Out in Evansville: An LGBTQ+ History of River City

PROLOGUE

DEFINING THIS WORK

Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister in Hitler’s Third Reich, made an interesting observation during the 1942 Wannsee Conference as Germany developed the final solution for European Jewry. Goebbels pointed out that simply killing all the Jews would not erase Judaism. No, he said; you must destroy the Stars of David and the Torah scrolls, burn the synagogues and books and photographs. To erase a culture, you must also destroy its history. If you don’t, in four hundred years some student of archaeology will dig up a relic or a photograph and wonder what it was, and the whole thing will start again. Destroy the history and you erase the people forever.

This book is an attempt to preserve the history of people and show the long timeline the LGBTQ+ citizens of Evansville took on their journey from the closet to parades down Main Street.

Before we begin our journey through Evansville, Indiana’s past with regard to what we now refer to as the LGBTQ+ community, we should establish what this book is and what it is not. No book nor any work can ever tell the entire, complete history of the community. Too many have passed on without leaving any documentation of their lives. Gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender people have lived and died in Evansville since its earliest days, but until late in the nineteenth century, there was no written evidence that they were here or that the larger community was aware of us.

For a century, people who became aware of their sexuality or gender identity had to hide that for fear of violence, incarceration and ostracism from community and family. There were no examples of public personalities who presented a positive image to follow, especially after 1895 and other scandals that followed. The term closet might have originated here, as it is such an apt expression. Evansville has always been a bastion of religion. Mainline Protestantism and devout Catholicism dominate the faith landscape and taught that being a homosexual was worse than being a leper: you chose this life. Of course, now we know that is not true.

Likewise, what this book is not is a complete recounting of the history of bars in the city vis-à-vis LGBTQ people. There were indeed places other than those mentioned here that were, from time to time, places some queer people gathered to have community (like the Forget Me Not Inn on the east side). Also, this was never intended to be a complete and concise history of drag performers in the city. That is impossible, as there were, over the course of the sixty or so years for which we can find evidence, too many to list. Someone will undoubtedly read this book and declare it incomplete because their favorite wasn’t mentioned. I apologize here for the omission.

Over the course of a year, I interviewed a variety of LGBTQ elders who provided a wealth of information, stories, photographs and hearty laughs. I owe them a debt I cannot repay except to acknowledge their gifts.

This book is not a psychoanalytical study of sexuality or the kaleidoscope of the gender spectrum or sexual identity. There is no way I could incorporate even the beginnings of such work. This is not a religious study of humans and their chosen gods either. For some, homosexuality is something one does, not who one is, and therefore is sinful. We bypass that off-ramp as well.

What, then, is this book? Even to some LGBTQ readers, it will be so much froth and little substance because they were not mentioned nor was anyone they knew. Gay politics can be brutal. People who dislike drag as a cultural phenomenon (and there are quite a few gay men who virulently dislike it) will say the chapter devoted to it is a waste. I disagree. I have attempted, to the best of my ability, to document the events, places, personalities and photographs that demonstrate what I consider to be the timeline that shaped both our own cultural identity and the awareness and thoughts of the city at large.

The chapter about AIDS/HIV was particularly painful to write. I served on the board of the AIDS Resource Group for seven years when it was very difficult to raise money and awareness. The years between 1993 and 1999 were difficult, but it was in that mid-’90s period when things began to change for us, and a wide spectrum of community leaders chose to become involved. That made all the difference. I watched quite a few friends die. In one’s thirties, that seldom happens outside of wartime or some major natural disaster.

In 2019, a very public celebration of Pride emerged in Evansville. The first Pride parade through the downtown occurred in June, sponsored and organized by a new group, River City Pride, along with a daylong festival at the Haynie’s Corner neighborhood, our own Greenwich Village if you will, in the city’s art district. The day before, the Art District neighborhood merchant organization hosted street drag performers as part of its First Friday festivities. Thousands of people—a large proportion of them heterosexuals along with their children—cheered and clapped and handed dollars to the performers. These events had been happening in bigger cities for decades, but not here.

This book takes a critical look at the path the LGBTQ community took to reach that moment. Even as we watch some political attempts to further marginalize our transgender loved ones, we must fight for them, for all rights of citizenship are worth fighting for.

This book wasn’t easy to write. I hope that the reader looks at this not so much as a parochial story but a universal one that shows that with courage, determination and truth, a marginalized people can gain a place at the table. As Shirley Chisholm said, If they don’t have a seat for you, bring a folding chair.

CHAPTER 1

SEX AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

Evansville, Indiana, is a medium-sized city in the southernmost pocket of the state, on a bend of the Ohio River. Settled in 1812, the city grew rapidly after 1837, when the federal government announced it would build a canal system connecting the Mississippi River to Lake Erie. The terminus of one part of the canal would be in Evansville. This announcement led to a rapid rise in population and industry, a great migration of Germanic people and building wealth for some families.

