Forest Park

Forest Park is one of the best-known locations in St. Louis. Since its opening in 1876, it has been a major part of public life,  home to the 1904 World’s Fair, museums, a world-class zoo, and 'The Muny' outdoor theater.  Less well known, though, is the important role the park has played in making possible LGBTQ life in the region.

As sociologist Laud Humphreys showed in his book Tearoom Trade, in the years after World War II Forest Park offered “privacy in public” to men who were seeking sexual encounters with other men (be they gay, bisexual, or heterosexual; married or unmarried).

And, once gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people began creating more formal organizations in the late 1970s, the park’s size, its prominence, and its location at the western border of the Central West End (the so-called gay ghetto) made it especially attractive as a place to gather. It was a public space where many could assert their right to the city.

In the 1970s, as LGBTQ people in St. Louis began to develop more formal organizations, they turned to Forest Park as a familiar location for these activities and gatherings.

When a group of LGBTQ people decorated automobiles for a pride event in 1973 (remembered by some as St. Louis’s “first gay pride parade") their destination was Forest Park. Starting at the Red Bull bar in East St. Louis, cars drove through downtown St. Louis and west to Forest Park, ending at the "cannon" -- a location well known to the procession's participants.

Learn More:  Memories of the event by Dan White  [external link]

For many years, St. Louis's formally organized Pride celebrations were held in and around Forest Park.

Celebrations in 1980 included a community picnic in Forest Park, at the "northeast corner of the Steinberg parking lot," and workshops at nearby Forest Park Community College. The 1980 Walk for Charity, the first of St. Louis' annual marches, began at Maryland Plaza in the Central West End and proceeded up Lindell, on the northern edge of the park, to a rally on Washington University’s campus.

The next year (1981), at the last minute, Washington University revoked its permission for a similar gathering, and organizers held their rally in Forest Park, at the corner of Skinker and Lindell. They sarcastically thanked the university for “teaching us yet another lesson in bigotry and oppression!”

But a new tradition was born, and until 1997 the annual Pride parade ended with a celebration in Forest Park.

Learn More:  Timeline of Pride Events 1979 - 2019 [external link] 

Forest Park is a place that many St. Louisans hold as an essential part of their everyday lives, and it has played this role for LGBT people as well. But sometimes competing claims for space in the park resulted in conflicts and violence.

 In fact, claims to public space often reveal the inequalities underlying urban life.

This was especially clear in June 1992 when, after the Pride celebration in Forest Park, some LGBT people were verbally harassed and physically assaulted as they walked to their cars.

On Sunday evenings, the northeast section of the park had provided a popular spot for young African American women and men to hang out with their friends. Often the group numbered in the hundreds. Police had recently moved the group to a new location after Muny theater attendees complained about their presence, and now the young people were directly in the path of the departing Pride-goers.

The details of how this encounter resulted in physical attacks are unclear, but it is clear police discouraged victims from filing charges and made no arrests, even though some were so badly injured they required hospitalization. In its wake, media reports warned of “mob” violence, making no effort to identify the actual perpetrators. LGBTQ activists blamed police for mishandling the entire event. Some Black journalists, while denouncing the violence, pointed out that African American youth “had a right to be in the park like anybody else” (Patricia Williams, The St. Louis American, 1992). Both young Black people and LGBTQ people (some of whom were Black) thought that they were being discriminated against by city officials. Clearly, park and city officials had created this clash because they valued the white families who made up the majority of Muny audiences more than these other park users.

In the wake of the 1992 attacks, LGBTQ activists pressured St. Louis authorities for police reforms. Prosecutors began filing hate-crime charges for assaults against gay and lesbian people. By the time of the next Pride celebration in Forest Park, local LGBT leaders had conducted “sensitivity training” for more than 50 police officers who provided security for the event, and Freeman Bosley Jr., St. Louis’s new (and first African American) mayor, appeared at the rally.

Efforts to police who used the park, and how, did not end in 1992. But decades of claiming park space for themselves helped to challenge the invisibility and marginalization that LGBTQ residents of the St. Louis area had long experienced.

Stories like these are explored throughout Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis. They remind us both of the ways that public spaces like parks have structured LGBTQ life in the St. Louis region, and of the importance of innovation and organizing to the history of our communities.    

Explore:

Forest Park Forever. Timeline. https://www.forestparkforever.org/park-timeline (accessed November 2020)

Laude Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. (Chicago : Aldine Publishing Company, 1970).

Laude Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Thesis (Ph.D.) Washington University, 1968. Dept. of Sociology.

Dan White. St. Louis' First "Gay" Parade? St. Louis LGBT History Project, October 19, 2014. http://www.stlouislgbthistory.com/component/content/article/2-uncategorised/127-st-louis-first-gay-parade.html (accessed November 2020)

Missouri Historical Society. Unofficial Pride Parade Collection, P1020. http://collections.mohistory.org/resource/1017988 (accessed December 2020).