Bloomington home/gay center 2... (#0255)

One of the many places I lived in Bloomington, this with some of the more interesting background. I had a friend who always managed to somehow make good connections with various bureaucrats, and so he managed to rent this from the university. It was a large and rather elegant house that had been some administrators home but, at that time, was simply being held by the university for later use. We shared the entire house, with my friend and his girl friend having a bedroom on the first floor and me on the top floor. Since it was owned by the university, we didn’t have to worry about much of the upkeep other than snow removal.

It’s size worked perfectly – I was a leader of the small gay group and we could have meetings in the living room along with potlucks in the dining room. My friend who rented the place usually left town with his girlfriend over the holidays, so another friend and I organized Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner for other gays who had nowhere else to go. Besides being an easy one block walk to the student union, it was also an easy walk to the gay bar and back through the cruising area around the library, so an ideal location...

One fun point – it was also the location for the letter writing campaign we would do, which led to Indiana Governor Bowen claiming that, as far as he knew, there were only ‘13 homosexuals in Indiana and they all live in Bloomington’.