I had played the part of the best little boy in the world for so long, no one even suspected I was capable of deception. I was 16 years old when I was first smuggled into a bar on the campus of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. I learned to hide in the shadow of my 26 year old boyfriend, careful to stay out of the lights that could reveal my telltale acne. I felt so grown up, but also got off on the adrenaline rush that comes with breaking rules and getting away with it. In 1965, we had no place of our own. College campuses were the most acceptable places to mingle among straights without drawing too much attention to ourselves. I quickly learned what every Queer boy and girl learned in the 1960s. Gay people meet in bars. Every other place was fraught with dangers and risks that most of us determined too perilous.

Before my 21st birthday, I was introduced to “the Gay bar.” In the underground world of sexual outlaws, a legal ID was not exactly a top priority. Every other crime paled in the shadow of the “crime against nature.”  It gave us a strange feeling of freedom, as though we got to choose our own rules, since we lived as outlaws anyway. The Gay bar in the Inman Hotel in Champaign had an entrance to the hotel lobby as well as a street entrance. Whenever the police would arrive in the hotel lobby, more than half of the bar patrons would quickly slip out the street entrance, but not because they didn’t have the proper ID. Mostly because they didn’t want to be seen in a Gay bar.  

If I was asked to characterize the chronological evolution of the Gay movement, I’d have to say that Gay bars came out first, then Gay people followed. In some respect Gay bars in the late 1960s, early 1970s were huge closets where you could dance and drink, practice being free, but still remain out of sight. To everyone struggling to break down the last vestiges of the closet door, Gay bars “were” the outside world. It was as far OUT as many were willing to venture at that time. For a few generations after Stonewall, Gay bars would become the Temple, a sacred place where we came to meet, to worship and to grow. In a strange (queer) way, our bars were to us, what churches were to the civil rights movement. Even today, when politicians appeal to the African American community they go to the churches, when they appeal to the LGBT community they go to the bars.

For me personally, the bar came to symbolize a political movement. It was without a doubt, the only place one could go at the time, where there was access to the entire LGBT community. As far as I was concerned, the way out of oppression was through the Gay bar!

I just came to accept the bar as a necessity. It certainly seemed at the time, that a Gay without a bar was like a day without sunshine. Looking back now, I can see that I had become like a battered wife. In order to protect her husband, she denies he ever beat her. It was easy for me to blame my illnesses on unknown viruses or a chill or a cold. Eventually, in order to truly believe those excuses, I had to become an expert at denying the elephant in the living room. Gay bars had become synonymous with Gay life and as a result smoking became synonymous with being Gay. So smoky bars became a symbol of freedom, in a really perverted way. Just as sure as the coal miner knows he is trading a living for a black lung, I was sure I was slowly being poisoned. In my home and on my job I chose to be smokefree. But not unlike the miner, when it came time for socializing, I put on my cap, adjusted the cap lamp and descended back down into the mine. And again, like the miner, I thought I had no choice.

The skeletons finally came marching out of the closet when I began to take care of people with AIDS. Tobacco smoke became deadly for many of them. My own Robby soon was forced to avoid most Gay gatherings because the consequences of being in secondhand smoke for hours was simply too dangerous! What I would later come to understand is that their weak immune systems simply fast forwarded the process I, an HIV negative man was in myself. Tobacco related diseases soon overtook AIDS as the biggest cause of premature death in the LGBT community. But still, even today in 2010, the acceptance of tobacco inside the LGBT community requires denial of the elephant in the living room.   

I have now become the elephant! I am like the gushing broken oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, but many fellow LGBT community members are like those who want to continue to drill in spite of the consequences. The fact that LGBT smoking rates among twenty-somethings is double that of the general population has about the same effect as the estimates of the amount of oil that is leaking from the BP well. The collateral effect on other living things is just another element factored into the excuse for continuing the mistake. Tobacco has unfortunately become as sacred in the LGBT community as the Gay bar itself. Its great commercial sponsor, the tobacco industry, has used its historical relationship to target young Gay men and women as future tobacco customers. And those who parrot the industry line, proudly proclaim smoking as a symbol of personal freedom, while simultaneously taking away the freedom of others!

It’s Gay pride week again and I will take refuge in my apartment, as I do every year. I would love to participate, but in the LGBT community, tobacco has greater value than life! I have laid my body in the middle of a busy street to protest the lack of funding for AIDS, but in the LGBT community today, no one is lying in the street for me, because tobacco has greater value than life! As I have confronted one doctor after another who asked the question, “how many packs a day did you smoke?” there are few in the LGBT community who want to believe I never smoked, that it was secondhand smoke in bars that caused my disease.

This week I read a blog about a woman who has decided to be a victim no more. So I’m following in her footsteps! So this is what I want to say to my dysfunctional wife beating husband, the LGBT community. Put out the damned cigarette, you’re killing me! I’m tired of covering my bruises so the outside world won’t know what you’ve done to me. I’m tired of taking the blame for your violent, arrogant disrespect for others. Defending smoking does only one thing! It makes money for tobacco companies, period!

Tobacco rules in the LGBT community. But I guess I cannot expect more in the American culture where people consistently defend corporate interests at their own peril. When I cannot breathe, an LGBT person who defends the right to smoke looks a lot like a Fred Phelps supporter with a sign that says “God Hates Fags!” When I am forced to stay home because LGBT events accommodate smoking, I am reminded of the signs in the old South that read “whites only!” I am proud of the way our community came together during the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic. But I do not share that pride today as we as a community still defer to the cigarette at the peril of members of our own community. Smoking should be banned at all LGBT community events including Pride celebrations outdoors! Smoking is a plague that has cut too many of our lives short and caused immeasurable suffering. The Act-Up phrase, “silence equals death” still applies today. I am Gay, but I find no pride in the fact that my community thinks addiction is more important than my right to breathe. I am a Gay man, but I am ashamed that my own community is as out of touch with reality as Sarah Palin, as arrogant as a self-righteous homophobe and as insensitive as a Gay basher who claims the panic defense, when it comes to the subject of tobacco and cigarettes.

I want my life back! Put out the damned cigarettes and admit that your actions harm other people! And please, please don't tell me I am anti-smoker. That's absolutely the same as a bigot who claims discrimination when he's asked to stop discriminating against homosexuals!

FOLLOWING IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT I'VE BEEN UP AGAINST IN MY SIMPLE REQUEST FOR EQUAL ACCESS. THIS PERSON IS AN EMPLOYEE OF THE SAN FRANCISCO HEALTH DEPARTMENT:

 ENOCH LUDLOW’S CORNER