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Pride, activist groups, the gay press and more take form in wake of Stonewall riots
Bumps and hurdles loomed in most areas as movement came of age in ‘70s and beyond
The most impactful legacy of Stonewall isn’t what happened those few nights, but what grew out of it — annual Pride celebrations, of course, but also the gay press, a proliferation of rights groups, de-classification of homosexuality as mental illness, disco, sexual lib, AIDS and more. Whole books have been written on each of these topics, for anyone interested in further study.
THE BIRTH OF PRIDE
Some of the people who rioted starting on June 28, 1969, once things settled, started to organize and a group called the Stonewall Veterans Association, which is still in existence, formed.
In November 1969, Craig Rodwell (1940-1993), owner of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop (the country’s first gay bookstore), along with his partner Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy and Linda Rhodes, proposed a New York City march to commemorate the riots. He introduced a resolution at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organization (ERCHO) in Philadelphia.
“We propose that a demonstration be held annually on the last Saturday in June in New York City to commemorate the 1969 spontaneous demonstrations on Christopher Street and this demonstration be called Christopher Street Liberation Day,” the resolution said. “No dress or age regulations shall be made for this demonstration.”
The concept of Pride being held in other cities simultaneously was ingrained in the concept from the outset.
“We also propose that we contact homophile organizations throughout the country and suggest that they hold parallel demonstrations on that day. We propose a nationwide show of support,” the resolution stated.
Christopher Street Liberation Day was held June 28, 1970, the first gay Pride march in the U.S. It covered 51 blocks to Central Park with a parade permit reluctantly delivered just two hours before the scheduled start time. Marches were simultaneously held in Los Angeles and Chicago. In 1971, it had spread to Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee and three European cities as well. Pride in Washington started in 1975.
Since 1984, the parade and related events in New York have been produced and organized by Heritage of Pride, a volunteer, non-partisan LGBT group.
THE GAY PRESS
The gay press didn’t begin with Stonewall. The earliest known publication had an inauspicious start. In 1947, an underworked secretary trying to look busy, typed, stapled and distributed 12 copies of Vice Versa, which she dubbed “America’s gayest magazine.” Since then, thousands have followed in her steps producing about 2,600 — at their height — publications ranging from weekly newspapers to more radical tabloids to glossy monthly magazines.
Seminal pre-Stonewall publications included Ladder, Vector and the Los Angeles Advocate.
The number of these publications exploded after Stonewall. It was seen as necessary as even the most liberal alternative press of the day — in New York, The Village Voice, refused to print the word gay. “Throughout the ‘70s, people who depended solely on mainstream media for news would hardly have been aware of the gay rights movement,” writes author/historian Eric Marcus in his 2002 book “Making Gay History.” “With a few notable exceptions, the television networks, daily newspapers and newsmagazines gave little coverage to gay issues.”
“After the apocalyptic Stonewall impulse, the press erupted in so many directions that it is impossible to document when each publication was founded, how long it existed or who edited it,” writes Rodger Streitmatter, author of “Unspeakable: the Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America.”
“Our Own Voices: A Directory of Lesbian and Gay Periodicals” listed 150 publications by 1972, Streitmatter writes.
One of the most influential was called simply GAY, started in December 1969 by gay press veterans (and partners) Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke, who’d covered Stonewall. It soon became, according to Streitmatter, the “newspaper of record for gay America.”
Veteran activist Lilli Vincenz, who wrote a lesbian column for GAY, is quoted in “Unspeakable” as having said, “It was the newspaper of the day. If you were gay and you wanted to find out what was going on in the world, you turned to GAY.”
It sold 20,000 copies of its first issue (at 40 cents per copy) and reached a monthly circulation of 25,000 by its second issue, figures that took the Advocate two years to build. Within six weeks, two other New York-based newspapers were launched — Come Out! and Gay Power. GAY continued until Clarke was murdered in 1975.
Streitmatter writes later in the book that the publications “that survived the aftershocks of Stonewall were those with a combination of calm voices and stable finances,” citing GAY in New York and The Advocate in Los Angeles as leaders.
But two months before GAY was launched, in October 1969, Vincenz and a small group of men and women met in the basement of a Connecticut Avenue building to work on the first issue of the Gay Blade. The monthly, mimeographed one-sheet issued by a volunteer staff contained three columns of news, community notices and a small advertisement for someone who wanted to sell a car, writes author Edward Alwood in his 1996 book “Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media.”
“By distributing copies at the city’s gay and lesbian bars, they quickly established the Blade as a source of valuable information that was not available from any other source,” Alwood writes.
