Dance marks gay community’s progress
When she began visiting the Union Cafe after its 1996 opening, Linda Schuler habitually chose a seat next to a window.
“My partner at the time (now her wife) would ask me, `Why do you always want to sit by a window?’” Schuler said of the Short North establishment. “I said, `Because there is one.’”
Columbus may be known as a gay-friendly city today, but it wasn’t always that way.
Schuler, 73, and other older members of the local LGBTQ community can recall the days when gay bars were disguised, when they socialized out of town for fear of being spotted by someone they knew and when they were subjected to police harassment.
“Bars never tended to have windows, because you were afraid people would look in and see you,” said Grandview Heights resident Phil Martin, 61. “And if you had glass, people could throw bricks or rocks through them, as well. So that was not a fun experience.”
To help mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising (considered the birth of the LGBTQ movement in America), organizers of this weekend’s Columbus Pride Festival added an event to commemorate the movement’s history.
They chose a “tea dance” — a way in which gays and lesbians in the 1940s to the early 1960s would hide their gatherings under the guise of an afternoon social dance. If authorities raided the event, attendees dancing with a same-sex partner would quickly grab an opposite-sex partner to avoid harassment or arrest.
“We wanted to have some extra things this year, and this (tea dance) was a way to pay homage to it, sort of a tribute,” said Ryan Scarlata, assistant Pride Festival coordinator.
The event will take place from 4 to 6 p.m. Friday at Brewdog Franklinton.
In recent decades, as laws and attitudes changed, tea dances have morphed into celebratory events, often still held in the afternoons
Actor Jake Borelli, an Upper Arlington native, who will host the Pride Festival Tea Dance
but no longer disguised.
Schuler and others in Columbus say they never attended an original tea dance — the dances were popular before they were born or when they were children — but they have plenty of stories of living a life of secrecy.
“There was one bar on the East Side with a strobe light over the dance floor, and the strobe would come on when the police came so people could get off the dance floor,” said Steve Shellabarger, 74, a Short North resident.
Mark Miller, 69, of Victorian Village, recalled a bar named the Grotto in German Village.
“It was totally fenced, and it was a tall fence,” Miller
said. “They didn’t have windows; they didn’t have signs.”
Some of the fear resulted from laws that were used against gays.
Sodomy, for example, was illegal in Ohio until 1974, and although it applied to heterosexuals as well, it was normally enforced only against homosexuals, according to Susan Becker, general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.
Gays were sometimes charged with importuning, a misdemeanor on the Ohio books until 2002, which outlawed expressing sexual interest unwanted by a member of the same sex.
Beyond the legal ramifications, though, members of the LGBTQ community lived in fear of losing their jobs or being denied housing because of their sexuality.
Schuler, a retired teacher, said that in the 1970s, she never went to gay bars in central Ohio but traveled to Dayton instead.
Miller said he wasn’t sure if younger generations were aware of what he and others went through. He said that members of the Stonewall Columbus “Trailblazers” group (for those 50 and older) have talked about putting together an oral or written history.
Miller might be heartened to hear what Jake Borelli has to say. Borelli, 28, is an Upper Arlington native who now is a successful actor.
Earlier this year, his character on “Grey’s Anatomy,” Dr. Levi Schmitt, came out as gay, and Borelli did publicly, as well. (He had been out to family and friends for years, he said.)
Borelli will be hosting the Pride Festival’s tea dance Friday.
“It’s a testament to how far we’ve come that we can have a tea dance out in the open,” Borelli said. “It’s not lost on me that this has been taken out of the shadows, and we are now given this really beautiful opportunity to celebrate out in the open.”
Scarlata said plans for Friday’s tea dance include the hosts periodically calling out “raid!” at which point everyone will look to dance with someone of the opposite sex.
All is not sweetness and light when it comes to LGBTQ rights, though. Becker points to the fact that Ohio lacks a statewide law barring discrimination on the basis of sexuality (although many cities, such as Columbus, have local ordinances).
“The quality of people’s lives are affected every day by this,” Becker said. “I’ve gotten calls about this for over 30 years, and honestly, the calls I got 30 years ago are not unlike the calls I am getting today.”
But as Borelli mentioned, there is an appreciation of how much more accepting society is today compared to the original “tea dance” era.
“I’m so thrilled to have come this far,” Schuler said. “I can walk down the street in the Short North now, holding hands with my wife (Karla Rothan). We don’t have to hide in corners anymore.”