Story 14: Miss Gay Knoxville at the Hyatt Regency

Miss Gay Knoxville at the Hyatt Regency (1974)

Many young girls dream of growing up to be Miss America
.
Not many young boys dream of growing up to be Miss Gay Knoxville.

I never dreamed of growing up to emcee the Miss Gay Knoxville Pageant.

But I did.

Don’t let the “Miss” mislead you. Any pageant with “Miss Gay” in the title is a beauty pageant composed of drag queens. And don’t let the official sounding title mislead you either. Drag pageant names are generally as phony as “world championship” titles in professional wrestling or “very special episodes” of prime-time television series. Sometimes the winner of a local drag pageant will indeed go on to a more select regional or national competition but not always.
By the mid 1970s gay life in Knoxville had grown to the point where the community supported at least a half-dozen bars of decent quality and size. Tennessee’s drinking age was eighteen and Knoxville’s liquor-by-the-drink law set closing time at 3 a.m., drawing patrons – especially on the weekends – from as far away as Lexington, Kentucky and Atlanta, Georgia, where the drinking age was higher and the closing time earlier.

So when some people decided it was time for a Miss Gay Knoxville Pageant to be held, they didn’t think small. The very first such event would be held not in a large gay club. No, it would held in the enormous grand ballroom at the Knoxville Hyatt Regency. Among the celebrity judges would be Knoxville’s mayor, a very straight man who seemed to have no problem being associated with such an event.

What was needed was a celebrity emcee. For reasons of which I’ve never been entirely certain, that turned out to be me.

I wasn’t really a celebrity but a somewhat well-known local radio personality. I considered myself actually less than somewhat well-known but the organizers didn’t think so. Or maybe everyone they had asked had turned them down.

I did have some concerns when they made the offer. Would I have to be in drag? No, they said, I would be in a tuxedo. Given my life-long aversion to formal wear, I didn’t really consider that a yes or no answer. I’d never dressed in drag but suspected a dress would be more comfortable than a tux. But a tux it was to be, they said. They would even pay for it. Fine. And they would pay me. Also fine. Then I decided to push my luck. Would they pay for my drinks at the after party at the Back Office Lounge? Yes they would. Again fine. Then I really pushed my luck. Would they provide me with, um, “companionship” for the evening? I don’t think I was really serious about that request but they said, yes, they would. I wasn’t sure how fine that was.

The big night arrived. I’d been fitted for the tux a week earlier and, yes, they had paid for it. The mayor was indeed there along with such “celebrity” judges as a local hairdresser and a female TV news personality and an audience of several hundred.

The lobby outside the Hyatt’s three main meeting room/ballrooms was, well, interesting. Apparently no knew that the adjacent ballroom was to be occupied by the Rev. Bob Bevington, “the chaplain of Bourbon Street,” who was in the second night of revival services. He was apparently unaware that he was to be preaching that night next door to a drag queen pageant.
But I had other concerns. First of all, I had never emceed a beauty pageant of any kind, much less a gay beauty pageant. My only familiarity with such was years of watching Bert Parks host the Miss America Pageant. Somehow I didn’t consider Bert Parks a model for the role I was about to play.

A few years earlier, I had emceed a number of drag shows at the Europa, but I had worked backstage with a microphone and a list of performers and cues as to their preferred introductions. I could dress as I liked, usually in my club clothes. Backstage was also the changing area for the performers so I was generally the only guy back there who remained fully clothed. The owner paid me in cash at the end of each evening and I also got free drinks during the shows. Although I introduced all the acts I never introduced myself. I was just a voice over the PA system.

But now I would be introduced. And now I would be seen. In a tuxedo.

I would have note cards for the introductions but I couldn’t just hold them and read them word for word as I had done at the Europa. I had been chosen emcee in part because I was a radio personality. You don’t see radio personalities. You hear them. It doesn’t matter how they are dressed. It doesn’t matter if they are reading everything they say. I had done theater and I had public speaking experience, but my everyday work in radio depended only upon my voice.
Now, I realized, I would be one of the performers. I wouldn’t be in drag, I wouldn’t be lip-synching, but I would be performing. And I wouldn’t just do introductions for each act; I would have to introduce the whole event. I would have to welcome the audience, introduce the judges, explain the judging procedure, thank the sponsors and keep the whole event running smoothly.

Ouch.

Should I prepare a monologue of some sort? No. Should I just keep it simple? Yes. Either way I had to have an opening line. In my years of theater I had learned that if I could get past my very first line the rest would fall into place.

