gays and graves: a live podcasting event

episode details

Hey baby, long time no talk. We’re back with a bonus episode from our first live podcasting event in October, Gays and Graves.

We partnered with the Congressional Cemetery, which is home to what is affectionately known as the gay corner, a plot where iconic Queer individuals and Queer D.C. residents alike are buried. Jeff Rollins, cemetery docent and gay expert, was kind enough to share with us some of the stories of the individuals buried at the cemetery.

Since this was recorded live, the format of this episode will feel very different than our typical content. The event was held outside, so the audio quality is a little lower than normal, and you’ll hear a siren or two and someone blaring their music in their car in the background.

If you’re new to Queering the District Podcast, might we suggest heading to another episode in season one as your starting point. 

We want to thank Jeff, Spark Social, and the Congressional Cemetery for partnering with us on this amazing event.

If you’re sad you missed this event, keep your eyes and ears peeled because we may have a new live podcasting event coming your way soon, so be sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube to stay up to date on all things Queering the District Podcast.

Have a story to share? Think we missed something? Give us a call, and bare it all after the beep at 202-753-6570.

Videography by Julia Hay

Video editing by Julia Hay and Ellie Stuckrath

Audio editing by Abby Stuckrath and Julia Hay 

Photo Credits: “Objects from Archives Center, National Museum of American History” by National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution, CC BY-SA 2.0

transcript

Text in italics and parentheses indicates ambient sound, sound effects, and music integrated into the podcast, unless noted otherwise. 

ABBY: Tonight is all about our Queer ancestors and the afterlife, and we'll be exploring the very ghostly history of the gay plot at the D.C. Congressional Cemetery. And, today, we have Jeff Rollins, who runs the gay plot tour at the Congressional Cemetery and is just an expert on all things for this plot. So we're so excited that you're here tonight.

Thank you so much for being here. 

JEFF: Thank you. 

ABBY: All righty, so, Jeff, you run the tour of the cemetery. To help people who aren't familiar with what the Congressional Cemetery is, share how you got involved, and just a little bit of your story. 

JEFF: So the Congressional Cemetery is in Capitol Hill. It was founded in 1807, and it flourished, like a lot of Victorian era cemeteries all the way to the 1950s.

But really in the 60s and 70s and 80s, is when we started seeing gay activists being buried there. And it really started in 1975, with a man named Leonard Matlovich, who was a technical sergeant in the Air Force. And he has his own story we'll talk about later. But him being buried there, was a pivotal moment for the cemetery to have other gay activists and gay military people want to be buried there, even if they weren't living in the district, some of them were far off as California—died in California—but were buried here because of Leonard Matlovich.

But there's also other aspects of the tour, like any sort of cemetery you have, LGBTQ people buried there. And we have people that just live their normal lives in the District, like a GW professor there on the tour, but they have their own story. Then you always have your more, sort of infamous or famous people.

And we have a connection to Walt Whitman at the cemetery too. So like Père-Lachaise, who has, you've got Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. So we have that aspect as well. So you can really think of it in three aspects with the LGBTQ burials.

ABBY: Yeah, and Leonard was, he was the first of like starting this plot, but he's not, the most prominent.

And he's not the first one to really be there that was a gay figure. In fact, we were saying that the first, oldest one was actually from the 18th century. And before we give it away, we did want to give the audience a chance to guess who this historical lover is. So how the game is going to work. We're going to have a couple of these tonight.

I'm going to, we're going to ask the question, and then if you think it's A you're going to stay on, you know, spooky theme, you're going to give us your best ahhhh, or if you think it's B, you're going to give us your best booooo. Okay. Okay. Sweet. So go ahead and read your question. 

JEFF: Okay. Historians consider this resident to have been Walt Whitman's intimate companion for more than ten years, as well as a muse for some of Walt's poems, such as O Captain, My Captain. 

ABBY: Okay, you guys have a second to ruminate. If you think it's Frank Kameny, say, ahhh. 

AUDIENCE:: (quitely) ahhhh

ABBY: Okay, okay. That's okay, that's okay. And now, if you think it's Peter Doyle, say boo.

AUDIENCE: (loudly) Boooo.

ABBY: Yes, exactly it’s Peter Doyle. So tell us a little bit about their history, about Walt Whitman, and their relationship. 

JEFF: So, Peter Doyle, was 20 years younger than Walt Whitman and lived in D.C., the D.C. area, most of his life. He came over from Ireland with his family in the 1800s. And then post-Civil War, he actually was a Confederate soldier.

