A White Horse

I was doing a book event a while ago and someone in the audience asked me why I do this every year. I re-released an episode that I originally wrote a few days after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida on June 12, 2016.

where a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 more one night when they were just going out. Why, I have done it each year for nine years now. And part of the answer is that I have a deep love and profound respect for places where people... become the people they are, where they find out who they feel most comfortable being, where they go again and again to be that way.

It could be some art space, or all-ages matinee hardcore show, or support group, or the library, or a sci-fi convention, or a dance floor, or group therapy, or a church basement, or the rec room at a temple, or some clearing the woods. But I love these spaces and intentional communities that people have chosen to build and maintain as a means to offer, I suppose, different ways to live in this world. And the Pulse nightclub, like the White Horse, was one of those.

But the rest of the answer is simpler, because it still feels necessary. People's rights, people's personal safety, people's health, people's health care, people's identities are under attack in the United States, and people deserve to be safe.

We need these spaces. This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DiMeo. The White Horse Inn on Telegraph in Oakland opened in 1933 or thereabouts.

No one's been able to nail down the date. Historians have tried, as have some of its various owners, it seems, over the years. But if you're not an academic, or if you don't have a personal financial stake in solidifying its claim as the oldest gay bar in the United States, to operate continuously in one location, it doesn't really matter when the Whitehorse first opened its doors.

Just that it was soon enough for a man to walk in on just the right night in 1936 or 46 or 54 and see the most beautiful man he'd ever seen in his life and just be done for. Soon enough for another man who'd heard of this place, heard of places like it, whispered about, or mocked by the fellows in the assembly line, or in the office, or in his usual joint across town.

Heard the cracks about pansies and perverts and queers. And feared what they might mean. Feared why the words seemed to cut right through. Sit strange in his belly. And tight in his throat. But who fought through that fear to make his way there, to the white horse? Who may have circled the block, all butterflies, before working up the courage to part? Who may have walked right past it?

rather than be seen walking in by some stranger. Or maybe he pulled his collar up and tipped his fedora low and pushed through the door as fast as he could. And who may have learned that night in that bar? Where men talked to men by the fireplace in the back. Where women flirted with women in the light of the jukebox. Men held hands by the pool table like it was nothing. Like it was in everything.

knew that night for sure, that this was the place he belonged, that this might be the only place he belonged. Like it was for other women and men, those who were identified correctly as such at birth, and those who weren't. People who needed their lives to change. To make sense. To be less lonely. To be less scary. To be more fun. To be saved. In the 40s and 50s and later.

Men and women, friends from the neighborhood at the bus or church, friends who knew the truth about each other, would walk arm-in-arm up Telegraph Road to the White Horse, would play at being people they were not. and then walk through the door into that windowless room and become who they were. They'd go their separate ways, he to a boyfriend and she to a girlfriend.

And they'd spend a few hours in a place where so much of what they'd been taught all their lives about what life was supposed to be, about who they had to be to be happy, or responsible, or good, or saved, just fell apart. Just... Put the lie to the whole thing. The laws of the universe themselves. Just torn up and tossed like confetti. To swirl in the barlight. And flit in the laughter and the dance songs. A light on the eyelashes of some pretty man.

would float on the surface of a martini glass. And then they'd say goodnight to their boyfriend and girlfriend, to the people there who understood, who helped them understand. And they'd link arms and go back out into the world.

The world did not want that man and that woman to be who they were. Gay sex was a felony. Cross-dressing was a crime. People risked imprisonment. forced sterilization, institutionalization, lobotomization, for acting on who they were. If the cops, armed with laws that let them raid bars, if they suspected women were dancing with women.

or men were holding hands or speaking in high-pitched voices in some cities if the cops came and threw you into the paddy wagon if not threw you up against a wall your name would wind up in the paper along with your address You could be fired, kicked out of your apartment, lose your car loan, get beat up or worse by people in your own home or by people who now knew where your home was. The laws would change.

Attitudes would change, sometimes for the better, and sometimes not. The war seemed to change everything for a while, especially there in the Bay Area. All these soldiers and sailors and nurses flooding in. away from home for the first time, discovering who they were for the first time, discovering whole worlds in windowless rooms like the White Horse. In the 60s, a straight couple bought the bar, and they were so worried about raids, it seems.

And some speculate so skeeved out by their own clientele that they instated a strict no-touching policy. No more slow dances. No kissing. No nothing. It was like that for years. But still people came to the White Horse. Because it was their place. But then the late 60s came. And the hippies came. And the radicals came. Berkeley was just down the road. The Black Panthers were on patrol right there in Oakland.

And gay men and lesbians and transgender people started staking more radical claims. Started living more radical lives. And the white horse embraced gay liberation. And by then it was just one of the many gay bars in the area where people could find each other, could find out who they were and who they wanted to be, where they figured out what was possible to ask from this life, where they asked for it together. as they'd done in the Whitehorse Inn since 1933 or thereabouts.

The White Horse Inn was opened the night in 1966 when transgender women fought back against police harassment at Compton's Cafeteria across the bay in San Francisco and rioted. It was still open two years later when the Stonewall Inn was raided across the country and people protested for three days. It never really stopped. It was open on the night in 1973 when an arsonist set fire to a gay bar in New Orleans.

locked the door, and killed 32 people. The white horse was there for people who needed to mourn. It was open for people who wanted to celebrate in 1962, when Illinois became the first state to decriminalize homosexuality. and 13 years later when California joined it, and 28 years later when the Supreme Court forced 14 states to do the same. It was open in 1977.

when San Francisco elected Harvey Milk to its board of city supervisors, and in 78 when he was assassinated. It was open in 1979 when 75,000 people marched in Washington for their civil rights. And it was open all throughout the 1980s, when its customers started dying, when its employees started dying. In one year alone, eight bartenders, eight, died of AIDS-related illnesses.

And the White Horse Inn stayed open. As it has been, again and again, when men and women, and boys and girls, transgendered people, were murdered for who they were. So many since 1933 or thereabouts. Mourned by what people now call the LGBTQ community. A community built, year by year, night by night, in windowless rooms like the White Horse.

It was open when Vermont passed its civil unions law, when Massachusetts passed its marriage law, when San Francisco's mayor issued marriage licenses, and when the California Supreme Court annulled those unions. annulled the marriage of the manager of the white horse, too. It was open when the California voters rejected gay marriage, and it was open for dancing when the Supreme Court threw that vote out.

It was open on a Saturday in June when someone killed 49 people in Orlando, Florida in a place like the White Horse where people came to be who they were. And it was open on Sunday. And it's open tonight. And it'll be open tomorrow. This episode was written and produced by me, Nate DeMaio, in June of 2016. It was produced with research assistance from Andrea Milne and production assistance from Kathy Tu. The show currently gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

It is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent artist-owned, listener-supported podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you want to drop me a line, you can do so at Nate at The Memory Palace. You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook at The Memory Palace on Instagram and threads, which I occasionally remember to post on, at The Memory Palace Podcast.

I also recently launched a newsletter, which you can sign up for at the memory palace podcast.substack.com. That is the memory palace podcast.substack.com. I will, from here on out, be writing up a bit about each new episode as it comes out, as it will be shortly about this old episode that you've just listened to. I will also be writing about the process of writing and promoting, in this November, releasing my book, which is also called The Memory Palace, from Random House, this November.

Again, that is TheMemoryPalacePodcast.substack.com if you want to subscribe. Thank you for listening and take care of each other. Radiotopia.