Editor Nancy Tucker told Alwood they printed “things that we thought were important to the mental health and social welfare of other people like us,” Alwood quotes her as having said. “Periodically we ran warnings of blackmailers who hung around Dupont Circle or the gay bars. We wrote about rough cops. There were plenty of military and government workers who were undergoing some type of security investigation and all of those people needed to know about their rights. These were a heavy orientation for us.”
It was the first of a new generation of gay papers that included Gay Community News in Boston, NewsWest in Los Angeles, Gay News in Pittsburgh and GayLife in Chicago, Alwood writes.
“Unlike the early homophile press, which stressed identity and cooperation, this second generation concentrated almost solely on political change and resistance,” Alwood writes.
The Gay Blade was rechristened the Washington Blade in 1980 and went to weekly publication in 1983. It’s the oldest continually operating LGBT newspaper in the country. It celebrates its 50th anniversary in October.
REGIONAL GAY RIGHTS GROUPS
Although groups like the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis had been around since the ‘50s, things became more emboldened after Stonewall. The Gay Liberation Front was the first organization to use gay in its name. Previously, all “homophile” (as they were known) groups purposefully did not.
Legendary early activists Barbara Gittings and Kay Lahusen were vacationing on Fire Island when they heard about Stonewall. Upon returning to the city in September, they began attending meetings of the Gay Liberation Front and encountered a much different group of people and ethos.
“They were huge meetings, it was the best theater in town,” Lahusen is quoted as having said in “Making Gay History.” “This was the heyday of radical chic … and here I was this plain Jane dinosaur from the old gay movement.”
Gittings said there was zero acknowledgement of the pre-Stonewall efforts.
“Suddenly here were all these people with absolutely no track record in the movement who were telling us, in effect, not only what we should do but what we should think,” she’s quoted as having said in “Making Gay History.” “The arrogance of it was really what upset me.”
Gittings said she and Frank Kameny were even asked at one Philadelphia meeting who they were and what they were doing there.
“For once, I think even Frank was dumbfounded,” Gittings is quoted as having said. “As if we owed them an explanation.”
Gittings said right after Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front and the Mattachine Society, which some perceived as having been slow to respond to the riots, were the only two active groups.
“Mattacine was so stuffy and its day was over,” Lahusen said in “Making Gay History.” “These organizations seem to have a built-in life expectancy.”
“Mattachine wasn’t up to managing the lively response to the Stonewall riots and GLF came in to fill the void,” Gittings told author Marcus.
The Gay Liberation Front (a name used by multiple groups over the years), however, disbanded after just four months when members were unable to agree on operating procedure. In December 1969, some people who had attended Front meetings but left frustrated formed Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), an “orderly” group to be focused entirely on gay issues. A D.C. chapter had formed by 1971. It became the Gay & Lesbian Activist Alliance in the ‘80s, and continues to this day.
Many of the main groups with major name recognition today started later. The National Gay Task Force (now the National LGBTQ Task Force) started in 1973. Two groups merged to form the largest, Human Rights Campaign, in the early ‘80s.
Many of the state groups came much later, uniting around the marriage issue. The California Alliance for Pride and Equality was founded in 1999 and only became Equality California in 2003. The now-dissolved Empire State Pride Agenda was founded in 1990 through a merger of two earlier groups. By 2005, it was the largest state lobbying group.
AIDS
In a roundabout way, Stonewall, in time, also brought attention to the disparate health care needs of LGBT people. That’s the contention of Perry N. Halkitis, dean of Rutgers School of Public Health and author of the new book “Out in Time: From Stonewall to Queer; How Gay Men Came of Age Across the Generations.”
“The riots allowed gay people to say ‘we exist’ and create a demand for health equity,” Halkitis said in a recent interview with tapinto.net. “The civil disobedience of Stonewall served as a catalyst to the activism of the AIDS era, which in turn has contributed to the foundations of how public health today emphasizes social justice and health equity.”
Although initially about wholly separate issues, Stonewall started a movement that was eventually “catapulted” 13 years later when HIV hit, he says.
“As the riots framed the basis for the recognition of gay people as viable members of the population, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s created the circumstances by which they would come to demand that the government and society attend to their well-being,” Halkitis said in the tapinto.net interview. “Before then, gay people kept silent and were invisible to their doctors, who were unaware they were gay or did not understand the mental health and drug issues they were facing. The AIDS crisis shined a light on the fact that there was this population that needed specific health services beyond what was given to the general population.”
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, deputy commissioner for the Division of Disease Control of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said in a New York Times interview last week that the histories of Stonewall and AIDS are inextricably linked and have affected what’s still happening today.
“It’s so critical that you had an uprising, and it became not just folks being downtrodden by their system but actually then fighting back,” Daskalakis told the Times. “I feel that the fighting spirit now is like the ACT UP experience in New York. There was a feeling that it was part of LGBTQ rights to ask for faster, better support and funding to fight HIV. … I think the legacy of activism remains powerful decades later.”