But his family was in the D.C. area. Once he left that, he voluntarily left after being injured in battle. He wanted to have nothing to do with the war anymore and came to D.C., and he worked as a streetcar conductor and going up and down from the capital to Georgetown, and Walt Whitman around the same time that Peter Doyle was a Confederate soldier, Walt Whitman, who was living in Brooklyn at the time, his brother George was injured in the battle around the same time as Pete, and Walt came from Brooklyn down to D.C. to make sure his brother was okay. His brother was fine, but Walt was taken with the soldiers who were injured, both Confederate and Union soldiers, and worked as a de facto nurse aid. And he was never a medical person, but would work in different, makeshift hospitals around the city and would help these soldiers write letters back home, etc. and Walt Whitman actually lived here from 1863 to 1873.

And two years into his time here, he happened to get on the streetcar that Peter Doyle was the conductor on, and Pete tells a story years later that was the fateful night, and they were drawn to each other once, and they went all the way back. He went all the way back with him, meaning at the end of 30th and M in Georgetown, and they spent the night at Union Hotel together.

And for the next ten years, they were pretty much inseparable. As long as Walt was in town, they would take long walks together, spend time in the Union Hotel. They never could live together even though they wanted to, and historians pretty much think of them now. It took the historians a while to warm up to Walt even possibly being what we would call a gay man, let alone having an affair with a man.

But they pretty much have warmed up to the idea that Walt and Pete were definitely intimate lovers companions. Gay wasn't even around. The word homosexual wasn't around. But the way in context we would think of it, they were definitely in love.

ABBY: And kind of speaking on that, like academics and mainstream media really hesitate to call or label people gay or Queer if we can't really have that, like, quote “hard core evidence” that they ever had sex.

And it's honestly not really relevant to the conversation of like, did they ever have an intimate relationship? Because as Queer people looking at history, we can recognize that. So can you tell us a little bit more about that and how, like, people have grown more accepting of, like the bush at the grave, and everything of accepting the Queerness of his relationship with Peter Doyle?

JEFF: Yes. I mean, people have really warmed up, so much so that there's a D.C. biographer of Walt Whitman who now calls Walt Whitman a Bear, which, you know, that that language would never be prescribed to him in those days. But, if you read, anyone who's read Leaves of Grass can tell it's a lot about man on man love, man on man sex.

I wouldn't even call it coded. We have letters that Walt wrote to Pete that Pete kept, and those are in book form as well. Walt did not keep any letters that he wrote, and, they're not explicit, but straight men do not talk this way to each other in letters. So I think just as time has gone on, contextually, people have just come to accept the fact that, I mean, for all practical purposes, Walt Whitman was a gay man.

ABBY: Exactly. So there's another icon buried at the cemetery whose sexuality isn't as contested or wasn't as contested, but still really had to conceal their Queerness because it wasn't accepted publicly. So let's see if y'all can guess who this next person is. So this person was the first Black Rhodes Scholar, a very prestigious scholarship at Oxford University. Now, if you think it's Alain Locke say ahhh, and if you think it's Bayard Rustin, I think I spelled it wrong, say booo. Okay, if you think it's A...

AUDIENCE: (loudly) Ahhh

ABBY: If you think it's B… 

AUDIENCE: (quietly) Boooo

ABBY: It’s A! So good job A. So, Jeff, what was he known most for in his life? 

JEFF: So Alaine Locke was born in Philadelphia to the Black Victorian middle class. His parents were very into education and really pushed for Alaine to pursue that. He went on to Harvard to not only get his bachelor's but later PhD. He was the first Black Rhodes Scholar, by his own writings. He was, it was the first time he really encountered racism when he went to England trying to get into college at Oxford.

He sort of lived in a bubble, if you will growing up in Philadelphia and going to private schools. And his parents really sort of sheltered him. But that opened his eyes to, being we wouldn't call him an activist, but trying to think of how his writings would, would sort of inform his, his future.

He spent a year in University of Berlin and went to gay bars at the time, and, and his first entry into gay sex. And we have a lot of this in his writings. When he came back, he taught at Howard University his entire life up until 1953. He was born in 1885, I believe, and he died in 1954.

So, he only had a year of retirement. What most people, if they know him at all, he was a pretty good philosopher. But due to his race, he's not in a lot of textbooks. I was actually a philosophy major and never heard of him until I started doing this tour. That's sort of being rectified. There's a great biography about him.

But he is also what he called the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance. We might call him the architect or the producer. He really pushed different artists, mainly starting off with writers and later, the visual artists, and then a little bit of the musicians. I don't know how much he really partook in the musician part, but the push for Black excellence and to show, like white people that, their art was just as good.

And they didn't have to be, you know, the white gaze didn't have to be on them. They could produce the art and be in control of it. 

ABBY: And one of my favorite facts about his grave here at the cemetery is that it actually wasn't established until 2014, when he died in 1954. So can you tell us a little bit about this?

How did this happen and why so late in the game? 

