The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South

FIFTEEN. Economic Opportunity and the Queer Community

FIFTEEN Economic Opportunity and the Queer Community Travel/Vacation: New Orleans Hotel. Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Feminist Owned.1 T he town had an appeal, especially for those seeking independence; longhairs, hippies, artists and others flocked to Eureka Springs. An advertisement was posted in Ms. magazine to attract this very set. Barbara Scott fled New Orleans, Louisiana, and a bad marriage. After coming out as a lesbian, she often traveled to Eureka Springs and eventually moved there in 1972, buying, appropriately, the old New Orleans Hotel. Having been active in the feminist movement in New Orleans, she sought to create a space for lesbians and lesbian feminists in Eureka Springs, but it would eventually become a focal point for gay men as well as lesbians from across the region. Scott, known by some as “the first lesbian,” brought with her later lesbian feminists from her native New Orleans, friends and friends of friends seeking quiet getaways in defined feminist spaces away from the city. As word spread, women from other cites began to arrive. Many were feminist tourists. Some were not. Scott remembers that “a lot of women were runaways,” leaving abusive husbands, coming to the hotel “for escape and a change of life.”2 Scott leased the hotel’s downstairs bar to another lesbian woman and two gay men also from New Orleans—Manny Williams and Vernon LeBlanc. Both men were familiar with the bar business. In New Orleans, LeBlanc was a waiter at the popular Fatted Calf cabaret venue. Downstairs bars were frequently queer in the American South. The upstairs rooms were let out to the traveler, and the downstairs was let out to cater to the traveler’s needs to meet others like them. Little Rock 167 had two gay spaces operating out of the basements of hotels, as did Jackson, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama. The Quarter bar downstairs in the New Orleans Hotel used this trend and the increasing gay and lesbian visibility that came out of the 1970s to create the beginnings of an openly queer community in Eureka Springs. The bar and the hotel were hugely popular as lesbians and gay men began to arrive in droves.3 Scott remembers there was never any real trouble. The only problem they had was keeping the straights out. “They integrated us,” she remembers. “The straights came in because it was the happening place to be.”4 Asgaymenand lesbiansarrived attheNew OrleansHotel toimmerse themselves briefly in the queer community formed there, others came with more permanent goals. Some saw great potential in the land around Eureka Springs. Queer men and women were attracted to Eureka Springs for a variety of reasons. Seeking a break from the city, gay men saw opportunity in Eureka Springs. Purchasing boarded-up homes and run-down businesses in the winding streets of the old downtown, some gay men started businesses in a place that was quickly gaining a reputation as a space that offered much more than simple tolerance. It was a queer space that offered a sense of a larger identity.5 Though it was hard to find work without the capital needed to cash in on the growing tourist trade, gay men found jobs waiting tables in the increasing number of high-end restaurants in town. Some became gallery attendants, and others found work in the hotels playing piano in the bar or offering concierge services. When all else failed, some gay men with theater training put aside their feelings toward Gerald L. K. Smith and the uptown highway crowd and found work as cast and crew members in The Great Passion Play, still one of the area’s largest employers. Steve Roberson came from Houston weary of the city and his life as an accountant. He and his partner looked for a quieter, rural life. They looked at Asheville, North Carolina, but deemed it “too closed.” Then they visited Taos, New Mexico, but for them it was “too brown.”6 Then Roberson remembered Eureka Springs. The town was not all that foreign to him; he had visited as a child when his parents took him and his brothers to see The Great Passion Play. Roberson returned in 1990, but, aside from the enduring but now ailing Passion Play, he found a town much more inviting than he remembered. Roberson quickly found “a support network” of gay and lesbian business owners. 168 ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY AND THE QUEER COMMUNITY Roberson and...