As the number of deaths soared, gay and lesbian people and gay rights organizations redirected their energies, Marcus writes in “Making Gay History.”
“Many thousands of gay people who had never participated in gay rights efforts were motivated to join the fight against AIDS,” he writes. “New organizations joined existing ones to provide care for the sick and dying, conduct AIDS education programs, lobby local and federal governments for increased funding for AIDS research, pressure medical researchers and drug companies to become more aggressive in their search for treatments and a cure and fight discrimination against people with AIDS and those infected with HIV.”
AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed the diagnosis of “homosexuality” from the second edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
In the mid-20th century, some homophile activist groups accepted psychiatry’s illness model as an alternative to societal condemnation of homosexuality’s supposed “immorality” and were willing to work with professionals who sought to “treat” or “cure” them, Jack Drescher writes in his 2015 study “Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality.” Other activists, however, forcefully rejected the pathological model as a major contributor to the stigma and in the wake of the Stonewall riots, brought modern sex research theories to the attention of the APA.
Believing psychiatric theories to be a major contributor to anti-gay social stigma, activists disrupted the 1970 and 1971 annual APA meetings.
Although, Drescher writes, there were rumblings happening within the world of psychiatry that helped the gay cause, “the most significant catalyst for diagnostic change was gay activism.”
Kameny and Gittings spoke on a 1971 APA panel entitled “Gay is Good.” They returned in ’72, joined by Dr. John Fryer, who appeared anonymously as a “homosexual psychiatrist.”
APA’s Nomenclature Committee eventually recommended removing homosexuality when it determined it unique among the supposed mental disorders in that in and of itself, it did not cause distress nor was it associated with generalized impairment in social effectiveness of functioning.
It wasn’t a completely cut-and-dried affair; the psychiatric world continued grappling with the controversial decision for years, Drescher writes in his scholarly article, but it was “the beginning of the end of organized medicine’s official participation in the social stigmatization of homosexuality.”
Many people, both inside and outside the psychology profession, claimed the APA had succumbed to pressure from gay activists and while it was true that many gay men and lesbians had exerted pressure, there were also respected psychiatrists within the organization who worked to affect the change, Marcus writes in “Making Gay History.” One was Dr. Judd Marmor, a Los Angeles psychiatrist.
“We didn’t merely remove homosexuals from the category of illness. We stated that there was no reason why a priori a gay man or woman could not be just as healthy, just as effective, just as law abiding and just as capable of functioning as any heterosexual,” Marmor is quoted as having said in Marcus’s book. “Furthermore, we asserted that laws that discriminated against them in housing or in employment were unjustified. So it was a total statement.”
Shortly thereafter, the American Psychological Association and the American Bar Association came out in support of gays.
“It was an important step that we took,” Marmor said in “Making Gay History.”
DISCO
Disco music, a type of dance music and the subculture around it that emerged in the ‘70s from the U.S. urban nightlife scene, is inextricably linked to post-Stonewall gay life.
Its “four-on-the-floor” beats, syncopated basslines and shimmery instrumentation flourished in venues popular with black, Latinx and gay nightlife lovers mostly in major cities on the East Coast at the dawn of the ‘70s. The most popular disco artists were Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, the Bee Gees, Chic, KC and the Sunshine Band, the Village People, Thelma Houston and others. Pop acts like Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, who’d had hits in other genres, jumped on the disco bandwagon with success.
In his essay “In Defense of Disco,” gay writer Richard Dyer writes that disco gave gay men a mainstream musical genre they could embrace.
“All my life, I’ve liked the wrong music,” he writes. “I never liked Elvis and rock ’n roll; I always preferred Rosemary Clooney. And since I became a socialist, I’ve often felt virtually terrorized by the prestige of rock and folk on the left. … Disco is more than just a form of music, although certainly music is at the heart of it. Disco is also kinds of dancing, club, fashion, film — in a word, a certain sensibility.”
Thematically, Dyer (whose essay is included in the 1995 anthology “Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture”), writes that disco has both rhythmic and lyrical appeal to gay men.
“No wonder (Diana) Ross is (was?) so important in gay male scene culture for she both reflects what that culture takes to be an inevitable reality — that relationships don’t last — and at the same time celebrates it, validates it.”
“Our music owes so much to the gay clubs that first nurtured it, which in turn helped to create safe spaces that allowed a marginalized population the freedom to be themselves,” writes Ned Shepard in a 2016 Cuepoint essay.
He cites a comment from Barry Walters from Billboard.
“The history of dance music in America and the history of LGBT folks — particularly those of color — coming together to create a cultural utopia was and still is inseparable. Neither would have happened without the other,” Walters is quoted as having said.