JEFF: Yeah, there's always like peculiar stories with a lot of cemeteries and this is one of them. So when he died in 1954, he lived on R Street in between 13th and 14th, and there's a plaque that talks about him a little bit.

He lived there with his mom up until she died. His dad died very young. He left his small estate and wanted to be cremated to a friend of his. And then that friend just sort of kept these ashes in a paper bag for a while. He died and went to a woman they were friends with. She did not want to keep them.

She talked to Howard. Howard didn't really want to take the ashes, but thought out of respect they should. Howard debated like should we bury him on campus? But they didn't want to become a cemetery because of so many, you know, famous people graduated from there. They didn't want to say no to them. So around this time, he was coming up on his 100th year anniversary of being a Rhodes Scholar. The first Black Rhodes scholar, and the Rhodes Scholars at the time wanted to honor him. And when they found out he didn't have a burial place, they thought, oh, this would be a good way to, to honor him. And they chose Congressional Cemetery because of its prominence and a lot of important people are buried there.

And he is in a very, like prime real estate if you want to think of the cemetery that way. He's right near the entrance. And, it's a lovely stone. And he had a full ceremony and that's on YouTube. You can watch that on YouTube. And it was very nice. 

ABBY: Were you there for it? 

JEFF: I was not there for it. But I've watched it. 

ABBY: Yeah, yeah. So this next couple that we have is John Frey and Peter Morris, and they're buried together at the cemetery and have a really extremely unique gravestone. And for folks who have listened to the first season of our podcast, you're probably familiar with where these two have met. So what we wanted to do was give you all a little hint from our first episode, which is called xoxo ladd forrester, and where we have a different couple, Paul Kuntzler, who was also a part of the pickets with the Mattachine Society.

He also met the love of his life at this establishment. So when you hear the creepy little witch laugh, that's me trying to censor out the name of the establishment, so there's not like a random witch laugh in the podcast. It's trying to make sure that you guys won't hear the name of the actual establishment.

But Ellie’s going to play about like a minute clip of Paul's story of meeting his partner at this, either the Chicken Hut or the Bohemian Caverns.

(start of podcast clip)

ABBY: But there was one more introduction at (witch laugh) that would change Paul's life forever. 

PAUL:  I believe he was sitting in the middle, and I was sitting over there, and I think he sent me a beer. 

ABBY: Paul met his partner of 42 years at (witch laugh). 

PAUL:  Stephen Brett Miller. I'll show you a picture of him. 

ABBY: He pulled out a thick wallet filled with cards, cash, and other mementos, and then a small, slightly tattered photo emerged.

PAUL:  This is in Amsterdam in the summer of 2000. 

ABBY: Wow...

PAUL:  I call him the movie director. 

ABBY: Yeah, with the haircut, the stoic look, he's got going. 

PAUL: Uhuh

ABBY: Very suave. 

PAUL: Correct. 

ABBY: While, the federal government was hunting down the Queer community in hopes of destroying their careers, families, and way of living. I like to think of Paul's story as a reminder that Queer joy existed and will always continue to exist, even amongst a backdrop as frightening as the Lavender Scare.

Paul found not just a gay community, but a life partner. He found a love so profound that even 20 years after Stephen's passing, he carries an original photo in his wallet with him every single day. 

(end of podcast clip)

ABBY: So that's a little clip from xoxo ladd forrester, and so we would love if you guys could now try to guess, where you think Paul and John Fey and Peter Morris met. So if you think it's Chicken Hut, say,  do your little ahh. 

AUDIENCE: (semi confidently) Ahhh 

ABBY: And if you think it was Bohemian Caverns, give us a boo. 

AUDIENCE: Booo

ABBY: Y'all are right. It's the Chicken Hut. So, like I, we kind of mentioned in the clip on the podcast, we're experiencing the Lavender Scare right now, which, for context, is when the federal government made it illegal for you to be homosexual in the government.

So Chicken Hut was one of the places that was surveilled by the FBI to try, and raided by the FBI, to try and weed out gay men who are working in the federal government. And so this is kind of the environment that John Frey and Peter Morris were working under. So how did this kind of impact their life?

JEFF: Yeah. So John Frey and Peter Morris were both students at Catholic University, but they met at Chicken Hut. They were both born in 1929. So if you think when they're in their 20s, like this time period, we don't have gay bars like this. But they existed, but they were always sort of undercover, or, the Chicken Hut was a restaurant by day, and it was sort of a gay, white male, cisgendered male, bar at night.

And that's where really from the mid 40s, late 40s through the 50s was sort of the place to go, if you are a gay white male. By going there, you really were putting yourself at risk. So, John Frey was working as a professor at GW. Peter Morris later was on the Board of the Catholic gay Dignity.

