Lessons from the Holiday Inn

In 1979 I was a junior in high school and got my first job at a small, local Holiday Inn. I worked as the evening houseman, and would take care of the guests, the rooms, and the hotel after the maintenance and housekeeping staff left at 5:00.

Known as “The Nation’s Innkeeper”, there were about 1500 Holiday Inns during the 60’s and 70’s. Unfortunately, this particular Holiday Inn was starting to show its age by 1979. Business was starting to slow, likely due to a number of things that people no longer found appealing. Things like outdated furniture, old TVs, and orange sculptured carpet. Not to mention the moldy smell, the bedbugs, the rude staff, and the houseman who only knew how to fix things by checking to see if they were plugged in.

Once school was out, I wanted to work full time, so I was put on a 2-man crew to work in the Summer. We were to update the hotel over the course of the three months so business could continue as usual. I worked with a guy named David, who was only a couple of years older, but seemed much more mature. He had graduated high school, moved out of his house, and lived in an apartment in downtown Akron.

We would paint a section of rooms, remove the carpet and the old furniture, and a contractor would install the new carpet and furniture. It was hard work, but not too hard, and a good summer job. We were on our own, could take long lunch breaks if we wanted, and would talk about work, the waitresses (who clearly preferred him over me), school, and sports. He didn’t talk much about his personal life, but I suspected he didn’t have the best childhood. We were friends, but would go our separate ways on the weekends.

One Friday, in the middle of the summer, as we were hauling a credenza out of a room, a maid who was pushing a cart stopped and pointed her finger at David. “I know where you were last night”, she said with a stern head nod. “I saw you.” David responded with a sheepish grin, but didn’t say anything.

We hauled the credenza down to the container, where the used furniture would later be taken to a wholesaler, or, if we forgot to lock it at night, into the back of one of the staff’s vehicles. I was generally not a nosy person, but I was bored, and I asked David about what the maid had said.

“ It was nothing”, he said tersely, and with a look that strongly suggested I not ask again.

A few years earlier, a friend of mine once told me that he didn’t mind us joking around, but did not want me to tease him about being Jewish, because it was a very sensitive topic. What I heard was, “tease me unmercifully about being Jewish, until you mature enough to know you’re being a jerk.” Which I did, unfortunately it took a few more years than he expected.

Similarly, after David responded angrily, what I heard was, “You should probably bug me until I give up and tell you the truth, because it’s probably something good.” Which I did. Finally, near the end of the day, he stopped painting, turned around and looked at me, and said, with a resigned voice, “She saw me at the Stagecoach. “

I looked confused, so he responded, “It’s a bar”.

“So?”, I said, still confused, and kind of disappointed.

There was a long pause, and then a deep breath.

“It’s a gay bar”.

I laughed. “Man, that’s embarrassing! How did you end up there!’

He looked at me, rather incredulously, and said,

“I’m gay. “

In 1979, we all knew what being gay meant. It meant lispy voices and limp wrists, feather boas and makeup, sinfulness and perversion. It was a danger to our children and a threat to our manhood. Most of all, it meant being a social pariah, an outcast, and a tortured soul dwelling on the fringes of society. It was about the worst thing you could be called on the playground.

Of course, I didn’t know anyone who actually knew a gay person, or even met a “gay” person. No one would dare admit they were gay, or even that someone in their extended family was gay. Our understanding relied on innuendo, invective, rumors, and the caricatures on TV and in the movies. I don’t think we were even sure they existed. They were like unicorns, like some kind of big gay unicorns, and here I was, face to face with one of them, out in the wild, uncaged, with nothing to protect myself but my cunning and my wits. My autonomic nervous system was revved up into the red zone as I pondered this and looked blankly at David. Eventually I said, “Oh, ….um…… OK”.

There was an even longer pause.

“Well, I guess we have to start painting room 206”.

“Yeah, all right”, and we painted room 206 and went home.

I worked that Saturday bussing tables, and then went back to work Monday morning. I caught up with David, who seemed kind of surprised to see me, and then we started working. We didn’t say much for awhile, but eventually he said, “Did you tell anyone?”

“Nah”, I said, and since he brought it up, I asked him, “So, what’s it like to be gay? “

I hadn’t meant that to be taken seriously, but he did. He told me, and over the next few weeks, he continued to tell me. He told me what the Stagecoach was like, and what his friends were like. He told me the secret signs, and the signals to hook up with someone. He told me about drag queens, and sugar daddies. He brought in pictures. He told me things that were interesting and some that were not so interesting. And he told me that gay people had sex. Lots and lots of sex. As much sex as 18 year-old boys would have if every 18 year-old girl wanted it just as badly, and had no concerns about being pregnant or what anyone thought about them.

What he never did, though, was talk about anything bad about being gay, even though, through the cracks, there was clearly pain. He never tried to convince me to become gay, and, in fact, seemed to like having a “ straight friend”. I may be overthinking this, but it seemed he got some sort of validation or acceptance, which must have been pretty difficult to imagine during that era. After about a week or two, things pretty much went back to normal. We finished up the summer, and I went back to school, and back to my night houseman job, and he left to work somewhere else.

Two years later, in 1981, the CDC reported a cluster of cases of Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia in 5 men in Los Angeles, as well as an outbreak of a cancer called Kaposis Sarcoma in 41 men in New York. This was notable for two reasons; the diseases were rare, typically found only in people with little to no immune systems, and all the men were homosexual. By the end of the year, over 100 people had died of a poorly understood disease known as Gay Related Immuno Deficiency. In 1982 the disease was named AIDS, because it was a known to affect some heterosexuals, particularly natives of Haiti. It was becoming an epidemic. In 1984 the HIV virus was isolated as the cause. It was a fatal disease, and there was no known treatment.

Homophobia and fear of AIDS spread as fast as the disease, and people with the disease, even children, were ostracized and kept out of schools, churches, and other public places. Politicians ignored it. Televangelist spread rumors of gay people purposely spreading the disease to white Christians, and spoke of AIDS as God’s judgment against gay people. Of all the TV preachers of the 80s and 90s, only Tammy Faye Bakker reached out a hand and supported all those people being devastated by this disease.

In the mid-80s, a friend of mine told me a joke.

“ What’s the hardest part about telling your parents you have AIDS? “

“Trying to convince them you’re Haitian. “

The joke being that it was easier to tell your parents that you had a fatal illness, than to tell them you were gay.

Over the next 20 years more Americans died of HIV/AIDS then died in all of World War 2. I sometimes wonder if David, with all the rampant sex he talked about, made it through those years okay. I hope he did. Eventually, through unprecedented advancements in medical research, treatments for the disease were found and, along with preventative measures, the disease is now relatively controlled. Though it’s still ravages other parts of the world, in America it is no more deadly than diabetes.

As importantly, it has forced America to confront the issue of gay rights. They have, and, although not perfect, things sure seem better than they did in 1979.