That night I went to the Kismet (which I also looked up in the phone directory], but, not knowing that (particularly in those very homophobic days) gay night life didn’t start until after midnight, I arrived at 8 pm. After a brief pause, he snarled, “The Kismet,” slamming down the phone.
“What’s the name of the gay bar?” I asked. When the bartender answered, I asked him if this was a gay bar, and, surprised, he said darkly that it was not. I knew it wouldn’t likely be a gay bar, but that didn’t matter. I solved that particular problem by looking up “Cocktail Lounges” in the Yellow Pages, picked out one on Gay Street (yes, there is such a downtown street), and phoned it. How to find a gay bar, for example, was a puzzlement. In January of 1976, when I came to Columbus as a Visiting Professor at the Ohio State University Law School, I also moved to the city to explore the gay world for the first time in my life (I was 32).