But they lived together really from the time that they graduated undergraduate. So some of their landlords were very suspicious of them and did not particularly condone their relationships. And just by going to these places, it really put them at risk. And that was really throughout the whole city. There were Black bars on U Street, the same thing with that.

A lot of lesbians would go to restaurant bars. And there were a couple of bars like that. But if you're a federal worker, you're going to be much more conservative and probably go to a hotel bar. If you had more private jobs, you might go to something like the Chicken Hut, but you were still, they were still being raided.

Like if you've got an alcohol drink, you couldn't even carry it. If I moved over there, I would have to go over there. And someone who works here would have to bring me the drink. You had to sit down. There were a lot of laws in all these various cities. So you had to navigate that, and you know, their picture could have been in the paper if they'd been arrested. And then he definitely would have been fired from GW. So...

ABBY: Right.

JEFF: to find socialization, to find love, you had high risk. 

ABBY: And so this is a picture of their gravestone. And it's a picnic table. 

JEFF: Right. 

ABBY: So tell us a little about this. Why did they pick a picnic table for their grave stone? 

JEFF: So this cemetery was founded in 1807, and it's part of the Victorian. It's not technically a rural garden cemetery, which was started in 1850, but the Victorians had a more romanticized view of death. And wanted the cemeteries to mimic a park. So if you go to Congressional, it's rolling hills with a lot of trees and a lot of places to really spend the day.

And that's what people would do back then, because these cemeteries were far off from where people were living. Maybe less so with this one, but far enough because they thought disease could still be spread through the body, etc., etc.. So if you went there, you might want to spend the whole day, so the Victorians would have picnics.

Well, John Frey and Philip actually designed this, and they wanted to hark and sort of pay homage to that Victorian era in a very, very literal way. And this is a picnic table. Today I did a tour, and there were people, like, eating there. And I had to ask, like, is it okay if I talk about this while you're sitting there?

But they moved. But, they want people to eat there. It's a nonprofit, the cemetery. A lot of people who work in the nonprofit, they’ll eat lunch there. And they both ate there. They, it was created before they died. Which isn't as common as you think, but at Congressional we have a lot of people who design their own stones and they're not deceased yet. 

ABBY: So they literally ate at where they're now buried?

JEFF: Yes. Yes.

ABBY: That's kind of iconic. Okay, so speaking of and being in the era of the Lavender Scare, again, when the government made it illegal to serve as a federal government employee if you were gay, we have probably one of the most prominent figures in the gay community who was fired from his job as an astronomer at the Army Map Service.

And so we'd love it if y'all can guess. I think it's the next slide. Who we think the father of the gay rights movement, or what he was known as is. So if you think it's A: Harvey Milk, you'll say ahh. If you think it's B: Dr. Frank Kameny you say boo. If you think it's A...

AUDIENCE:(loudly) ahhhh

ABBY: And if you think it's B...

AUDIENCE: (loudly) booo

ABBY: It's B! It's Dr. Frank Kameny. So tell us a little bit about his story and about coining this term, “gay is good.”

JEFF: Yeah. So Frank Kameny was born in 1925. He served in World War II. He also got his PhD from Harvard in astronomy. He taught one year at Georgetown, and then he got a job in the federal government at the Army Map Service.

And he'd only been there a few months, when during this Lavender Scare, where, you know, it's in the same time when the Red Scare is happening, when they're trying to root out communists, which at least I know more from, like they were rooting out movie stars, which, but also in the federal government, they didn't find as many, but they found a lot of homosexuals.

And I think for a while they were firing like 60 a week. It's hard to get a number, exactly how many people were fired. Up until the time it was 1957 that Frank was fired. People who had been fired before him pretty much just went off into the shadows, maybe tried to find a job in the private sector.

A lot of them had specialized jobs, which is still true in D.C., and there was nowhere else for them to work, so they ended up in poverty. Frank, though, fought it from the moment that he was called into the office, he questioned them in the office. Where have you heard this? What are you accusing me of?

And so he got a lawyer to try the case, and then the lawyer tried. It didn't go very far. Then Frank became his own lawyer, even though he had no lawyer training, and it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. He petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case, and they refused. So that ended his case.

But it started a whole career of him, trying to represent, provide legal aid to, even though he never was a lawyer or even a paralegal, legal advice to civilians who were fired, but also people who were discharged from the military. 

ABBY: And then this kind birthed also the movement of the Mattachine Society, which we talked about earlier, is who ran a lot of these pickets that we are now mimicking.

And of course, if we're going to talk about these pickets, if we're going to talk about the Mattachine Society, we have to talk about me, (audience laughs) which I don't know if you guys remember who I am, but we can try and guess if you don't. So we're going to, I think, Ellie, think it’s this next one. Who do we think the mother of the gay rights movement is?