When the big night arrived, once again I found myself backstage and once again it was the changing area for the performers. The scene was rather Felliniesque, I in my tux and a group of young males in various stages of female attire. Well, mostly female attire. While all the performers’ outfits included wigs, heels, gowns and usually bras to maintain a feminine illusion, what they wore underneath varied considerably. Some wore girdles for shape and concealment while others wore basic women’s panties. Still others wore jockey shorts under their pantyhose. While each performer was onstage, I would be checking with those still to perform to see if there were any changes needed for their introductions. It is more than a bit surreal to be dressed formally and be having a conversation with another guy dressed in a wig, full makeup, bra, pantyhose and jockey shorts.

Finally, my note cards in order, the audience was seated, I walked on stage, adjusted the microphone stand and said, “Good evening and welcome to the first annual Miss Gay Knoxville Pageant!” Then it was time for the line that had just come to me backstage.

“Tonight,” I continued, “represents the bringing together of two great American traditions: The Miss America Pageant and ‘I’ve Got a Secret,” referring to a once-popular television quiz show that had left the air a few years earlier. The audience’s abundant laughter meant they got the joke.

The ice broken, I quickly moved on to introduce the judges and give an overview of the evening, introduced the first performer and exited stage right. Stage right, in theater terms, is to the audience’s left and it was in that offstage area that the performers changed, the show’s directors ran about in a perpetual state of queenly panic and I, ever the actor, pondered my lines for my next appearance on stage. I kept each introduction brief and appropriate. “Celebrity” though I might allegedly be, the audience was not there to see me. And I didn’t consider tonight’s work to be a career move. This might indeed be the first Miss Gay Knoxville Pageant but I doubted I would ever host a second one, if indeed there were a second one. (As it turned out I wasn’t living in Knoxville the next year and have no idea if there ever was a second one.)

I don’t recall much of the rest of the pageant, at least the on-stage portion. I don’t recall who won or how the individual judges’ voting went. I have a vague memory of meeting backstage (stage left this time, away from the boys in lingerie) to tally the results.

What I do recall is the after-party and the night (all night) that followed. The party began at the Back Office Lounge around ten and ended, for me at least, around six the next morning in the bedroom of my mobile home some fifty miles away.

The Back Office Lounge was part of the gay bar renaissance of the early 1970s in Knoxville. The legalizing of liquor-by-the-drink in Knoxville and the lowering of the drinking age to 18 and a closing time of 3 a.m. for clubs that served liquor led to a real expansion of Knoxville nightlife, gay life included. The Carousel drew a mixed gay-straight crowd during the height of the disco era because of its large dance floor (lighted from underneath) and DJ booth, a first for the city. It also had a show bar upstairs for drag performances. Entré Nous was an intimate art deco club with a small dance floor. The Carousel was tucked away in the Fort Sanders neighborhood near the University of Tennessee. Entré Nous was a few blocks east of Gay Street, the main shopping street. (That’s right, Gay Street.) The two remaining “old school” gay bars – beer only, midnight closing time – were likewise off the beaten path.

The Back Office Lounge, however, was a former restaurant right across from the main post office and just a few steps from the county court house. Actually, it still served as a restaurant during the day for the downtown lunch crowd. By nine or ten p.m., however, it became a gay bar. It lacked a dance floor and therefore was primarily a “cruise” bar, a place to meet both old friends and, if things worked out, new friends.

It was the perfect place for an after-party with lots of room at the bar and lots of tables throughout the room, suitable for the crowd – well-dressed and, um, sexually diverse – that would be arriving from the pageant.

So far, all had gone as planned. The promoters had paid for my tux and paid me a small fee for hosting the pageant. Throughout the after-party I’d be told what a good job I had done hosting. And throughout the after party, the promoters had kept another promise: they paid for my drinks. But what about my (perhaps) facetious request for, um, companionship for the night?
They came through on that score also.

With a contestant from the pageant.

Fortunately, it was someone I already knew, someone whose house I’d been to for an after-bar party the previous year when bars still closed early. Unfortunately, although they had honored my assumedly facetious request, I was now committed – at least out of good manners – to spend significant time with this guy, missing out (or so I imagined) on other opportunities with guys just waiting to trick with a pageant MC. Yeah, right. On the other hand, he was a friend, a fun guy and not a regular at drag, although he had performed once at the Carousel. And because I had been at his house for a party after that performance I knew he was one of those who did drag while wearing jockey shorts (underneath his pantyhose.)

(A bit of history here: In the days before – and for some time after – Stonewall, many municipalities included among their anti-gay laws a requirement that any person in drag must be wearing at least three items of clothing “appropriate to gender.” Thus many drag performers wore male underwear – and perhaps an item of outerwear such as shirt – under their gowns. Police conducting all-too-frequent raids on gay bars would check for such things. Even though the laws fell into disuse by the mid-1970s many performers followed the tradition. Others felt keeping their male underwear drew some sort of gender line between being a drag performer and a transvestite or “tranny.” End of history lesson.)

