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The restaurant was demolished in the late 1980s but its foundation is still visible.īefore indoor plumbing was common, many hotels offered public showers and sinks. Many a late night she’d strut into the restaurant in a gold lamé dress with a fur wrap, looking for all the world as if she’d just stepped out of Liberace’s limo. One of the most colorful patrons was Doris Paton, proprietor of the Queen Bee, a lesbian bar in Smoketown. Residents complained, so the city trimmed back bushes where discreet sexual encounters might take place, but its reputation as a gay hangout continued into the 1980s.įor twenty years beginning in the 1960s, the Steak ‘n Egg restaurant on Fourth near Oak was a popular eatery. The case begs the question: was there other such activity in Louisville at the time that was never discovered?īy the 1950s Central Park was already known as a gathering place for gay men. He was sentenced to eight years in prison but got out early and moved to Houston. Discussing all the renters in the neighborhood, Charles Lutz noted, “Most of the girls have been self-supporting for several years and seldom speak of marriage.” You can’t deduce anything about their sexual orientation from that remark, but it’s an interesting comment by a young man of marrying age.Īnother hint came in 1949 when a young man whose drag name was Fifi Larue was arrested for conducting a sex club in the basement of a house on Second near Magnolia. He had gay friends in a nearby apartment building.Īnother tantalizing clue is buried in a college freshman essay from 1938. Upon his release, he found a place to rent in Old Louisville, no questions asked despite his notoriety. After his lover’s death, he visited several men in the neighborhood who appear not to have been married, hinting at a gay network. His story opens the door briefly on a gay subculture in Old Louisville. He’s buried with his parents in Calvary Cemetery. Louisville’s most famous homosexual eventually returned in the late 1950s shortly before his death. Rather than send him to prison, the judge advised him to skip town, which he did. In 1951 he re-surfaced in the papers when the police arrested him at his apartment on Sixth near Oak for soliciting a young man for sex at a downtown hotel. The Courier-Journal had a field day in its reporting.īecause there was no evidence of a crime, authorities could do little except declare him insane and send him to Central State mental hospital, where he stayed twelve years.
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Hustling it into his car, he drove to West Point and tossed it into the Salt River. When Aufenkamp discovered the body, he panicked. Somehow he mistook a bottle of rat poison for medicine.
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In February Detchen, who’d fallen ill, went to the back of his boyfriend’s pharmacy on Market to rest. George Aufenkamp, Jr., a pharmacist, had fallen in love with William Detchen, but the relationship was rocky. The first real glimmer of a gay presence dates from 1936. Old Louisville could be a comfortable place for gay men and lesbians to live as long as they were careful. If someone threw a party, gay men felt compelled to walk to the front door with lesbians before they paired off secretly with members of the same sex behind the curtains. Homosexual sex was still against the law and could be punished by up to two years in prison in Kentucky, so the LGBT community had to be quiet. One man, Richard A., had no trouble living in a same-sex relationship with his lover in Old Louisville in the 1950s. The neighborhood, which at one point had over 25,000 residents, was the perfect place to hide. Why? The theory is that when all of those old single-family mansions were getting cut up, absentee landlords weren’t too picky about renters they just wanted the money. Today they’re a visible part of the city, contributing in many ways to its leadership.įor years, Old Louisville was known by whispers as Kentucky’s gay mecca. Only in the 1980s did it start making noise. Even after the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York–the LGBT world’s Bastille–the local population remained discreet for years. Until recently, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people were a relatively hidden subculture in Louisville as they were throughout most of the country. Adapted from a chapter of his book, Secrets of Old Louisville