Is it A: Barbara Gittings or B: Eleanor Roosevelt? A?

Audience: (very loudly) ahhh

ABBY: Oh my gosh. Yeah, it is A. It is A. It is Miss Barbara. What we want to talk about though is she was instrumental to the movement. And I also just love her and her partner's gravestone. I think it's beautiful. But tell us a little bit about her and how she got involved in the movement with Kameny.

JEFF: Yeah. So, Barbara was born in Austria, and her dad was a diplomat, and then she lived in Delaware for a while, and then she went to one year at Northwestern. She always sort of knew she was attracted at the time to girls. She didn't understand really what it was or put a word to it.

But a teacher did. There's actually writings where a teacher didn't let her into some honorary society because she thought she was not living up to, like, a moral high code that a student should live. So, yeah. And then when she went to Northwestern, she knew she was attracted to women, and she pretty much failed out of Northwestern because she spent all her time going to bookstores and the library to find anything written about homosexuality.

And at that time, you know, they had medical textbooks, psychology or psychiatry that talked about it being a mental disorder. Or you had, books like The Well of Loneliness or dime store novels that you can find at like a drugstore, where the lesbian or gay man would inevitably die at the end and/or be arrested or a mix of both.

So Barbara did not go back to Northwestern. She moved to Philadelphia, and she kept trying to find people like her. She went to New York, took a bus up to New York to go to a gay bar. She said that she thought that you had to be femme or butch, and that she couldn't be femme. So she dressed butch. She got some clothing of the male gender, which put her at risk, because if you wore more than three pieces of clothing at that time in New York, you could be arrested, of the opposite gender.

So she was putting herself at risk. She didn't really like the bar scene. So she comes back to Philadelphia and hears about some gay groups that had started in California. Mattachine started in 1950. You had the ONE, Inc., which started a little bit later. Then you had the Daughters of Bilitis, which started in 1955, I believe, which is more lesbian oriented.

The other two were a little bit more focused on men. So she went to San Francisco. She met the founders of Daughters of Bilitis, came back, took a couple of years to actually join. Then the West Coast people said, “oh, why don't you open up an East Coast version?” So she opened up a chapter in New York and would try and get women to come.

And she really did that, really through the early 60s, before she meets Frank. She meets her partner, Kay Tobin, in 1961 because they decide to open up a sort of a New England chapter. They met in Rhode Island in 1961. It was pretty much love at first sight, and they were together up until Barbara's death in 2007.

Barbara died unfortunately from breast cancer. Kay died in 2021, which I think we’re going to talk about. Actually, Barbara was not buried here in 2007. They did erect this bench in 2007, but they had a service in Philadelphia for her. And Kay kept her ashes on the mantle in their retirement home in Philadelphia until Kay died. And then they were recently interned, I think, in 2022 in the bench. 

ABBY: Wow. 

JEFF: Yeah. So Barbara and Frank are considered, quote unquote, the mother and father of the gay rights movement. They would always question that term, but together, they worked together, which we'll talk about, I believe. 

ABBY: Right. Yeah. 

JEFF: It's really what sort of people don't question that that moniker for both fits.

ABBY: Yeah. And one of the biggest things I think they're most instrumental in changing, is the American Psychiatric Association of declassifying Homosexuality as a mental disorder, which we have a really interesting picture of, that I'd love for us to talk about is when they went to the Association and they had Dr. H. Anonymous. So tell us a little bit about this photo. This is Barbara, Frank, and then our doctor.

JEFF: Right. So Barbara and Frank, when they met, which neither one can remember when they met, but it's definitely around 1963, 1964. When they met, they both were of a different ilk than a lot of people at that time. A lot of the people that were in the Mattachine or Daughters of Bilitis, really just wanted to assimilate into culture and wanted to not offend straight people.

Barbara and Frank did not like that. They were more what we think of activists today. And they were like, you know, you need to change. We're the right ones. You're the wrong ones. So Barbara and Frank, when they met, it was almost like a star exploded. And they were very powerful together in this. And believe solely like we need to change society. We don't need to change for society. 

So Barbara always said, you know, we can fight the morality, we can fight the religion, but we can't fight the science because the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, at the time, I, I'm not sure when they added this, but they added homosexuality as a mental disorder. So they really wanted to lobby the American Psychiatric Association to remove it.

And they had meetings with them. They would meet with different people, who would even agree with them. But, you know, it's hard to change something like that. Finally, the APA called them on their bluff a little bit and said, okay, come speak at our convention. So originally it was just going to be Frank and Barbara and a straight psychiatrist.

