If you want to understand gay life in America today, you need to go to a city with a historic gay neighborhood and thriving a womyn’s center, where gays won victories against police harassment of gay bars in 1969, where its corporate titans win Supreme Court cases, a city that has confronted the realities of terrorism and has more than two lesbian bars. In other words, Oklahoma City.
I’m in town March 22-25 to check it out.
Greggor Mattson 
One response to “Oklahoma City bound”
Thanks, Greggor –interesting (and with your linking to a 1969 event) witty. I followed that 1969 link: a protest by one person is not exactly Stonewall, but the guy won in court. What I found more interesting from that article was the offhand remark that what “gay communities” had that unorganized gay people did not have were “a newspaper and a community center,” and that, much to my surprise, Oklahoma City got itself a gay community center in 1983 (the Oasis Gay Community Center, which was then renamed the Oasis Resource Center). I’ve told you before (partly in reference to Tory’s honors paper on “queer beers”) that I think that the ubiquity of gay bars before Stonewall, and the fact that “Stonewall” happened at a gay bar, can eclipse the role of gay community centers in “gay liberation, phase 2” –very important for us non-drinkers, and part of a “politics of respectability” (a phrase I learned of from that African American conference Carol and GSFS sponsored, where it is even more problematic than it would be in a gay liberation context).
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