Warren Holleman - The Briar Patch

 

I'm going to tell you about my first visit to a gay bar. Come to think of it was pretty much my first visit to any bar. I was raised a Southern Baptist. And if you were raised a Southern Baptist, you know that there are church people and bar people, and the two usually don't come together. Well, it was about 20 years ago, and I was taking a class at University of Houston. The assignment was to film a series of family role plays. Most students recruited other classmates to do the role plays. But I had a friend who was an actor, or at least a former actor, and I thought, wow, mine could be really good if I would recruit him. 

 

My friend Grant had actually been a professor of drama at University of Houston, and he had been in movies. He was the rather inept team chaplain for the Dallas Cowboys in the movie North Dallas Forty, if you saw that one. But Grant was in his later years, in his 70s. He had fallen on hard times. His health was poor, he was short on funds, and I thought, he can help my role play a lot, and I can help him by compensating him financially a little bit. Excuse me. 

 

So, we did the role play. It went very well. And then, it came time to pay him. He paused and he said-- he had this mischievous look on his face, and he said, "You know what I'd really like you to do is take me out for a couple of beers." Well, we headed down Greenbrier at his direction, and he had me turn left into a parking lot just north of Holcomb. If you are my age or older, you know that's the site of the Briar Patch, Houston's first gay bar. And by that time there were other gay bars, but this was the one that older men preferred. 

 

As we entered the door, Grant was thrilled. He was in poor health, but you wouldn't have known it for the next two hours. [audience chuckles] His eyes were twinkling. I was happily heterosexual, as he knew, but little did I know that he was now recruiting me for a little role play that he was designing. [audience laughter] In this role play, there would be this aging queen-ish gay man and his younger lover. He took me around that bar, introducing me to all of his friends whom I never could see, because it was so dark and so smoky

 

But eventually, my eyes adjusted. It was a piano bar. And at a given moment, the pianist started playing Broadway show tunes. And the men in there knew every word to every song. I tried to pretend that I knew the words to the songs. I actually loved it. I've never been in a place where there was so much joy and camaraderie. And at one point, though, they asked me to come sit down on the piano bench, and they attributed a song to me. There was some Broadway show tune about an old man who took a young lover. They changed the words from girlfriend to boyfriend. So, I got to be the feature of that song. And once again, Grant was loving this role play.

 

And then, the tones shifted and the tunes shifted. Instead of Broadway show tunes, they were suddenly playing Baptist hymns. [audience chuckles] I'm not kidding. Baptist hymns. I knew all the words to those. [audience laughter] But the thing was, the words for the first time started making sense. [audience chuckles] I mean, this just as I am. Did anyone grow up singing that one? Wow. Those men knew the theology of that song and what it really meant. And Amazing Grace, there was a line, Through many dangerous toils and snares and hardships I have already come. But grace has brought me safe thus far and grace will bring me home. And I thought, wow, these songs are beginning to make some sense.

 

I started thinking, maybe this bar-church divide isn't-- I began to think, I'm in a real church now. These men had been ostracized from most churches, and they had created one there. And the last song sounded like a hymn. There was a very reverent tone, but it wasn't-- I couldn't place it. When they started singing the words, I realized it was that song from West Side Story, that was about a young couple, heterosexual couple in West side who could not really love the one they loved and be the person they were because of prejudice and that sort of thing. 

 

And wow. Tears were coming down my eyes. It wasn't because of all that cigarette smoke in the room, either. Just the last few lines haunt me to this day. There's a place for us, somewhere a place for us, and then someday a time for us. Take my hand and I'll take you there. Hold my hand, we're halfway there. Somehow, some way, somewhere.

 

Wow. That was one of the last times I spent significant time with Grant. He died not too much after that. I've always been grateful, because I felt like he showed me that place. Having been raised a Southern Baptist, I suddenly felt for the first time I really got a glimpse of heaven in that bar.