But then Kay was like, no, we really need a gay or lesbian psychiatrist, or else there's not going to give them much credibility because, yeah, they understand the gay movement at the time, the gay rights movement, but they're not, neither Barbara or Frank were medical. So they asked around and no psychiatrist was willing, except for Dr. H Anonymous, who I believe his name was Fryer, John Fryer.

He said, I'll do it if I can wear a disguise and have my voice modulated in the microphone. Frank was totally against this. But Kay and Barbara were like it's the best we’ve got. It actually turned out to be a great success. The room was packed and this was 1972. And in 1973, the APA actually started and formally removed homosexuality as a mental disorder. And they actually invited Frank and Barbara to the unveiling of this. And, it actually made some of the newspapers, and there was a Philadelphia newspaper that said 20 million homosexuals cured overnight. (Abby and audience laugh)

Cause with the strike of a pen, it was removed as a mental disorder. And as Barbara said, the strike of the pen made it a mental disorder and the strike of the pen removed it.

So they were very successful. 

ABBY: So if we're going to talk about Barbara, we obviously have to talk about her partner Kay. And also we have to talk about The Ladder. So we have a picture of Kay and then also their graves again. But also behind her are pictures of The Ladder. So can you tell us a little bit about The Ladder about their work there?

JEFF: Yeah. So the Mattachine Society had its own magazine, and the Ladder when it was started, they're like, we should have our own magazine too. And these magazines were generally mailed out. These organizations have a mailing list. We're talking ten, 15, 20 people. We're not talking a lot of people. That would put you at risk, so if it was delivered to the wrong, even though it was in a, you know, a covered envelope, if it was sent to your next door neighbor that can out yourself and put you in harm. They also lobbied for some bookstores to have this. So The Ladder, we don't have a picture of it, but when it was originally created in the 50s, they would just have drawings of women on the front.

But Barbara actually became the editor of it from ‘63 to ’66, and they really lobbied to make it much more progressive. So you can see at the bottom left, that's a picture of Ernestine Eckstein, who is an amazing person in her own right. There's not a ton about her, very interesting person. There's some interviews with her. Lilli Vincenz is the top left. So you see photographs. So Kay and Barbara really lobbied we need real life lesbians, as Barbara put it, on the cover to give it credence. And it says The Ladder: A Lesbian Review. In the beginning, it just said The Ladder. But, Barbara kept pushing for it to say a lesbian review, and the font kept getting bigger and bigger as the years progressed.  (Abby laughs) 

But Barbara was a little too, Barbara became a little too radical for the Daughters of Bilitis. By 1966, they were sort of ousted because they wanted articles to be a little bit more activist oriented in The Ladder, versus more of an assimilation type. So their time was fruitful, but it pushed the Daughters of Bilitis a little too much.

ABBY: Right, right. So I'd like us to go back to Leonard Matlovich, who we briefly discussed at the beginning as kind of starting this sort of activism within the gay plot of the cemetery. And he was featured on the Time's front cover in 1975. I think we have a picture of it right here. So why was he featured, and why was this kind of really groundbreaking for the gay rights movement at that time?

JEFF: So up to this point, we have, we have these assimilationist, and then we have people like Frank and Barbara who were doing the pickets that you've seen pictures of in front of the White House in 1965, in front of the Pentagon, and in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4th. But all this time, Barbara and Frank had also been working with military people who had been discharged for being a gay or lesbian.

And I'm using those terms just because those are the terms of the time. And what kept happening is, the Department of Defense, you know whatever branch it was, would find something else at fault with those, the service men or service women and just focus on that and not focus on the gay thing. So they’re like we need to find a model soldier who has no blemished record at all, like even the most minor thing to do a test case on the ban on gays and lesbians in the military. So, Frank, I mean, Leonard Matlovich was a very different type of person. He actually didn't come out to himself until 1973. And by this time, he was a grown man.

He did not think of himself the way Barbara and Frank and Kay did. He thought he was immoral that, that he believed in what the religion said, and he really didn't want to be gay, but he finally came to terms with it. And, in 1974, he saw an article in the Air Force Times that the ACLU and Frank had put out talking about like they were looking for someone that could be a really good test case.

He thought he would be a good choice. They really weren't keen on that at first because he was too new and they knew he would become famous. But in 1975, he actually gave a letter to his commanding officer at Langley, outing himself. And his commander asked, “what does this mean?” And he said, it means “Brown versus Board of Education.”

So they were, Frank, and a lot of the gay rights activists at this time, were really modeling after the Civil rights, the Black Civil Rights movement. And, so they were following that with Brown versus Board of Education. It immediately made Leonard famous. Time Magazine, this was September 1975, I believe, put him on the cover in his dress uniform and it says, “I'm a homosexual, the gay drive for acceptance.”

