I was following him in and out of stores.
“This queen must have hit every department store in town. The morning came, and Conrad headed downtown. I was to follow him because sooner or later, he would go to a gay bar and I would be there to see where it was.” Carl told me to just go downtown where the department stores were and find a gay man. “There were no (gay) newspapers back then. When Conrad was about to be discharged, he asked Banks how he could break into gay life when he got back home to Boston. In Berlin, Conrad had come out, dating “a beautiful German boy.” He had also made a life-long friend of another gay soldier, Carl Banks, who had more experience in the gay world. But he knew no gay people in his hometown and felt lost. At 22, lean, with dark Irish looks, Conrad should have been excited about entering gay life in Boston. In 1969, the Stonewall Uprising was the seed that fell on a ground made fertile by people like them.įreshly discharged from the Army in 1961, Bill Conrad, returned to a welcome-home party in Somerville thrown by his family. Like other members of their generation, Bill Conrad and Helaine Zimmerman took tentative steps out of the closet early on, but by the end of the decade, they had found a community.
Imagine: an entire era ended in one day and nobody knew it.įor some, this new moment meant unwanted turmoil for others, including queer people, it was a chance for liberation. The nation mourned its president but if the majority white, heterosexual culture had known what was coming, it might have mourned its unquestioned dominance, too. The disillusion that had boiled beneath mainstream notice for years was unleashed on that afternoon when President Kennedy was assassinated. Much of what we associate with the 1960s occurred in the following decade.įor the first three years – until Novem– the prevailing ethos was still button-down and conformist. By the time the flower children arrived in San Francisco’s Haight–Ashbury neighborhood in the Summer of Love, the decade was more than half over. The fragile blend of euphoria, idealism, drugs and death, which defined the hippy period, was not very long. These images flash like news footage that gets a little grainier with each passing year.
Think 1960s: long-haired protesters on Boston Common, young women dancing with flowers in their hair, and across the river, the sound of drums and the sweet scent of reefer on Sunday afternoons on Cambridge Common. In memory, each decade has its own gallery of pictures. Originally published in 2015 on Mark Krone's blog Boston Queer History.