I went to school at University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky.
So it would have been around 1970, 71.
And it had a gay bar - The Living Room - that I knew I had to get into that gay bar somehow.
I met a guy that was very clever at changing license - driver's license birthdates.
So he worked on mine and made me 21 years old, even though I was only - maybe I was
19 by then.
So I get to go to my first gay bar.
The gay bar was on Main Street - that's where the front door was.
I don't think anyone ever used the front door of that bar because it was on Main Street.
The back faced a parking area which was dark, and that's where everyone parked.
And the first thing that I found out was - I was driving - he instructed me to back the
car into the wall because he said - we didn't have front license plates in those days in
Kentucky, we only had rear license plates - you had to back the license plate up to
the building so that it couldn't be read because police would apparently ride down
behind the gay bar and take down the license numbers and put you on the list of suspected
homosexuals.
This was terrifying to me because the car that I was driving was registered to my father,
whose name is also Michael, just like mine.
So I could see something really terrible would happen, so I would always make sure that that
license plate couldn't be read.
So I go into the gay bar for my first time, and in those days the gay bars were usually
a Paris whorehouse motif, or an English hunt motif, or a Cowboy bunkhouse, you know, that
sort of thing, on the main level.
And then they always had a floor upstairs or downstairs, and whichever one it was was
where the dancing was and the shows, if they happen to have drag shows.
And so it was at The Living Room where I met my first drag queens.
My two best buddies were like the Mutt and Jeff of drag queens.
Wilfred was about, I'd say, 6-foot-4, African American.
Couldn't've weighed more than 150 lbs.
I don't know what it is about tall guys who want to go in drag, but always, you know,
it seems like the taller you are, the more likely it is you're going to want to be
in drag.
And then his little buddy, who I think's name was Leo, was about 5-4, also African
American.
And they were just - I was fascinated by these two because I'd never met any drag queens,
and in or out of drag, they were a hoot.
So I remember one time when Wilfred said he had something very special planned where he
was doing a show.
He said that I had to be there that night, so I showed up that night.
It was probably 1970 and the Broadway show "Pearly" was on Broadway, a musical.
And there was a number from it called - I hadn't heard it before - called "I Got
Love" that Melba Moore sang.
So Wilfred's on stage with a tiny spotlight just on his head and starts out very quiet,
very slow, "He thinks I'm afraid," you know, it's very soft.
And all of a sudden, it's one of those songs, it's Broadway, one of those songs that just
blows out into this, "I got love, I got love, I got love."
I had never seen such a performance before.
I had seen drag queens perform and they were just up there lip-syncing, but this was a
flat-out performance.
It changed my idea of what drag performances could be.
He was very good.
So that was a fun experience that I had with Wilfred and his "I Got Love" performance.
I also learned from them the bane of existence for a drag queen in those days, especially
if you're a big drag queen like Wilfred, was getting shoes that fit.
Nowadays I'm sure it's easy with the internet and that, but big feet, little women's shoes.
I learned the terms "shrimp" and "biscuit."
"Shrimp" was when your foot was too big and it curled over the ends of the shoes and
it looked like shrimp.
And then, with the sandal back, with the heel that hung over the back, and that was "biscuit."
And to this day, I've never forgotten those terms because they're so descriptive, you
know, "shrimp" and "biscuit."
And they would talk about each other, "Oh she's giving us much shrimp and biscuit."
But they did - my drag queen association in those days really kind of open my eyes to
a world and accepting people in the gay world who were so different from the way I was,
and appreciating them and enjoying them and just, again, widening my scope of what I was
comfortable with.
Often times, I hear, you know, in the gay world, "Oh, this person's too nelly."
I think sometimes, within the gay world, we tend to group maybe a little bit too closely
together with certain subgroups within the gay world.
I'm so happy that my horizons were expanded at a young age and I came to realize that
being gay is not monolithic.
We're not all the same.
The same-sex attraction, maybe, the same - but within that, there's so many different types.
Watch a gay pride parade and you can see that.
Every type you can imagine.
And so I think that it's - the important part of that story to me is just the level
of acceptance of other gay people who aren't like me.
So I think that's probably the most important thing.
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