After DADT's Demise, Part II

I did have a bit of decent news yesterday in an email. The day before, after contacting the Air Force through their website, I also contacted the Servicemen's Legal Defense Network, SLDN, leaving them a message about what I had learned. (They help with legal issues involving gay and lesbian service members.)

Yesterday afternoon, I got a reply that I should contact one of their lawyers between the hours of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM Eastern Time. It was too late to contact them Friday, so I will do so next week.

They said they are working with many DADT-discharged veterans, in addition to those discharged before DADT. So, perhaps they can help me with my quest to return to the Air Force.

Twice before in my potential and current Air Force career, all was almost lost. When I first applied through my AF recruiter whose office was in Huntington Park, CA, I was told that my scores on the AF exam were not high enough. A few months later, after I'd left Marine OCS, I got called by the same AF recruiter and told that my scores were now acceptable, so I reapplied.

A few months later, when I was at AF Officer's Training School (OTS) at Lackland AFB, I had failed the Flight Screening Program to become a pilot. I had no other options. My flight commander came to me when we were playing one-pitch softball and said my discharge paperwork had arrived and I would be discharged the next day. In the afternoon, however, we learned that the Air Force was sending recruiters to talk prior service personnel into switching to missile careers since there was a critical shortage of missile officers. I and a couple of others went over the club where they were meeting to volunteer. We were not encouraged by what we were told.

The next morning, in class, our squadron commander showed up. My fellow flight members told him of my plight and desire to remain in the Air Force. Impressed that so many of my fellow officer trainees were on my side, he told my flight commander to hold up my out-processing paperwork until he explored all the options. It took weeks of waiting and little news, but a few days before graduation I did learn that my application for missiles had been approved. I finally had an Air Force career.

So, I suppose I am not always totally discouraged by bad news relating to the Air Force. Where there is hope, there are always possibilities.

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After DADT's Demise

I was intending to drive out to the sole USAF Recruiting Station in the Denver area later today (14187 E. Exposition Ave., Aurora, CO, 80012) to find out if the repeal of DADT also had provisions for the thousands of us who were separated before DADT took effect in 1993. But I figured I'd use the Air Force's website to find out as much as I could before making the drive.

When I input all of my personal information and submitted it, the Air Force computer declined my attempted application:

"09/22/2011

To: Gregory Sanchez

While we are excited to see that you are considering a career in the United States Air Force, based on the information you have provided, you are not eligible for the following reason:

You are over the age criteria for the program you selected."

They also have an effective chat function which I then utilized. "Dale" told me that I was not eligible for the Prior Service alternative because it has been over six years since I last served. Heck, DADT alone ate up approximately 18 years.

Obviously, these two responses were quite discouraging. After waiting 32 years for the military to allow gays to serve openly, now I am told I cannot reapply. When I was a missile combat crew commander at Minot, and an instructor of English at the Air Force Academy, I didn't need to be in the kind of shape I was in then. However, I have continued to stay in shape for the past 32 years, and I am in at least as good a shape as I have ever been in my life, and likely in better shape than many currently serving in the Air Force. If I had been allowed to take a physical, and had I not passed that physical for any number of valid reasons, I would not have an effective complaint. Had I been discharged under DADT in 1993, regardless of my age, instead of under a different system in 1979, I would be able to reapply.

There may be some out there who were discharged in 1992, just before DADT came into effect; but they will also not be able, under this repeal, to reapply. They are in the same situation as I, sadly.

As I said, if we were allowed to apply anyway, and take the required physicals, then we would at least have been treated fairly, given all that we lost in past and can now never get back.

This feels very much like it must have felt for the freed slaves to be told that, yes, after so many years in abject captivity, they are free but are not entitled to the forty acres and a mule compensation they felt they were promised when they were finally free.

Freedom without the means to directly benefit from that new freedom rings just a bit hollow for those of us who are not allowed to return to serving our country as we were once able to.

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Gay Theater in Denver, Part IV

What I did not know until I spoke to Steve Tangedal at length a few weeks back was that Theatre on Broadway garnered significant funding throughout their successful run because of, you guessed it, Bingo! Ticket sales alone would never have gotten the sheer number and quality of the productions they put on from the early 1990's until approximately 2005.

What killed the golden Bingo goose for them came from an unlikely source: the legal end to smoking in public places. When the law took effect in 2005, the Bingo players who smoked stopped coming, and there must have been a good many of them. Monthly income from Bingo plummeted, Steve told me. Effectively, it killed TOB.

TOB had successfully expanded, too, before the end came. In addition to their regular site at 13 S. Broadway, they opened the Phoenix Theatre and staged plays there from approximately 1999 until 2007. They also staged productions at the Denver Civic Theatre until 2007, as well.