SEXUAL LIBERATION
Sexual liberation in the pre-AIDS era for lesbian and gay activists was a heated topic. Gay men especially enjoyed dabbling liberally without any of the baggage sexually adventurous women — despite this being the era of Helen Gurley Brown and her landmark 1962 book “Sex and the Single Girl” — faced, but the concern that gay rights would be overly associated with a free sex narrative was contentious and variations of that argument continue to this day.
The 1980 William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”)-directed movie “Cruising” was a nadir of the conundrum.
“There was … a political and ideological split in the gay community about whether or not it was valuable or necessary to show the leather and sadomasochism aspect of the community on screen,” recalls “The Celluloid Closet” author Vito Russo in “Making Gay History.” “There were middle-of-the-road gays who found this kind of thing horrifying. Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you were necessarily acquainted with the more far-out aspects of gay sexuality, especially in the 1970s. There were a lot of gay men, and certainly lesbians, in this country who would have been deeply shocked by the sex bars in New York. … Suddenly the issue became, ‘Do we want to present this to the world as the way gay people are?’ The public was not going to distinguish between one group of gay people and another.”
Nancy Walker (not the “Rhoda” actress) writes of her volunteer work in the early ‘70s at the Boston-based weekly Gay Community News in “Making Gay History.”
“We wanted gay liberation but what did that mean,” she writes. “Did it mean equal rights? To me, that’s all I ever wanted. On the other hand, some of them wanted to be able to fuck in the parks. Well, that’s wonderful, but if they did, I wouldn’t take my children there either. How far is sexual freedom supposed to go? Are you allowed to have intercourse on the street corner because you feel like doing it? How does that make you different from a dog? What happens to civilization when people lose all their socialization and have sex, where and with whom they please? We have to have a little bit of self control, a little discipline. I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in sexual freedom. I’m interested in being able to live.”
Ultimately things somewhat self calibrated — AIDS brought a day of reckoning writ large, it didn’t manage to kill off gay bathhouse culture and, of course, antiretroviral meds and PrEP were game changers in the AIDS war. But it’s not all gay “Pollyanna.” Entrapment of cruising gay men remains a problem. As recently as 2015 in Rehoboth Beach, Del., of all places, 12 men were arrested for public lewdness by undercover police officers.
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Acclaimed Chef Patrick O’Connell’s memoir reveals the arc of a life well lived
Overcoming obstacles to serve everyone from Jerry Falwell to Queen Elizabeth
Renowned three-Michelin-star Chef Patrick O’Connell says food and wine hold a unique ability to bring people together. Indeed, he has served everyone from right-wing zealot Jerry Falwell to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth during his decades at the beloved Inn at Little Washington in rural Virginia.
O’Connell’s compelling new memoir, “Main, Middle & Gay” is out Sept. 15 from Celadon Books and offers a deeply personal account of how he transformed his love of food and affinity for the finer things into an iconic inn and restaurant that draws diners from around the world nearly 50 years after it opened in 1978.
O’Connell is launching the book with an event on Sept. 18 at Lisner Auditorium featuring Chef José Andrés and former Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema. He met Andrés just after Andrés began to work in D.C. and was “on fire with ideas.”
“We sat next to each other at Charlie Trotter’s restaurant and the meal went on for hours and we had a natural rapport,” O’Connell told the Blade in a recent interview. “The chemistry will be fun and lively and unpredictable and exciting. I think we’re all different personalities and we’ll compliment each other.”
O’Connell said he’s excited to hold the event at Lisner.
“I studied theater at Catholic University and transferred to GWU so it’s a coming home party and Lisner has been there since I was a kid and it was always like D.C.’s Carnegie Hall. It feels like going home to my old stomping grounds.”
O’Connell hopes to bring the book to life visually at the event and he has produced a short film that will be screened.
The book traces the self-taught O’Connell’s remarkable journey from rural paperboy and short-order cook to proprietor of one of the world’s most celebrated restaurants and Relais & Châteaux hotels. Along the way we learn about the many challenges he faced — from distrustful and homophobic local residents in Washington, Va., to an expensive, public “divorce” from his longtime romantic and business partner, Reinhardt Lynch.
“It parallels the evolution of American cuisine over 50 years,” he said. “It’s a rare perspective to be in the trenches for that long.”
O’Connell writes candidly about his relationship with Lynch. The two opened the restaurant together — O’Connell running the kitchen and Lynch handling the business. But O’Connell’s accolades and growing notoriety led to jealousy that triggered a protracted falling out and dissolution of both their personal relationship and business partnership. Lynch, as recalled by O’Connell, attempted to secretly sell his 50 percent of the business but ultimately agreed to sell his stake back to O’Connell for a reported $17.5 million. “The Washington Post ran with it as a salacious celebrity divorce story and included all the financial details,” he writes.
