowl in the early 1950s.
“I still remember walking into this packed bar. It was an hour before closing, and they were six deep at the bar. I asked Rodney if everyone here was gay, and he said yes. I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Hoffman said.
Oasis that it was, the Punch Bowl represented the only type of place where a gay person could be gay, and for many of its patrons, it symbolized the double lives lived by many.
Hoffman was a case in point. She became a part of her friend Rodney’s circle, but never thought the world she glimpsed inside the Punch Bowl applied directly to her. Hoffman was born in upstate New York. When she was 9, her family moved to a small mill town in Connecticut. When she was 16, as soon as she finished high school, she left for Boston. She worked at various jobs before entering college. She went to Boston University for one year and transferred to Radcliffe her sophomore year. At the end of her freshman year, she married a Harvard graduate student.
Six months into her marriage, she fell in love and began an affair with the woman who served as matron of honor at her wedding. She divorced her husband shortly thereafter and began a six-year relationship with her matron of honor. She said that for her, there was no sudden lightning-strike of an epiphany. Neither was she shocked to the core. Shortly after her relationship began, she sat down on the steps of the Peabody Museum, the sun shining on her face. “The answer for me was crystal clear. I’m a lesbian,” she said. “It made my coming out so much more easier, because I knew this world of people, and I liked them.”
Other older gays—patrons of the Punch Bowl or not—also bear witness to the realities of being lesbian or gay in the decades before liberation, when many lived in what George Casper calls an “ambiguous area.” Casper, who recently turned 81, was 22 when he proposed to the woman who would be his wife for the next 20 years. He knew he was gay, and he told her so. He had also come out to his roommate at the college where he studied to be an Episcopal priest. He told his parish priest and his Christian education counselor. He had a deep, loving relationship with another man for 10 years, a relationship he never hid—and at the same time he nurtured a marriage with a woman with whom he had two children.
Casper’s homosexuality was a fact of his life since he was 13 or 14. Growing up in small-town Ohio, Casper would listen as his friends talked ceaselessly and breathlessly about girls. These talks didn’t interest Casper, and he found he didn’t view girls the same way his friends did. And when his mind wandered, his thoughts would turn to boys.
“Whoops, you’re different,” he recalled thinking to himself. Casper had no word for what he was when he was a teenager, and he didn’t act on these impulses until he was 18 and had a sexual encounter with an older man.
“It was, oh my God—almost life-changing. It was total, total, total pleasure and that scared me. I knew what an orgasm was, but this was way beyond that. It shook me up on so many levels,” he said. “I became self-conscious of my awareness and attention to men. It troubled me. It wasn’t that I thought I was bad, awful or evil. It was just a huge ‘differentness’—that was what was troubling me.”
Casper discussed his feelings with his Christian education counselor, who told him that if this was how he felt, Casper should use it. They were feelings of sensuality, emotion, and love, the counselor said, and such feelings could only make him a better clergyman.
But it would not, by any means, give Casper license to live as an openly gay man. He married a woman, he said, because in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that was the only model of life available. And Casper didn’t want to live his life alone. But neither, he said, did he want to hide who he was. And throughout his studies for the clergy, he would admit his homosexuality time and again. He had a 10-year relationship with a parish priest in Auburn, where Casper was posted. Casper was 23, and “Tad” was 46. Casper’s children called his lover “Uncle Tad,” and Tad’s mother, who lived in the rectory, called Casper “Georgie.” He said he had two spouses, and he divided his time between the two. He never discussed his relationship with his wife, although she did confront him with it years later.
Today, Casper lives with his husband, Fred Mazyck, in Dorchester. Both are active in Prime Timers, an organization for older gay men, and live their lives quite openly. His children have been largely supportive of him.
“Did I go and say ‘I’m gay?’ No I did not. Did I hide myself in the closet? No I did not. I lived in an ambiguous area where I lied to no one,” he said. “I’ve never been willing to lie about who I am.”
Records indicate that the Punch Bowl started operating under that name in 1944, although people have varying ideas as to how old the place actually was. Published reports and a few reminiscences put the opening in 1946 by Henry Vara Sr., whose other contributions to gay nightlife in Boston included Jacques and, later, The Other Side.