Steve provided me with lists of plays they put on in addition to the ones I attended (I did see Psycho Beach Party at some point. And it, along with Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Jerker or the Helping Hand, and Two Boys in Bed on a Cold Winter's Night, were successful as late night gay theatre.)

Here are the ones he remembers:

Shakespeare's R & J
Naked Boys Singing
Laramie Project (created at the Denver Center, becoming one of the most produced titles in the country for quite some time)
Making Porn
10 Naked Men
Ruthless! The Musical (which launched the Broadway career of Annaleigh Ashford)
Crumple Zone
Pageant
Parallel Lives
Torch Song Trilogy
Gross Indecencies: The Trials of Oscar Wilde (which I may have seen at the Phoenix Theatre)
Dirty Blonde
Last Summer at Bluefish Cove
Stop Kiss
Southern Baptist Sissies
Sordid Lives
Corpus Christi
Gertrude Stein and Companion
Laughing Wild
Kiss of the Spiderwoman
The Eyes of Babylon
Some Men
The Sum of Us
Porcelain
Dying Gaul
Lips Together Teeth Apart
Beautiful Thing
Varla Jean Merman's Under a Big Top
Snakebit

It's an impressive list using any criteria, and I am sorry I missed almost all of them in the final years of TOB.

Fortunately, Steve is now working to create a new gay theatre production company at a venue right at Five Points. We can all wish him good fortunate because if he attains even a portion of the success he gathered at TOB, he'll have another remarkable run.

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DADT Has Ended

Interrupting my look at Gay Theater in Denver, at 12:01 AM earlier this morning, DADT ended. At my age, it may be difficult to get back in; however, I still intend to try.

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Gay Theater in Denver, Part III

After a couple of conversations and email exchanges with Steve Tangedal, I realized that I saw Ten Percent Review and even The Boys in the Band at Theater on Broadway's first venue, 135 S. Broadway. That was likely 1991, the first year I lived in Denver.

In addition, I got in on the first gay play in the new venue, 13 S. Broadway, Breeze From the Gulf by The Boys in the Band creator, Mart Crowley.

I was also there from the start of their "coming out" first gay season with the following productions:

Six Degrees of Separation
Raft of the Medusa
Jeffrey
The Boys in the Band

Obviously, I got hooked and made TOB a regular visit whenever a new production was mounted in the following years:

Love, Valour and Compasion
Howard Crabtree's When Pigs Fly
Howard Crabtree's Whoop Dee Doo
Poor Superman
Party
Execution of Justice
Cabaret
A Perfect Genesh

Steve informed me that he flew to Howard Crabtree's farm in Buck's County, PA, to load up the original off-Broadway costumes designed by Crabtree himself for TOB's production of Whoop Dee Doo. For When Pigs Fly, TOB had three different revivals.

That was the '90's. Unfortunately, and I cannot explain why, I never attended any performances after the late 1990's. In my next post, I will list the many productions that I missed, as well as finally explaining the "Bingo!" reverence.

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Gay Theater in Denver, Part II

Bingo!

I will explain that remark in a later post on this subject, but the most long-lived and consistently entertaining Denver gay theater company was Theater on Broadway (TOB).

Located at 13 S. Broadway from approximately 1991 until 2006, it was awarded the "Best Season for a Theatre Company" for three different seasons. It was presented with the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1998.

Theater on Broadway did not start out quite so grandly nor at all gay. It had its humbler beginnings in Lakewood, of all places, as the Lakewood Players from 1972-1978, performing in several venues all over Lakewood. Steve Tangedal, my source for much of this information, joined the company in 1979. They were then performing at the Green Mountain Recreation Center up until 1988, with support from the city of Lakewood that, unfortunately, diminished as the Greed Decade continued.

With financial support from the city of Lakewood all but gone, the company moved to the DU Studio Theatre until 1989, when they actually became The Theater on Broadway by relocating to 135 S. Broadway for two years. In 1991, they moved one day, in the middle of a successful production, to what would become their most successful location, the one depicted above and mentioned earlier, 13 S. Broadway.

It was there that I became aware of TOB from the very beginning of its gay phase, after the passage of Amendment 2 in 1992, an event that injected an unintended, though serious, dose of reality and gay pride into many aspects of Denver gay life.

Not only did several gay organizations rally to successfully fight Amendment 2 on the streets and in the courts, mentioned as a backdrop and additional motivation for my writing the Rainbow Arc of Fire series, it energized Steve Tangedal to evolve TOB into a venue for gay plays and musicals almost exclusively. The Denver annual pride parade and festival in 1993 expanded significantly in length and size and attendance. It was the first time I actually marched in the parade.

TOB was already performing Six Degrees of Separation, a play with a significant gay character and a hilarious nude scene, so it became an easier transition to All Gay All The Time!

Many of the original players and participants from the Lakewood days had already left the company. Now, located in Denver, it was easier for Steve to recruit gay and gay-friendly actors and assistants to help with the transition.

 

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