After taking full control of the Inn just as the recession of 2008 hit, O’Connell writes of the scrutiny of guests who assumed Lynch’s absence would lead to a slip in quality. “The place couldn’t be just as good as ever. It would have to be better.”
What happened next proved a royal opportunity as Queen Elizabeth visited Virginia to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the founding of the state and O’Connell was asked to cater a reception. This chapter is filled with juicy details and behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the pressures of cooking for the Queen. The subsequent media attention proved lucrative for the Inn and photos of the Queen’s visit still hang in the Inn.
There are references to O’Connell’s sexual orientation throughout the book and he doesn’t shy from addressing his long relationship with Lynch or the resistance the couple encountered when they settled in sleepy Washington, Va.
“I didn’t realize that I was walking into a prejudiced hornet’s nest that I wasn’t fully prepared for and there was a great deal of hostility in part because they didn’t understand anything about what we were attempting to do here so everything about us and our desire to run a fine restaurant was foreign to them,” O’Connell told the Blade. “The irony of a place opening in the center of town of 150 people and at that time the word ‘gay’ wasn’t used here. It was as if they didn’t have space in their consciousness for such a thing. We were regarded as counter culture people.
“The restaurant became a success almost overnight and the locals couldn’t understand what the buzz was about,” O’Connell continued. “They thought food is food and why would anyone drive 60 miles out here for food. They became resentful of the ‘outsiders’ who came. Two outsiders were opening a restaurant and drawing other outsiders out here to a place where there weren’t many jobs. There was resentment on many levels by some — not all. They thought it would go away.”
But O’Connell said he never made his sexuality the focus of his work. Rather, he wanted to use food to bring people of all backgrounds together.
“I never made a point or attempted to make that a central focus on my work,” he said. “I felt that I had found my spot in the universe where I belonged, I loved living here, it was a sanctuary.”
O’Connell’s insistence that everyone is welcome has sometimes created tension and negative press, as when President Trump presented him with a National Humanities Medal that brought criticism from some progressives.
“We see a fascinating clientele here; we don’t judge and we’re not political,” he said. “When people come they are entitled to our hospitality.”
One of those people was televangelist and notorious homophobe Jerry Falwell, who made a reservation at the Inn years ago. O’Connell’s instruction to the staff was to treat Falwell like any other guest.
“We have an image of someone who maybe we would think would be hostile or judgmental and they often surprise us,” O’Connell said. “We held our breath and here’s Falwell working the tables and saying this is the best meal I’ve ever had, aren’t these two guys great and we thought he’s doing PR for us and he’s supposed to be the devil.”
O’Connell said he sees that dynamic play out night after night at the Inn. One of the most conservative national Republican figures, he said, is a regular and Vice President JD Vance dined at the Inn recently. Focusing on the food and hospitality for all constitutes O’Connell’s brand of activism.
“Food does bring people together,” he said. “And you’re doing your part in erasing preconceived judgements.”
He said he and his team did more to advance understanding and acceptance by focusing on hospitality than if “we were out marching.”
As evidence, he said, there are more and more gay couples moving to the area and the town’s mayor, Joe Whited, is gay.
“We’re the biggest employer in the county and largest taxpayer,” he added. “The Inn pays the town almost $1 million per year and property values are getting to be like Palm Beach. And that wasn’t a goal it was a byproduct of doing something as well as it could be done.”
But the book isn’t hagiography. O’Connell revisits traumatic events, like childhood bullies who attacked him for wearing a Little Red Riding Hood costume for Halloween and a sexual assault he endured as a young teenager aboard a bus.
“I don’t know why I couldn’t call out for help or try to make the man stop,” O’Connell writes of the incident. “I didn’t want to call attention to the situation and felt completely implicated. Once it began there was no stopping it.”
Interestingly, O’Connell told the Blade that one of the things he learned in writing the book is how little he’s changed since childhood.
“People tend to lock away a lot of childhood memories for good reason and in a book you’re reliving them and bringing them to life,” he said. “And my revelation is that I don’t think I’ve changed much since I was six and I think most people’s identity is pretty developed in their very early years and their personality is clear. What amused me most is I’m doing the same things now that I did in miniature as a five and six year old.”
As for popular TV shows about the restaurant business, O’Connell says he doesn’t watch them.
“It’s fake,” he said. “There are much more colorful characters and it’s much more exciting in real life. Nobody seems capable of capturing that. So maybe this [book] will have the effect of doing that and showing what it takes.”
O’Connell said the books and stories he most enjoys reading are those that start in childhood and carry through until late in life. He has certainly delivered that in “Main, Middle & Gay,” a moving, fearless memoir filled with the unexpected and natural drama that revisits a uniquely American life.