The Punch Bowl’s main room was dominated by a horseshoe-shaped bar. The room had a jukebox, pinball machine, TV (where people watched The Beatles on “Ed Sullivan,” Kennedy’s funeral and “The Judy Garland Show”) and a piano bar. Downstairs was a basement bar and—although no one ever advertised the fact—the dance floor. The Punch Bowl offered an opportunity for men to dance with men and women to dance with women, surreptitiously. Everyone kept an eye peeled for the flashing light that meant the police had just walked through the door. It had another meaning, too: Stop dancing. “The Lifeboat Drill” some people called it.
Before the Stonewall riots, if you went to certain bars, you ran the risk of being swept up in raids. Sam Goldfarb, 80, a psychologist who lives in Jamaica Plain with his husband, Steve Pepper, said that going to bars included being ever ready to grab the hand of the nearest woman and start dancing with her.
According to McGrath, the hush-hush basement of the Punch Bowl ironically became the most visible aspect of the Punch Bowl when it was featured as a location shot in the 1965 film “Never Too Late.”
Folks have different memories about the people who worked there—surly bartenders who may have been straight, may have been gay; the Varas—but they all remember one person: Eleanor Gustafson, or to hundreds of adoring gay men, “Tex,” the tiny, blonde waitress who was a fixture at the Punch Bowl for 20 years. She lent her boys money if they needed it and would wander through the bar announcing “Last cause! Last cause!” for last call. In her time the petite, eternally blonde-ringletted Tex inspired legions of drag queens. She had stories about everyone—from Rudolph Nureyev, who would show up at the Punch Bowl with a cadre of hot bodyguards; to Robert Mitchum, who would play piano upstairs and ask Tex to take him to other gay bars; to Bette Davis, whom Tex met when she worked as a cigarette girl at the Ritz-Carlton.
“She was this earth mother to all these guys who couldn’t be gay anywhere else. But that was just fine with her,” said Bobby Weatherbee, 67, who played piano downstairs. Today Weatherbee divides his time between Provincetown in the summers, where he plays piano at the Crown and Anchor, and anyplace warm in the winter. In the 1960s he held court in the Punch Bowl’s subterranean lower dance floor/lounge, where he would play, among other things, “God Bless America” and the poignant, haunting “Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” and where, on occasion, rats would scurry around his feet.
“Downstairs was eerie,” he said. “You couldn’t get any more like a cellar.”
Weatherbee discovered the Punch Bowl in 1964, when he was a student at the New England Conservatory of Music. It became his main hangout. It was a place of camaraderie, a place to be himself—if not a place to be 100 percent safe. Weatherbee was singled out for being gay and was bashed on more than one occasion. Lots of men were. But like the police raids, it was an accepted part of the scene.
“I was beaten up a few times, but you didn’t think of things like that,” said Weatherbee. For him, it was all about being with his kind. “We were bearing the guilt of being gay. And back then, it was something to be guilty about.”
By the end of the 1960s the Punch Bowl had its run. It closed with little fanfare in 1969. Most of its clientele and a number of its staff drifted over to the nearby Other Side (which featured dancing, relatively out in the open). Today, the site of what was once the Punch Bowl now has a mix of residential and retail buildings, most notably the South Cove Plaza.
Bay Village’s other gay bars enjoyed more extended runs. The Napoleon Club, with its three baby grands and unapologetic opulence, stayed in full swing until 1997, when it quietly and unexpectedly closed. It’s a private residence now. Luxor survived a bit longer before changing hands, changing names and languishing. It’s an Italian restaurant now. Only Jacques remains with its nightly parade of drag queens, but it’s more popular with bachelorette parties than with boys. Boston’s most successful gay bars aren’t even gay. They’re “straight” bars that are taken over monthly by Guerrilla Queer Bar, which draws gay men and lesbians to unsuspecting places throughout the city.
The years since have seen the number of gay bars in Boston decline steadily, for good or ill. The emphasis on bars as the only outlet for gay life claimed its share of victims—to unsafe sex, to drug and alcohol abuse. LGBT people have other ways to congregate today. They worship. They caucus. They play rugby. They sing. They meet online. And any happening bar on a Saturday night is bound to have a lively circle of pretty boys holding court.
But Boston’s maturation as a place where it’s OK to be gay took with it the klieg lights and the police cordons. And there are those who miss it to some degree.
“In the Punch Bowl,” Weatherbee said, “you could not be too gay.”