There was a wharf at the foot of what became Main Street, and riverboats, both passenger and freight, stopped there to load and unload every day of the week, giving employment to both white men and freedmen who’d come across the Ohio seeking liberty before the Civil War and after the war during the Black diaspora from the Deep South.

The blocks lining the river, along what was known as Water Street, were for many decades lined with taverns and houses of ill fame that deckhands and other roughnecks frequented. The newspapers of those days are littered with stories of gunfights, fisticuffs and loose women. In January 1864, a Black minister was stabbed to death outside a saloon by young men on a spree. The one who did the killing was released by a Union army police officer. There was little in the way of law enforcement on the waterfront. Gradually, city fathers tried to confine the sex trade to an area just west of what was becoming the main business district into a tenderloin area known as High Street.

This small area was less than three blocks long, a maze of crooked streets and Victorian houses and commercial buildings, mainly rooming houses and saloons. Roustabouts and rivermen would go from tavern to tavern along Water Street, eventually doing the line (visiting multiple places) at the bordellos or bagnios (brothels) along and around High Street.

Many of the properties were owned by prominent men in the city and rented to smart, savvy women who operated the houses. These were tough women who fought not only one another but also men and law enforcement when they felt encroached upon. In some cases, the madams, as they were called, would also look out for one another and cooperate to stop predators and those who would exploit underage girls for profit. This was long before the Mann Act of the 1920s, which criminalized taking a woman across state lines for the purposes of prostitution.

A good example of Evansville’s madams, Nell Evans lived in and operated a resort, as the Evansville newspapers referred to it, at 1 Walker Street at its intersection with High Street. It was, according to media of the day, the only house in good condition with a manicured lawn. Evans once said, Evansville’s finest have come through these doors, men that is. The house was built by a prominent businessman whose wife refused to occupy it due to its location. He reportedly sold it to Evans in the early 1900s at a very low price and visited the house often.

Evans operated her house of ill fame under the watchful eyes of law enforcement and city administrations until her death in 1949. She bequeathed the home to one of her most loyal employees, who had worked for her for decades. Evans’s family sued to break the will, but a local judge upheld it, and the woman took ownership. The house was demolished along with the rest of the area in 1960.

One of the most notorious of the tenderloin’s taverns stood on First Street at Clark, near the segregated high school for Black students. The address of the saloon was 333 Upper First, but habitués just called it the three Treys. Several times a month, there would be a stabbing or other fight, usually over a woman or gambling losses, as illegal gaming happened upstairs.

From the 1880s until the district, as it was known, was shut down during World War II, the tenderloin flourished with reputed payments to police and administrations that campaigned on the promise to clear the sin district but then realized its value. Police patrolled the area but did not enforce antiprostitution laws. They simply kept the violence at a minimum and arrested any underage visitors or sex workers.

In 1919, the city, under Mayor Benjamin Bosse, opened the first venereal disease clinic near the fashionable McCurdy Hotel on First Street near Locust. Administrations saw to it that the women who worked in the district were examined regularly and received treatment if found to have been infected with one or more diseases. It became known that the city on the Ohio River had the only government-supported prostitution district in the country.

A scandal involving two policemen and the administration of Mayor Frank Griese in 1932 almost spelled the end of the party on High Street, but Griese lost the next election, and the investigation into protection payments ended.

The thought at the time, according to the obituary written about the district as the entire neighborhood faced a wrecking ball in the name of urban renewal, was that the law enforcement of the day felt that keeping all of the vice in one area was easier to manage than if it was widespread in the city, as it later became. It was in this environment—a bifurcated political disposition to vice yet with a Victorian attitude about sex in general—that the first references to homosexuality are found.¹

A roundup of criminal convictions appeared in the January 6, 1887 Evansville Courier showing the following adjudicated cases of sex crimes in 1886:

Evansville had an uneasy relationship with sex. Publicly, polite society turned its head and didn’t look at what was happening in the tenderloin, just as white citizens turned their heads from the severe economic and social deprivations foisted on its African American citizens during this period. White middle-class God-fearing churchgoing Evansville refused to accept what it did not understand.

It was in 1895, during this heyday of sex and scandal, that Evansville came face to face with homosexuality in the person of Oscar Wilde, a locally popular author from Great Britain. The April 1895 trial of Wilde on charges of gross indecency and sodomy with young men at a London male brothel owned by his friend Alfred Taylor prompted much conversation in Evansville, as his works were very popular. After his conviction and sentence to two years’ hard labor by the British court, his books were pulled from the shelves in schools and libraries around the nation and Evansville.²

The editor of the Evansville Journal wrote on his conviction:

Among the good things that have come from the bench are the words used by the judge in London, in sentencing Oscar Wilde and his partner in debauchery, Alfred Taylor, which are worthy of remembering. Such a descent from decency as was developed in the case of these two men could hardly be imagined in a civilized community and much less in the instance of the man Wilde who essayed to lead the world to higher aspirations with his pen. Such a disgusting mess has not been brought to the public notice in years and it is hoped it is the last.³

An Evansville Courier editorial expressed what was probably the opinion of the day in the city about the desired end of anyone