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The mastery of love
The world knows Eric Anderson as Billy Porter’s partner, but in Rehoboth Beach, he has a story entirely his own
The world knows Eric Anderson as Billy Porter’s partner. In Rehoboth Beach, Del., he has a life — and a story — entirely his own.
My first time with Eric Anderson was hot — very hot. Before he arrived, I sat waiting, overthinking everything. When he finally appeared in a loose-fitting T-shirt and purple shorts, I understood why he attracts attention. Eric is the kind of man who changes the energy of a room simply by entering it.
After a quick hello, we got right to it. Techno pulsed through the room as Eric told me how to move, where to place my hands, when to breathe. My heart pounded. My muscles ached. I bent, twisted, and stretched while sweat ran down my back and burned my eyes. I didn’t bother wiping it away.
To be clear, Eric and I were not alone. Five other people were with us — and the yoga studio at SoulFire Collective in Rehoboth Beach was heated to 87 degrees.
“If you are always racing toward the next moment, what happens to the one you’re in?” Eric asked, opening his power yoga class and inviting us to leave whatever had followed us through the door and surrender to the present. Surrender did not come easily. At 58, I’ve done enough yoga to know the difference between discomfort and imminent death. Halfway through Eric’s relentless flow, the distinction began to blur.
A playlist of techno and remixed pop — including “Live Like You Were Dying” — carried us from one demanding pose to the next. Eric moved among the mats with the energy of a nightclub DJ and the calm of someone who trusted our bodies to go further than our minds believed possible. Nearly an hour later, when the music softened and I collapsed onto my back in savasana, he laid a cool cloth across my forehead. I exhaled — relieved, and maybe a little disappointed, that my first time with Eric was over.
At the end of my mat, a handwritten note congratulated me on my first class and invited me back — a small benediction after the storm. Then Eric closed the class by repeating the question with which he’d opened. For a man whose relationship with actor and singer Billy Porter has drawn him unexpectedly into the public eye, it sounded less like a yoga mantra than a personal creed.
The next time I meet Eric, there is air conditioning and caffeine. We are at Starbucks, where I deliberately order the largest drinks available, as though volume alone might buy me more time. He chooses a matcha, and I order herbal tea. My heart is pounding again, faster than the soft rock drifting from the speakers above us. Although I’ve already spent more than an hour with Eric, I know almost nothing about the man I’m about to interview.
Neither, it seems, does anyone else.
Celebrity outlets offer a handful of biographical details: a Rehoboth Beach teacher and yoga instructor with a master’s degree from Columbia University. Gay publications have been less restrained. One introduced him as Billy Porter’s “total hot stud,” called him “a snacc,” and praised his ability to “rock a Speedo.” Queerty distilled Eric’s identity to five words: “Porter is dating a teacher.”
All of it tells me how the world sees him. None of it tells me who he is.
I know from our text exchanges that Eric is slammed for time. He is scheduled to travel to New York later that day and fly to WorldPride Amsterdam the following afternoon. Billy is among the headliners for the opening-night Unity Concert and is also slated to perform at the Wedding Party XXL alongside KI/KI, Bimini, and the Vengaboys. Eric still has to pack. This, I’m beginning to understand, is part of loving someone famous: there is almost always an itinerary, another city, and a specific time and place Billy needs to be. Even here, with two untouched drinks between us, the clock is ticking.
As soon as we sit down, I open my laptop, ready to get to work. My mind is focused on the list of questions I’ve prepared, and I’ve already anticipated the shape of most of his responses. Then I look up and see Eric sitting perfectly still, smiling, and taking in the moment. He hasn’t even taken a sip of his matcha yet.
I quietly close my laptop and breathe.
Within minutes, the interview softens into a conversation.
Eric earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Delaware and a master’s in public school leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University. He began his career teaching mathematics before moving into school administration, eventually serving as vice president of the Charter School of Wilmington and head of school at Sussex Academy. Today, he teaches mathematics and social studies in the Cape Henlopen School District. He also coaches soccer and leads yoga classes at SoulFire Collective in Rehoboth Beach.
His return to the classroom was deliberate. Eric knows some people assumed there must be a story behind his leaving administration—that he had done something wrong or that teaching represented a demotion.
“I want to make it clear that I went back to teaching by choice,” he says.
As a child, Eric played school. Teaching has always felt natural to him, less like an occupation than an expression of who he is. Administration was different.
“It felt like work,” he says. “It wasn’t where my passion was, and it didn’t bring me joy. Going back into the classroom was simply me choosing joy.”
The more Eric talks, the clearer it becomes that teaching is not merely a job but a vocation. His mother is white and his father is Black, and growing up biracial was not always easy. “I saw the best and the worst of both,” he tells me. Those experiences helped shape his desire to become a teacher — to be the kind of person who could make a meaningful difference in a young person’s life.