This was really a huge thing for the time. Only I think, like, think movie stars were on the cover of any sort of national magazine and even that would have been questionable. Like were they or weren't they gay? So this was to have a non like celebrity on the cover was an enormous thing. And we want to talk about his grave at this point?

ABBY: Yeah. I wanted to point out, I tried to, it's a little blurry, but I wanted everyone to read what he has engraved, saying “when I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men, and I'd been discharged for loving one,” which I just think is a very beautiful sentiment. And what we talked about earlier before this is that he really just wanted to be an activist in death, was like his big reason for being buried here.

JEFF: Correct. Right. This isn't really his story. He was a model soldier. He served three tours of duty. He had a Purple Heart and a bronze medal. But, he wanted, first he wanted to honor Harvey Milk, but due to family issues with Harvey Milk and just this isn’t California. It just didn't make sense.

So he thought, oh, let me do a stone, a gravestone to honor gays and lesbians in the military or who'd been kicked out. So originally it did not have his name at the foot bed here. It just had the marker there, which is the quote Abby just read. And, it says a gay Vietnam veteran.

You also see the pink triangle, which is an homage to the pink triangle that was used for gay men that were in the concentration camps. They would put them on the clothing. I mean, I don't know if you noticed, on Barbara's grave, she had a black triangle. Lesbians were, to the best of my knowledge, were quote unquote lumped in with asocialism.

And so that's why, and a lot of AIDs activists reclaimed the triangle in the 80s. And so that's why it’s the pink triangle. He really just wanted this to be in the shadow of Arlington Cemetery and sort of cut not from the same stone as the Vietnam Memorial but have that same look. But when he was diagnosed with HIV/AIDs in the mid 80s, he realized he wasn’t going to be around that long, kind of came out like, oh, this is my stone. I'm going to be buried here. 

ABBY: So why did he choose where he chose in the cemetery? 

JEFF: Yeah. So you alluded, one of the big things he said, which it's hard to imagine, but yeah, I think he's executed it perfectly is to be an activist in death just as much as you are in life. And he chose it in Congressional because once he was walking, he lived here for a while, and he was walking around and someone was lost.

And he said, “what are you looking for?” And he's like, “I'm looking for Walt Whitman's boyfriend.” (Abby chuckles)So that's sort of clued him in. He'd been to Père-Lachaise and seen Oscar Wilde's grave and Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. So he's like, oh, people come to this. But he also, if you go up, it's so if you go to his grave just up the hill a little bit is J Edgar Hoover, the notorious FBI director who he loathed.

And he thought it'd be really funny to have a gay memorial just in the shadow of J Edgar Hoover. And, and then Clyde Tolson, who worked with J Edgar Hoover and had breakfast every day, (Abby and audience laughs) we're allowed to say that, is buried just a few up from his grave. So he really wanted to sort of be, sort of, you know, put his nose up to like J Edgar Hoover, but also have something meaningful in a prominent cemetery, but not a federal cemetery.

ABBY: Right. Right. And then the last gravestone that we have, I think is maybe one of the most unique ones. It's this entirely cube. Did they? Ken did this himself?

JEFF: Yes. 

ABBY: So tell us a little bit about Ken Dresser and Charles Fowler, this couple, and why they chose this and also why they're buried there. 

JEFF: So Kenneth Dresser and Charles Fowler, Kenneth was born in 1938, and Fowler was born in 1931, but they both died in 1995.

They were, they lived here for many years. They were partners. I'm not sure when they met, but they were partners up until their deaths. Kenneth Dresser was a large scale graphic designer and designed things like Epcot center and then the Disney Parade and Super Bowl. Charles Fowler, taught music, but also would write stuff in concert with Kenneth for the Epcot center and things like that.

They both were diagnosed with HIV/AIDs and both died in 1995. Kenneth wanted to design his marker, which we already talked about, like other people had done that. He actually ran into homophobia in designing it. The first company ghosted him, and then when he really questioned them, he found out that the company never designs for two men, and they refused to do it.

He found a company to do it. And, so this was really the, I think, really the first unique cube at Congressional. If you walk through Congressional, you'll see a lot of unique units. If you go to some other cemeteries, they are much more conservative. As long as it's not offensive, Congressional is going to go for it. One thing interesting, and as I started doing these tours, it made me realize, not true for John Frey and Phillip Morris, to my knowledge, they did not die from HIV/AIDs, but they did. And Kenneth Dresser was not ashamed of it. In his obituary, it actually, the end says died from AIDs. And so this made me realize, really in the 80s and 90s is when you start seeing same sex couples who are not famous, like a Gertrude Stein or Alice B Toklas be buried together.

And they were not only usually outing themselves to their family that they were gay, they were also outing themselves as they were probably going to die early. And I think this is very good way to display this because he, Kenneth especially, I cannot find Charles's obituary, but the fact that he wanted to say that he died from HIV/AIDs was really bold at that time because a lot of people, even if they were in control of their own burial plots, which a lot of their families just intervened, kicked their lover out, their partner out because they didn't have legal protections at that time.

