Before AIDS. Katie Batza
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in. If you had diabetes, you’d come in. If you needed an annual physical, you’d come in.”12 While at the Boston Center for Older Americans, the clinic served a small but diverse population that included the elderly, women, children, and gays.13 After the move to the Haviland basement in 1973, there was more physical space and more volunteers to reach out to each of these groups specifically. In addition to its regular daytime operating hours, during which anyone could schedule an appointment or drop by, the clinic opened its doors to specific populations in the evening and on weekends, including a gay health clinic on Wednesday nights.14 The clinic’s services and outreach to these specific populations reflected the diversity of the neighborhood and illuminated the deficiencies in the existing health-care system of the early 1970s. However, gay liberation rhetoric and politics were just a faint background hum to the neighborhood’s chants against gentrification and for access to affordable quality health care.
Clinic board meetings, which were intended to include and galvanize the entire community, looked more like town hall meetings and easily lasted several hours, which undoubtedly made them inaccessible for some in the community with limited time.15 One resident described how meetings would last “anywhere from three to five hours; yeah, they were long. Most of us on the board with some exceptions didn’t have experience in health care, or the management of clinics or human resources … we were the blind leading the blind.”16 In the early years, anyone who was associated with the clinic (founders, volunteers, patients, or even just neighbors) was welcome to attend the meetings, create agenda items on the spot, engage in debate, and vote on any and all decisions.17 This democratic structure reflected the political approach of many young, New Left–affiliated organizations of the period and was meant to foster personal investment in the clinic and larger Fenway community in the face of the encroaching redevelopment.
The way in which services specifically for gay patients became established within this very open structure illuminates how indirectly gay liberation influenced the Fenway clinic and the tight-knit community it served. With the clinic’s dedication to serving the entire Fenway community (of which gay men were a small part), creating and maintaining a gay health collective to formalize the clinic’s already established treatment of gay men was relatively easy. A doctor at Boston’s Homophile Community Health Center, which provided gay-friendly counseling to gays from around the city, asked clinic cofounder David Scondras if the Fenway clinic could provide medical backup to his patients. Taking advantage of the open, town hall–style board meetings, Scondras pitched the idea in April 1974 and received a warm reception. The Gay Health Collective of the Fenway Community Health Clinic began offering Wednesday night sessions on May 22, 1974.
Neither the inclusion of gay services at the Fenway clinic nor their formalization in the Gay Health Collective’s weekly sessions should be mistaken for gay liberation activism. While a handful of the Fenway activists were gay, Scondras among them, few were explicitly out or active in gay liberation organizations, focusing instead on the antiwar movement or the struggle with the Boston Redevelopment Authority. In fact, those who had insisted on the inclusion of gay health services at the clinic’s founding were often not out to one another or the Fenway clinic community. According to Scondras, “It was sort of an unspoken thing. No one ever got up and said, ‘Hey, I’m gay.’ ”18 Shedding more light on the political affiliations of the Fenway clinic during this period, one activist recalled, “It never really became a gay anything, it was just a place where gay people came … you advocated for anybody who needed help … we never thought of ourselves as gay, straight, white, black.”19 From this vantage point, Fenway residents never thought the Fenway Community Health Clinic directly related to gay liberation, and neither did the clinic itself. Rather, the clinic was an embodiment of progressive New Left politics, including the antiwar, antigentrification, labor, hippie, women’s, student, and civil rights movements, which challenged oppression in all forms, including homophobia. The clinic and many of its activists appear as gay allies rather than as actually gay. In this way, the New Left political and cultural milieu appears a better political point of origin for the Fenway clinic than gay liberation. However, the existence and success of gay health services at the Fenway Community Health Clinic from its inception did make the clinic unique.
While Scondras, who couldn’t remember ever specifically disclosing his own gay identity to the Fenway clinic community, was central in creating the Gay Health Collective, Ron Vachon was, perhaps more than anyone, the “gay face” of the clinic.20 Vachon was “the backbone of the thing … big, tall, strong, French Canadian, very gentle, but six foot three, bearded, probably could have been a professional wrestler if he didn’t go into medicine. He was working full-time at the Fenway clinic as a physician’s assistant and was gay.”21 While finishing up his degree as a physician’s assistant at Northeastern University in 1975, Vachon literally “wandered into the Wednesday night clinic for the first time because the man he was dating came in to pick up some files. There, he met then-medical director Sandy Reder, who on learning that Vachon was a physician’s assistant, put him to work on the spot. Vachon stayed to become part of the collective, and ultimately, the center’s first paid staff person.”22 He quickly became a leader at the clinic, even being considered for the position of executive director in the late 1970s, and always making sure that the clinic considered and met the medical needs of the gay community.23 In short, because they “were already part of the we,” already part of the Fenway community, a few activists who were gay were able to use the clinic’s organizational structure and mission to shape the services of the clinic and meet the medical needs of the gay community specifically without appearing to be outspoken gay activists.24 Gay health services originated at Fenway as part of the clinic’s community health activism, not because of any specific gay organizing. In this way, both the activists and the clinic itself have a very different relationship with the closet—they were more in the closet or at least downplaying their gay affiliations—than appears typical in the existing history of out and proudly vocal gay institutions of this period.
Boston’s gay population welcomed the opening of the Gay Health Collective at the Fenway for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it offered the only local, free, gay-friendly health services, which allowed gay men to avoid the ridicule they faced in many public clinics, the price gouging that was common in private doctors’ offices, and the inherent risks of using medical insurance.25 Moreover, the clinic was within less than a five-minute walk from the eastern border of the Fens cruising grounds, which made it an ideal location for gay men to stop in and get tested on their way either to or from the park. A volunteer doctor of the Gay Health Collective, himself a gay man, described his patients as “college kids, young adults, the bartenders … just the panoply of gay people as gay people were defined in the 70s. There definitely would be a mix of a stockbroker or lawyer, but not so many.”26 Another volunteer remembered, “I think we were caught off guard by the deluge of students and young folks that came for sexually transmitted diseases.”27 Word of the Fenway clinic’s gay-friendly services quickly spread throughout the city’s gay population via word of mouth, flyers in bars, and ads in Gay Community News. Shortly after its opening, the Wednesday night Gay Health Collective saw gay patients from all across the city and region. The clinic and its staff viewed and presented its gay services as a subsidiary to the larger mission of serving the neighborhood and providing low-cost, high-quality care, allowing it to remain a strong gay ally, but not actually gay. Regardless, it secured the Fenway clinic’s position as a new Boston gay institution among the city’s gay community.
VD screening and treatment for gay men began as one of nearly a dozen other programs run out of the clinic, aiding gay residents and quickly drawing gay clients from across the region. While the clinic quickly earned a reputation within the gay community as the gay clinic in town, it saw its services for gay clients as just another small piece of its offerings and distanced itself from close association with gay liberation or gay identity. A dozen years later, the clinic found itself on the frontlines of the AIDS crisis, on the cutting edge of gay and lesbian health services and research, and welcoming doctors and scientists from Harvard and the Centers for Disease Control in search of expert advice. While the Fenway clinic’s legacy grew from its relationship to gay and lesbian health, that relationship took nearly a decade to truly blossom,