Just then, Eric glances over his shoulder and locks eyes with someone across the room. He waves and flashes what is quickly becoming his signature smile. My first thought is that someone has recognized him as Billy Porter’s partner.
I’m wrong. It’s one of his former students.
Inevitably, our conversation turns to love — and to Billy. I’ve made it clear that I’m here to write about Eric, not Billy Porter. But separating the two entirely would be as artificial as defining Eric only by their relationship. Billy is now an essential part of his story.
Eric met Billy at a Christmas party hosted by mutual friends who had been trying to introduce them all night. It wasn’t easy — the party was crowded, and the two men never quite crossed paths. Eric stayed for the afterparty, where a friend nudged him and nodded toward the room: Billy was looking his way. Romance never crossed his mind.
Eventually, they started talking. Eric has never had much patience for small talk, and he wasn’t interested in cataloging which celebrities Billy knew. He skipped it entirely and went straight for the deeper questions — what Billy believed, how he saw the world, what mattered to him. They ended up at the kitchen table, trading life philosophies until 5 a.m.
What struck Eric most wasn’t the conversation’s length. It was its depth. Billy wasn’t who he expected. Neither was the conversation. By the time the sun was coming up, Eric was less surprised that they’d talked all night than by how much, it turned out, they had in common.
They had dinner the following evening, and Billy invited Eric to spend the weekend with him in New York. There, Billy took him to see Nicole Scherzinger in “Sunset Boulevard.” Right before the show started, he casually introduced Eric to a friend named Katy. Back in their seats, Eric asked how Billy knew her.
“BITCH,” Billy replied, “that is Miss K-A-T-Y P-E-R-R-Y!”
For all the glamour surrounding their courtship, Eric describes the foundation of their relationship in decidedly spiritual terms. His favorite book is don Miguel Ruiz’s The Mastery of Love, which explores how fear, expectation, and the need for approval can distort relationships. Its philosophy closely resembles Eric’s own.
On the surface, Eric and Billy inhabit different worlds. Eric is a deeply spiritual teacher rooted in a small coastal Delaware town. Billy is a celebrated actor and performer whose larger-than-life persona commands stages around the world. But when I ask Eric how the relationship works, he doesn’t hesitate.
“I know that I can be my authentic self with him, and he can be his with me,” he says. “We love each other unconditionally.”
The words could sound rehearsed. Coming from Eric, they don’t.
The red carpets, famous faces, and international travel are not what matter most.
“It’s all about the people,” he explains. “I love Billy’s family and friends, and he loves mine.”
Authenticity surfaces repeatedly in our conversation — not as an abstract ideal, but as Eric’s determination to trust what feels right for him, even when other people may not understand it. I tell him about growing up in Pittsburgh and spending much of my life trying to fit the person I was into the person the world expected me to be. Eric listens intently, then pauses before responding.
“Fuck the system.”
It is blunt, funny, and entirely consistent with the man sitting across from me. Dating Billy may have dramatically increased the number of strangers who have opinions about Eric, but it hasn’t increased the number whose opinions matter to him. He is remarkably unconcerned with what people he doesn’t know think — or say — about him. The attention is new. His response to it is not.
For Eric, authenticity isn’t about asking the world for permission to be yourself. It’s about deciding that permission was never the world’s to give.
That instinct—to look inward rather than outward for permission — predates Billy.
Eric initially turned to yoga for a practical reason: he wanted to improve his physical performance on the soccer field. It didn’t take long for him to realize that something else was happening. Yoga was strengthening his body, but it was also grounding him.
Over time, the physical practice became inseparable from the mental one. The poses, the heat, even the strength required to hold his body in place became less important than learning how to quiet the noise around him, stay present, and listen to himself. The man who had pushed me through an hour of sweat and discomfort wasn’t simply teaching people how to move their bodies. He was asking them to practice something he had learned to do himself.
That sense of being grounded has become particularly important in a relationship that often requires two people to live very different lives. Eric is quick to point out that he and Billy have separate careers, separate ambitions, and goals entirely their own. Neither expects the other to abandon an individual life simply because they have chosen to build a relationship together.
When Billy left for London to star in “Cabaret,” distance became part of their routine. They FaceTimed every day, a practice they continue whenever they are apart.
“I tell Billy everything,” Eric says.
Being authentic with Billy doesn’t require the two men to become more alike. If anything, the opposite seems true. They are comfortable following their own career paths, living separate lives when circumstances require it, and giving each other the freedom to pursue what matters individually. Then they come back together — not because either has put his own life on hold, but because they have chosen to share those lives with each other.
When we finally look at the time, nearly 90 minutes have passed. Eric still needs to pack. New York is waiting, Amsterdam after that, and somewhere there is undoubtedly an itinerary telling Billy exactly where he needs to be and when.