Somehow the successful experience of hosting the pageant – and the free drinks – helped me accept his companionship. Mostly it was the free drinks. At first.

The after-party was fun, although I felt a bit strange being the only guy there in a tux. Most of the contestants had shed their costumes and assumed their male identities, all except two: the winner whose name (both drag name and real name) I cannot remember and my “companion” for the evening, whose name I also cannot remember.

The club having no dance floor, everyone did a lot of table hopping. Most of the crowd had been at the pageant, and most of them stopped by our table, many offering assumedly sincere compliments to either me or my companion.

As the evening – and it was rather late evening, after midnight for sure, by now – wore on, the drinks wore us down. The crowd thinned and it was time to go. But go where?
Apparently it was decided – by me or by him or by both of us, I’m not sure – that “where” would be back to my mobile home in Roane County.

Story 13: Tom, the Discount Drug Dealer and Closet Case

Tom, the Discount Drug Dealer and Closet Case (1973)

I met Tom through Joe.

Joe was my afternoon DJ, an affable, heavy-set, baby-faced guy who had an affinity for smoking illicit substances.

In other words, Joe was a stoner.

Tom was his dealer.

And a more unlikely drug dealer I had never known. Tom was twenty, but looked about sixteen. His late parents (I never knew the circumstances of their death) had left him a trust fund but he didn’t have full control of it yet. It paid for his classes at the community college, but not much else. So he sold marijuana. The Roane County airport was lighted but unstaffed at night and, being located up on Roosevelt Mountain, was rather isolated. It was, therefore, a major drop-off point for marijuana shipments. At the time, apparently, most marijuana sold in the greater Knoxville area arrived at the Roane County Airport. Somehow Tom was part of the distribution network. As far as I know, Tom never dealt in any “heavier” drugs and he only did enough
dealing to pay his rent and basic expenses.

It was known to many that Tom was a dealer.

It was known to very few was that Tom was a closet case.

I didn’t know it at first. My gaydar barely went off when I first met him. I did find him very cute, however, in a “why can’t he be gay” sort of way.

It also took me a while to figure out just why Tom was hanging around the radio station so much. In a small-town radio station, things can get a bit informal. Friends do drop by and most of them know the protocol if we let them in the control room. When the red light goes on, shut up! At first I didn’t know just whose friend Tom was. Then I realized he was usually around during Joe’s afternoon shift, which ran from two to six. Since I did the six to ten a.m. shift, I was usually busy with production work when Tom would come around. Or I’d be ready to leave for the day.

But then Tom began showing up when Joe wasn’t there. I really doubted he was dealing to any other staff members. The owner and his wife preferred margaritas as their drug of choice. The news director was a family man into church activities and martial arts. The station secretary’s idea of living on the edge was extra sugar in her morning coffee.

That left just me. And my drug of choice was, well, tricking.

Perhaps Tom wanted to be my “dealer” too. Or maybe he just liked hanging out at the station between classes.

But then he started dropping by during my Saturday morning shift – when I was the only one at the station.

Mostly we talked about music, not unusual considering we were in a radio station control room, listening to music I was playing.

And then, one day, he invited me to his apartment.

To listen to music.

Tom’s apartment was in the back of a large old house. It was really a studio with one L-shaped room serving as dining area, kitchen, living room and bedroom. The living room furniture consisted of two chairs and his bed.

I quickly realized that Tom knew I was gay. Perhaps he’d heard about the hickey incident with Joey. Perhaps he had gaydar. Perhaps he was gay. I wasn’t yet sure.

In fact while we talked about me being gay, Tom seems at pains to indicate that he was not gay. At first he played the, “Oh I’m straight, but I’m very cool with gay guys.” I’d heard that from a lot of guys. Some I’d ended up having sex with. Others just became friends.

Tom was fun to be with, fun to discuss music with, so I pretty much played along with his claim of heterosexuality.

Until the back rubs started.

Tom was only a few inches taller than me, but very slender, basically a healthy version of skin and bones. From his energy and his healthy appearance, I suspected he did little or none of the drugs he sold. In fact we never smoked weed together. Maybe he knew I wasn’t a stoner; maybe he wasn’t a stoner, just a businessman.

One night I arrived just as Tom had finished a shower and he was wearing only his jockeys when he let me in, although he was holding his jeans as if in the process of getting dressed.

“Do you know any massage techniques?” he asked. It was an interesting conversation starter, not the usual, “Hi, come on in. Can I get you a drink?”

