Hey, I’m Walking Queer!

At the turn of the 21st century, going 20 years strong with her partner Denise Duclos, Denise Webb finally felt safe enough to come out. She was going back to school for nursing and had been working with preschool children until that point.

“It was a very scary time,” said New Haven Pride Center founder John D. Allen, leading his 10th annual Queer New Haven walking tour Sunday morning, speaking of an era before certain legal protections for queer people in Connecticut.

“You could be fired for being out. You could have your kids taken away from you.”

Webb and Duclos knew those worries well. I met them at Allen’s walking tour, where the couple filled me in on their story and their desire to learn more about the queer history of their city.

Allen’s walking tour, part of this year’s Arts & Ideas Festival programming, spanned 400 years, going all the way back to New Haven’s first public execution for homosexuality. Between then and now, several queer moments transpired, such as the 1967 arrest of rock star Jim Morrison of The Doors at the New Haven Arena — ​“We claim him, he’s bisexual,” Allen explained — and the fight for a domestic partnership registry in the city, which failed by one abstention. Armed with a thick binder and cheery disposition, Allen took a dozen participants through the city’s rainbow history.

Early in the tour, Allen mentioned how he cherishes the New Haven Green — the best of its kind in New England, in his view. Anyone who might have thought he was just a super-supportive guy would be proven wrong over the next hour and a half. Allen was enthusiastic about his opinions, positive and negative alike, and pulled no punches. Here are a few of his takes:

“Arguably the worst designed station in the world.” (Talking about Penn Station.)

“A horrible, horrible station.” (Still Penn Station.)

“It just killed him.” (This was about world-renowned architect Louis Kahn, who died of a heart attack in Penn Station.)

“If you are at all interested in queer history, you must see this film.” (I am Pauli Murray, a biopic of activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray, Yale Law School’s first Black woman graduate and a gender-expansive trailblazer.)

“One of the most homophobic organizations in the world.” (The Knights of Columbus, which originated at St. Mary’s Church on Hillhouse Avenue, one of the tour stops. ​“It’s a beautiful sanctuary,” he added before crossing the street.)

The two Denises listened in. They remembered having to hide their identities, both from the workplace and from the state as they struggled to protect custody over their 2‑year-old child, now 45 years old and proudly in a community identifying as ​“spawn of queers.” Now they could enjoy not just the fun of walking together in a queer group around the city, but also the somber education of what every step forward cost.

Allen took care to answer questions people might be too shy to pose themselves. Where did people cruise back in the day? In other words, what were the gay hookup spots for those on the down low? According to Allen’s research, the big ones were Long Wharf, the Farmington Canal Trail, the top of East Rock Park, and the men’s bathroom in the lower level of Yale’s Woolsey Hall.

“Floor-to-ceiling cubicles.”

Allen gave the kind of tour that could not be given by anyone else — partially because of his infectious energy and charming tendency to go on long tangents, and partially because many of the anecdotes were drawn from his own life.

He told us about inviting trans activist Sylvia Rae Rivera to New Haven to speak. He also gave a short review of Jodie Foster’s performance in a play at the ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) building in 1981, the night Foster’s stalker John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan in an effort to get Foster’s attention by recreating a theme from her movie Taxi Driver.

“There was Secret Service all over New Haven,” Allen remembered.

And the play?

“The show wasn’t really all that great,” he said with a shrug.

When the tour stopped near Grove Street Cemetery, Allen mentioned that he and his husband Keith had just gotten plots near the graves of erotic painter Paul Cadmus and his partner John Anderson, in an effort to ​“start a gay neighborhood there.”

“We’re looking forward to our final resting place!” Allen quipped with a smile.

By the time Allen wrapped up the tour at the Green he so loved, he was surrounded by lesbians trying to set up a meeting with him and one of their friends who they said would have plenty of sapphic stories to add to Allen’s tour repertoire. If you find yourself with the same urges, you can pass along any tidbits and leads about Connecticut’s queer history to Allen at [email protected].

From 400 years ago to now, it takes a community.