But for a while, neither of us was racing toward the next moment.
We were fully inside the one we were in.
a&e features
What ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ can still teach us
Producer David Collins on lasting impact of hit series
It’s hard to imagine where LGBTQ+ television would be without “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” the trailblazing reality series that premiered in 2003.
Each episode of this Emmy-winning show saw a group of gays converge on a struggling man — the titular straight guy — and offer nonstop wit while organizing his endlessly messy life. This program about a group of homosexual helpers took the world by storm, furthering the love of gay television begun by shows like “Will and Grace” but bringing it into the growing medium of reality TV. Of course, it wasn’t perfect; “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” often cast its experts less as multi-faceted queer folks and more as sources of early 2000s gay jokes. But despite these pitfalls, it’s undeniable that the original program explored the realities of being gay in a way audiences had never seen before. It was a monumental piece of LGBTQ+ representation, and its success is largely owed to the man who fought to get this show made: producer David Collins.
Collins spoke with the Blade from his Los Angeles home, where he’s spent the past few years living with his husband and his two daughters. David spoke fondly of his many years in the industry, detailing how it feels to be such a huge part of LGBTQ+ history. He explained, however, that he didn’t initially set out to alter how queer people were seen on television. “I never went out to make gay television,” said the producer. “I went out to tell great stories.”
“I’m a hillbilly from Ohio, and I thought I was going to be an editor,” David laughed, looking back on his career. “I interned at the Cincinnati Film Office, and I showed up to work my very first day, and the film commissioner was like, ‘Get to the airport right now and pick [someone] up. Don’t talk to them.’ Well, I ended up picking up Jodie Foster.” Collins raved about this car ride that changed his life, with the pair becoming friends and Foster pushing him to become a producer who puts their own media out into the world. Eventually, he did just that, and after learning about the wild new genre that was reality TV, he pitched a series to Bravo: “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”
“I was obsessed with Esquire magazine, and they had five categories: fashion, grooming, interior design, culture, food, and wine. So I gave them each a gay, and the Fab Five were born!” Collins said, describing how viewers quickly fell in love with the concept and earned the program four seasons and an Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program. He spoke about how proud he felt creating a show that centered real gay people, not characters in a story, remembering, “To stand in the middle of Times Square and look up and see this massive billboard with the original Queer Eye guys…it wasn’t even a dream come true, because it wasn’t a dream I had even fathomed.”
With his series, people were watching actual gay men and learning the realities of a queer culture that had always been portrayed as a danger to society. Collins tearfully recounted hearing about queer people using the show as a way to connect with their family, saying, “What I’m most proud of that’s come out of Queer Eye [are] the conversations that that series has allowed to have people around their kitchen tables with little boys in Ohio like me who were scared to death that they were going to burn in hell because their pastor was telling them that they were a sinner.”
Now, for all of its trailblazing, the program wasn’t wholly positive; the show’s focus on the central ‘straight guy’ meant it rarely delved into the lives of its Fab Five. Collins regretted that lack of depth but understood that earlier audiences weren’t accustomed to such a nuanced look into queerness — that would have to wait for the reboot.
When “Queer Eye” came out in 2018, audiences were introduced to not only a new Fab Five, but a whole new format (that didn’t rely on a straight person). Now, the series would assist queer folks and allies alike, spotlighting these individuals as well as the queer experts helping them improve their lives. The show has been applauded for its amazing makeovers, but where it truly stands out is its representation, offering a look into individuals across the country and the struggles — along with the immense joys — of being queer in America today.
Fans were disappointed to hear that “Queer Eye” would be ending after its 10th season, but David stressed that they wouldn’t have to be sad for long. “What I will say to you is this: hang tight,” he teased. “There’s yet another version of ‘Queer Eye’ to come, and we’re working on that now.” In the meantime, Collins is continuing his work with new shows like the “House of Stassi,” a series centered on “Vanderpump Rules’”prolific waitress. He’s excited about these new projects, but emphasized that his heart will always belong to “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and all that it continues to do for viewers 19 years after its finale.
“It’s not about your new outfit or your new couch or your new whatever. It’s about your humanity,” said Collins, speaking about the core lesson he hopes people take away from the Queer Eye franchise. “It’s about seeing yourself. It’s about dignity. It’s about how confidence breeds success.”
A valuable message that queer folks can benefit from even more now than they did in 2003. And, while it’s unclear just what lies ahead for this franchise, one thing is for sure: “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” helped people everywhere understand the power that exists within our queerness. It’s a truth that has impacted countless pieces of LGBTQ+ television today, and it’s one that Collins promises to keep alive through whatever hit show he creates next.
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Comings & Goings