“Not in a professional way,” I replied, “but I was in sports and I know some things about sore muscles.” Who knows, I thought, maybe he strained a shoulder lifting a bag of Colombian.
“I really need a back rub, man. I’m really tight and tense.”

He apparently took my silence for assent and, dropping his jeans on a chair, lay face down on his bed. I was still standing by the door and hadn’t yet taken off my jacket. Just over a minute had passed since I’d knocked on Tom’s door and now I was removing my jacket and Tom was lying face down on his bed in his jockey shorts.

The boy is fast, I thought. And I’d always prided myself on cutting to the chase with a trick. But I’d never gotten them undressed and on a bed this quickly.

I got up on the end of his bed on my knees and leaned forward to begin working on Tom’s shoulders. I was no professional masseuse, but I’d seen enough – and experienced enough – muscle massages during my years as a college athlete to know the basics. I worked down from his shoulders to his upper back. He was indeed quite tense and tight and he told me it felt good, so I continued. I moved down the middle of his back and then his lower back toward the waist band of his briefs. Up to now, although I was enjoying the experience, I treated it as one guy giving another a back rub. I’d done this for teammates in college and been the recipient a few times as well. No big deal up to this point.

But then I got a bit silly – or maybe just horny – and snapped the waist band of his briefs as if I were planning to go lower. I wasn’t sure if straight-proclaiming Tom would tell me stop right then and there.

Instead he reached back with both arms and slid his briefs down below his butt cheeks.
That had never happened to me in college.

Straight-proclaiming or not, Tom was about to get his butt cheeks massaged. He had a small, smooth, not-quite-bubble butt. I began where the waistband had been snapped, then smoothly over each cheek, then ran my fingers across the bottom where the leg openings had been. Then, sensing no objection, I pulled his briefs down further and went to work on his legs, then slipped his jockeys all the way off, even giving his freshly-showered feet a bit of a rub.

It was like a fantasy, the inspiration for a wet dream. Me, kneeling at the end of a boy’s bed while said boy lay face down and naked and asking for a back rub.

Tom lay still for a moment. I remained still too, wondering what would happen next. What would he say? What would he do? Where would we go from here?

Sorry to disappoint, but what follows isn’t an erotically arousing tale of passionate, unbridled sex that lasts late into the night.

Didn’t happen. Not that night.

Tom slid off his bed, retrieved his underpants, put them on, finished dressing in jeans and a flannel shirt and asked if I wanted a Coke.

“You’re good,” he told me.

I thanked him and then we spent the rest of the evening talking about and listening to music.
But the next time I visited Tom he wanted another “back rub.” And the time after that. And the time after that.

Eventually no visit to Tom’s was complete without him stripping to his briefs and lying face down on his bed.

And, eventually, it led to something more.

Never was a word said about Tom’s sexuality, the conversation of the evening remaininged about music or about the radio station or about school. Tom never spoke about his drug-dealing sideline and we never consumed any of his product. (I didn’t know - or want to know - where he kept his “stash.”)

Then one night when Tom had stripped down to his briefs I stripped down to mine too and went to work giving Tom a “back rub.”

When I finished I asked if he would return the favor, the favor I had offered so many times now.
He seemed to be confused by the request. Maybe he hadn’t heard me, I thought. Maybe I’d sent him into such a state of bliss with the back rub that he was having trouble receiving communication from here on Earth and, for a moment, he remained motionless, lying still face-down on his bed.

Suddenly he got up, keeping his back to me, reached down for his briefs and put them on, then turned around and gestured for me to lie face down on the bed. As I did, I couldn’t help but notice that either Tom’s briefs were rather loose or he was somewhat aroused. Not wanting to ruin the moment, I said nothing and just lay down awaiting Tom’s touch.

I was curious as to how this role reversal would work. Until now I had given the “massages” and Tom had received them. And I had been making it all up as I went along, trying to recall post-practice massages from the college athletic trainer. As far as I knew, Tom lacked any such memories.

But it didn’t seem to matter. Tom was either a natural or he was channeling my college trainer. Of course, my trainer’s hands never went some of the places that Tom’s hands were going.
For the most part Tom followed my pattern. He began with the shoulders and the upper back, then the lower back, all very legitimate moves my college trainer would have approved.
He also followed my moves around the waist and below. Down came my briefs – followed by Tom’s caressing hands – all the way down to my ankles.

As he finished and I lay there face down, I found the answer to my earlier question about Tom’s briefs. No, they weren’t loose.

I was about to discreetly get up and retrieve my underwear when Tom’s hands grabbed my waist and turned me over on my back. And "massaged" away any of my remaining stiffness.