And would not say the cause of death or it may be cancer. You had a lot of people in their 20s dying from cancer during that time period. But Charles was not ashamed. I mean, Kenneth was not ashamed of it so. 

ABBY: So we've gone through a lot of different graves and a lot of people, and there's so many more that are on his tour.

So I encourage everyone to please take the tour because there are so many other brilliant people and just a beautiful cemetery that you're able to walk through. But what's maybe one of your favorite anecdotes or stories that we haven't highlighted, either from giving this tour or from the history that you've learned? 

JEFF: I think one is, I mean, Barbara, I could go on with Barbara Gittings all day, but Barbara, I talked about how she knew that something in her was different than other women or girls and then women when she was older women, and when she finally heard the word homosexual, she spent I mean, she pretty much failed out of college just trying to find something to read. She worked with the gay task force at the American Library Association in 1970 to create a list of positive lesbian and gay writings. And at the time, I think there were only 32 things that they could put on this sheet of paper.

But now it's grown into the Stonewall Barbara Gittings Award, it’s given out to an author each day. There's still the bibliography that she helped create back in 1970, 71. And, you know, it's someone who also, during my time in the 80s, was like trying to find things in books, like I owe her a debt to that because it was very easy for me to find things. It was not easy for her. So, I talk about that in the tour. 

ABBY: Yeah. And for people that are just learning this history or have taken your tour, what is something that you want us as an audience, people listening to this podcast and people taking your tour to really walk away with? What do you think is one of the most important messages people should learn?

JEFF: I think a cemetery, like Congressional or any major city in the United States, especially on the East Coast, where you have all of American history, the LGBTQ+ history is American history. And while we talk about some people who are we're just local citizens or are connected to Walt Whitman, having this, what we lovingly call the Gay Corner, we never called it that and, you know, it was an organic thing that was created. It's a really, clear example of American history, which we are a part of, and there's nothing to be ashamed of. And it really tells a story, from the modern day gay rights movement all the way to now. Like, we actually have a grave of U.S. Navy Commander Alyce Grillet who died in 2019.

But on her grave, it actually says, bisexual and Queer. So, you know, we've gone from like invisibility to gay and lesbian to, like, actually having more modern language actually on the stone. So these people are having their activist language on stones, but also just saying, I'm here, and we're part of the American fabric just as much as anybody.

ABBY: So at the end of every episode, we have someone leave a voicemail. So in these we're going to have, Jeff leave a voicemail about his favorite memory at the cemetery. But if anyone's inspired from this, every episode is, whether it's historical or one of our after our episodes, we end it with either a crazy voicemail someone left us at Sinners and Saints on the phone, someone saying they just did coke in the bathroom, or of someone saying that they like, met the love of their life at Pitchers and now, like this whole Cinderella story that they had. So there's really beautiful moments that have been left on phi-phi, and we're so excited for Jeff to share his and to send us home tonight with that. So just pick it up. You'll hear bare it all after the beep. 

JEFF: It's actually recording? 

ABBY: Yeah, it is.

JEFF: Hi this is Jeff Rollins, docent at the Congressional Cemetery. I actually have quickly two favorite moments. One is, I give this tour, I used to give it to Montgomery County High School students, and I actually got a letter from one of the students who, after I talked about Kenneth Dresser and him talking about dying from HIV/AIDs, wrote me a letter saying, like, yeah, she understood more what her uncle had gone through.

And just hearing these stories brought it into context, and then going to an older generation. I had someone who was Leonard Matlovich’s age who was in the Marines around the same time that Matlovich was, and he was on tour with his current husband and ex-wife, and he was married to this woman at the time that Leonard Matlovich was on the cover.

And he said that it really it scared the shit out of him was what he said. And the [hair on his arm] stood up, and he knew he was the same as Leonard, so it made him eventually come out to his wife. They're still friends, like she was on the tour. And, and, they are going to be buried there in a bench and their bench is in front of Leonard's and has two cats on the front.

Because if you ever go to Congressional, it's also a dog walking park. So there's a lot of dogs there. And, but they wanted to pay homage to cats. So just the generations, like I said, it talks about American history and LGBTQ history and it became real with those two scenarios. 

ABBY: Amazing. Well, thank you all so much.

JEFF: Thank you. 

ABBY: That concludes the end of our live recorded podcast, but if you guys want to stick around to chat, get to know each other, ask some questions. We’ll be here for a couple more minutes, 15 minutes, just to gab. But thank you guys so much for coming. 

 (jazzy outro music starts to play) 

JEFF: Thank you.