The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's: A Gay Life in the 1940s
Ricardo Brown & William Reichard (editor)
In the modest, plainspoken tones of Upper Midwestern vernacular, Ricardo Brown's memoir, The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's, recounts a year in the life of Saint Paul, Minnesota's gay community. That the year was 1945, and that what passed for a community was a clandestine, guilt-ridden nightly gathering in an obscure blue collar bar makes the book a valuable, and occasionally compelling document ( not to mention an important counterweight to equally honest but more optimistic portraits of the period's gay life in bigger cities—George Chauncey's Gay Manhattan, Marc Stein's City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, etc.). That the book is being published posthumously, however, and in a clearly unfinished state, makes it much less of a gem than one might hope for.
Dishonorably discharged from the navy for homosexuality, and terrified by his failed weeklong attempt to start a new life in New York,18-year-old Ricardo Brown returned to his blue-collar hometown and found secret solace in the small crowd that gathered at Kirmser's each evening. The middle-aged German immigrant couple who owned the bar, a decidedly straight workingman's tavern by day, never acknowledged that their loyal evening clientele consisted entirely of gay men and lesbians. But in the buttoned-down conservative city of St. Paul, even that clientele had trouble acknowledging itself:
"There were never any overt signs of affection between men in Kirmser's, although a good-natured bear hug was acceptable, as it would be anywhere else. But a kiss between men, even in Kirmser's, was unthinkable, a deadly, ancient taboo. We all knew what the taboos were, from generation to generation, as well as the penalties for straying: banishment, disgrace, unemployment, ridicule, beatings, prison. Men simply didn't show affection for one another...Not even in Kirmser's."
Throughout the book, in passages such as this one, Brown suggests that, for the Kirmser's crowd, a sense of constant fear corroded St. Paul's surface of Norman Rockwell geniality. Nostalgic reminiscing about Kate Smith on the radio and the Montgomery Ward Christmas catalog is undermined—and overwhelmed—by arrests, firings, and the constant need to lie about one's self to anyone outside of the bar.
Other than their colorful nicknames—including Flaming Youth, Betty Boop, Lulu, and The Guy with Crabs—the male members of Brown's St. Paul circle are not particularly well characterized. And Brown's digressive storytelling makes it difficult to keep track of who's who. From time to time, Brown does hit the mark stylistically, with well-etched descriptions of his lesbian friend Ruth—"she slunk off, her nylons bagging at the knees in little pockets of despair, her purse stashed high up in her armpit like a rifle" and perfect soundbites of queeny bar dialogue: "What would you do with a cock that big?...Put it in a corner and throw kisses at it?" Overall though, the book suffers from a homogenous matter-of-factness, occasionally interrupted with bursts of generic hyperbole ("He was a Greek god") and flat-out peculiarity ("Willa Cather was the Coca-Cola of writers, an American original, bringing the nectar and the wisdom of the gods to even the smallest and meekest among us.")
Brown, a journalist, died in 1999, and while The Evening Crowd provides a fine overview of his writing's historical relevance in a foreword by former Minnesota state senator Allan Spear, there is no information provided on the book's editorial genesis. Poet and fiction writer William Reichard is the volume's credited editor, but the text is sufficiently disorganized that one senses that Brown's work has been handled with overly respectful kid gloves. While The Evening Crowd will surely prove valuable to students and scholars of gay and midwestern history, its meandering anecdotes and lack of logical structure are distracting enough to prove off-putting to more casual readers.
