Allegro: Memory of a First Night Out of the Closet
Stonewall came late to north Florida
My foot on the doorstep to a row-house by an alley, I stopped and shielded my eyes from the late afternoon sun. I looked both ways along Spruce Street, to make sure no one was watching me. A cop stood on a corner on the other side of 15th, but he was looking the other way, into the sun, like me. Two men talked and laughed halfway up the block to Broad Street to the east, but they were in their own world. Other people walked in both directions, but they were farther away. I shook my head, took a deep breath and stepped through the door to the Allegro. I worried: eighteen was legal age in Florida, but I was only twenty now, here in Pennsylvania, where legal drinking age was still stuck at twenty-one. The bouncer on a bar stool at the door didn’t card me, though. He smiled, and looked into the dim light of the bar beyond.
When I came to Philadelphia in the summer of 1975, I swore I’d finally work my way out of the closet. My teen years had been blasted by rumors about me being gay, rumors that started when I was eleven, rumors that I only finally outran when I went to school in Gainesville, where I finally screwed up the courage to find out what those rumors were all about.
But Stonewall came late to north Florida; college there might as well have been a decade behind the revolution in New York. My encounters in Gainesville were furtive and frightened. I was sure that discovery and exposure would mean expulsion from school and ruin. The dangers were real, but I was surprised by the joy I found in those very encounters. I learned enough to know that once I was far from where I grew up, I would live my life differently.
AIDS deleted a large portion of more than two generations of gay men.
During my first days in Philadelphia, I found Giovanni’s Room, the gay bookstore over on South Street. Because it was a bookstore, right out in the open on a main street, I felt safe to go in. A kind woman inside let me read books and magazines there without buying them — Gay American History, Rubyfruit Jungle, Dhalgren. I bought Dhalgren on my second visit; in the weeks that followed, I came back for the others. I’d found my people; it was time to join them.
I’d read in a flyer at the bookstore that there was a disco on the Allegro’s top floor. I made my way through the dark first floor. There was dim thumping through the walls. A half-dozen men sat in dim pink light around the bar, talking to each other through the beats across the room. I found the stairs in the back, went up past the little second floor bar — there was only the bartender there, still setting up — then up the next flight forward, to the big room full of white dance floor that flickered with colored lights.
I bought a gin and tonic from the bar along the near wall, and tipped the bartender when I pocketed my change. I took a sip. I looked around the room, and saw men dancing disco, in couples, just like I’d always seen straight couples dancing in the bars back in Gainesville. More men were here than downstairs, even this early in the evening. About twenty men on the floor danced in pairs. Another ten or so stood against the far wall, holding drinks in their hands or setting them on the wooden rail that ran around the room. Sipping my drink, for the first time in a long time, I felt safe just being myself.
Then I saw him: bearded, dark-haired, wiry, thin, in jeans and loose tan tee-shirt, dancing by himself, half-speed to “Get Down Tonight.” I walked over. He looked at me. I smiled: “Can I dance with you?”
“Yes,” and he smiled back. I set my drink down on a nearby table and walked onto the dance floor.
Moving slower than the beat, I mirrored his moves, watching him as he watched me. Before the song ended, he stretched his arms, beckoned me into his embrace. We slow-danced together until it ended and into the next song. All I could think of was his fingers in my beard, his ear so near my lips, my arms around his waist. I leaned into him — sagged against him, really. He caught me and held me: “Let’s get out of here.”
He led me to the stairs. “I’m Wayne. You are?”
“Dave.” We ran down the stairs, back to the street, to the end of the block, into the parking lot, and into his car. I’m sure there must’ve been people on the street, the cop still at his post, and I know we talked as we ran, but I don’t remember anything now but that this handsome man was running beside me. We piled into his car. Engine laughing, we left town for the ride out to his place.
Wayne lived almost an hour away, nearly all the way to Morgantown. We listened to music in his car. He was partial to bluegrass, which suited me fine. He reached over and rubbed my chest through my shirt, ran his hand gently over my face. I rubbed the top of his knee. When we got there, he drove into a trailer park and parked by one of the trailers, white and blue in the moonlight. We got out of his car. Wayne unlocked the door and we went inside.
The moment Wayne locked the trailer door, we wrapped our arms around each other and we kissed. Pulling back, still face to face, my beard to his, I unbuttoned my shirt and shrugged it off. He stepped back and pulled his off over his head. In moonlight through thin curtains, his wiry body gleamed like gold. We made our way to his bed.
The Allegro is long gone now.
It had survived in one spot since before World War II, becoming ever more coded and discreet in its advertising as the decades passed, until the 1970s exploded all the old rules about gay life. The Allegro tried to keep up, even did well at first, loosening its dress code, putting in the disco — but newer bars with flashier lights and faster songs won the day. They put the venerable Allegro out of business before the decade ended.
When I think of my first five years in Philadelphia, I marvel at how much I packed into my life. In those years between my first visit to the Allegro and my last, I found two careers and lost them by coming out of the closet. I learned how to live flush with money and how to live poor. I encountered other fleeting lovers like Wayne, and I missed my chance at many more. I found one man to live with and left him, then found another man, Warren, with whom I’ve built my life ever since.
No doubt, we did live fast in the 1970s. That was the decade when LGBTQ folks strode into sunlight, claiming our due. We had those ten years before the evangelicals really figured out how to stuff us away again. Ten years sped by before a virus did the bigots’ work for them.
AIDS deleted a large portion of more than two generations of gay men. In the 1980s and ’90s, the struggle against HIV — and the reinvigorated bigotry it fed — forced LGBTQ people to slow down, regroup, to learn new ways to live and fight. We did the work to integrate our identities into our everyday lives and our everyday lives into the public square.
Many of the bars that had been our refuge, our town hall, and our temple could not sustain the loss. There was never a hope that the Allegro would be reborn. At the turn of the millennium, the long-empty row-house bar was finally torn down, along with the entire block where it stood. A gigantic music hall, the Kimmel Center, was built over the site once the rubble was cleared.
Today, the Kimmel is a fixture in the city’s cultural life, anchoring the south end of Philadelphia’s “Avenue of the Arts.” I’ve been to many concerts in the music halls at the Kimmel, even sung on stage there twice, as a member of the Philadelphia Gay Men’s Chorus. There’s nothing discreet about that block any more.
Before dawn, when birds began calling, Wayne looked over. “I have to get to work.” He nuzzled my beard. “My job’s in town out here, so I can’t take you back to Philly. But I can drop you off at the SEPTA station in Exton.” We kissed, and held each other close one more time, then he made coffee and fried up some eggs on the tiny stove. Wayne drove me to the train in the rising morning light.
I rode the train back to Philly, smiling. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was really going home. I hummed “Morning, Morgantown,” quietly, so no one could hear me. The rails under the car clicked, clicked, clicked, keeping time to Joni Mitchell’s song.
Today, the city has mostly forgotten the Allegro and the generations of men who hesitated on its doorstep, gathering courage before going in. I still remember that night, though. Whenever I walk down that block of Spruce Street, I remember Wayne from Morgantown, and I step a little faster.
