My friend Dave Glascock: A gladiator for gay rights
To me, Dave, you always looked like the actor Wilford Brimley, forever fifty, with that roundish body and brushy walrus mustache.
Yep, that's you to the far right, holding court in the picture above.
Remember?
The image is sketchy but still, you look so dashing in your long sideburns and open-necked collar.
So 1970s.
God love you, Dave, even your last name -- Glascock -- that cross to bear for any gay rights soldier on the front lines of an emerging new culture war.
And I told you so, many, many times.
But you'd just wave me off with a sweep of that big hand.
My friend Dave was an LA taxicab dispatcher turned gay activist, a kid from Wisconsin drawn to culturally-liberal California like a religious witness to the Promised Land, to that place where he could just be himself.
He learned quickly that gay men remained social outcasts, even there.
But that never stopped him.
In the early 1970s, not long after New York City’s historical Stonewall riots, Dave was appointed by then-City Councilman Ed Edelman as LA’s first government liaison to its gay community.
His task was to take the pulse of a restive West Hollywood and ensure that civil rights extended to everyone, even the queer.
When we crossed paths twenty years later, in 1994, I was an LA newspaper reporter and Dave was heading an intervention program at the LA County Jail . This time, his job was to protect gay inmates from being beaten and raped by more hardcore offenders.
Teamed with Ken Irwin, an LA County Sheriff’s Deputy also in his early 50s, Dave developed a classification system for incoming prisoners, to identify who would be assigned to this new "softie tank."
In a charmless cinderblock room, the two partners — one gay, one straight — established a simple admittance criteria: You had to live as a gay man on the street.
They developed a quiz that included such questions as “Which gay bars have you been to?” “What is your lover’s telephone number?” and “Where and when is the gay pride parade?”
Together, they conducted 30,000 interviews.
I did a story about the campaign of this unlikely Odd Couple seeking change in the nation’s largest jail system.
That's how Dave and I became friends.
I saw how he thrived in this forbidding environment. He wasn’t only gay, he was HIV-positive. But he held another bond with these men.
In Wisconsin, he’d spent two years in prison for a singular dalliance he’d had as a teenager with a 15-year-old male prostitute.
Dave was 18, barely an adult himself.
Decades later, he still remained on the national registry of sex offenders, a Scarlet Letter that required him to check in regularly with a government minder, answer personal questions about his sex life and desires.
For this proud man, it was an embarrassing ordeal.
It was just one heavy price he paid, it seemed, for being gay.
Without a doubt, Dave was a gruff guardian to those men behind bars.
He brooked no bullshit.
He walked a tightrope between the jailed and the jailers: Among the prisoners, he outed career complainers from those with serious concerns, sometimes inspiring criticism from the inmates.
And he was mistrusted by guards who disliked the supposed pampering of gay inmates by an outsider unafraid to circumvent jail command, even telephoning a supervisor’s boss to get his way.
“I piss everybody off,” Glascock said, “at one time or another.”
When he started, deputies wouldn’t share his cafeteria table. They left him nasty notes, whispered about hm being a dirty old ex-con.
Dave ignored them.
No one would stand between him and his mission.
And in that small interview room, the gay imposters angered him.
After one long-haired inmate bluffed several correct answers to the gay test, Glascock’s eyes narrowed.
Such quick studies like this miffed him the most -- sullen jail veterans who lied about lovers they’d had, gay bars they’d visited, interlopers who would cause nothing but trouble among legitimate gay men.
So Dave went on the attack with the long-haired man. He demanded to know the location of the fish tank in the lobby of a West Hollywood gay bar.
“Er, it’s on the right, yeah, the right,” the inmate stammered.
“Next!” Glascock called out.
Smiling, he said the bar had no fish tank.
Another man professed to be HIV positive in an attempt for sympathy.
Glascock cleared the room.
“Listen, you son of a bitch!” he spat. “You know you’re not gay. But I am gay and I’m HIV positive. And you don’t want to be me. So, don’t ever pull that again.”
But over the years the job deepened his sense of compassion.
After a few tough minutes under Dave's interrogation, an inmate with orange hair finally passed muster.
“Thanks a lot, darlin’,” Dave said, clearing him for the gay ward. “The third degree’s over. Oh, by the way, I like the way you do your hair.”
He grilled one inmate on his favorite West Hollywood gay bars.
“I don’t go to bars anymore,” the man responded. “I’m almost 56 years old, nobody would have me. Anyway, I value my life, so I just don’t go.”
Dave studied the man in silence. He knew from experience that among some of his gay brethren, growing old was the greatest sin of all.
“I know,” he replied softly. “You get to be 50 and nobody wants you. It’s tough, man. It's really tough."
Of all of the incarcerated gay brothers he championed over the years, Dave had a lingering soft spot.
Drag queens.
“Nobody cares about people in jail, especially homosexuals,” he always said. “Last of all come the queens. They’re one of the most isolated groups in society. They have no power. And they have no one with any power who’s interested in their behalf.”
Dave and Kenny tried to keep the queens out of the softie tank. While not sexually attracted to each other, the queens often sought relationships with heterosexuals or other, more masculine gays.
Queens who had previously taken residence int he softie tank had taken on boyfriends, inciting fights. After lights-out, they cruised the dorm for lovers, using ripped-up bedsheets as makeshift halter tops.
So Dave helped create a cell block specifically for the queens.
Module 913.
Unfortunately for its residents, the tiny isolated ward was tucked away inside the padlocked heart of a suburban facility, far away from everything
The queens, of course, hated the place.
They called it the Witch’s Castle.
As one said, the back of her hand held against her forehead for dramatic effect, “The Witch’s Castle was a place where they put you away so no one can hear your cries.”
And so the queens languished in that cell they decorated with he-man posters and frilly toilet-paper curtains. Dave always called them “the girls,” and they greeted him on his visits like a returning hero.
Risking punishment, they maintained their feminine look with homemade makeup recipes: For mascara, they burned the black telephone receiver with a lighter, mixing the melted plastic with toothpaste smeared on the cinder-block wall.
They combined soap and oatmeal to make beauty masks. Earrings were fashioned from the foil tops of their morning orange juice.
Dave always defended such practices, describing the inmates as “women trapped in men’s bodies.” If they must be isolated, he said, allow them to go topless and wear makeup as a way to express their sexual identity.
“The attitude is, ‘Dammit, these are men and they’re going to be treated like men,’ ” he said. “Well, they’re not men. Nobody would choose this lifestyle unless they had something burning inside them.”
As I reported my story, I watched as a lasting bond grew between Dave and his partner, the straight-laced deputy Kenny.
One night, Dave gave Ken a tour of the West Hollywood streets where most drag queens are arrested
“Look! There’s Ken!” several queens shrieked as the suburban husband and father cruised past in a late-model Lexus, smiling broadly like a kid on a field trip.
“Hey,” he later asked Dave, pointing to one gay bar, “that sign says ‘SM’! What’s that stand for, like S&M?”
“No, Kenny,” Dave answered, his face wrinkled. “It stands for Santa Monica Boulevard, the street we’re on.”
They were two friends out on the town, having fun.
“Which way do I go, right or straight?” Kenny asked at one corner.
“This is West Hollywood, Ken,” Dave said. “It’s either right, left or gaily forward, but never straight.”
Inside one bar, they encountered men they’d interviewed at the jail.
Dave introduced his suddenly reserved partner.
“Hey, remember Ken? He’s finally come out of the closet!”
Ken fired back, “Yeah, and now I want to go back in.”
After the story ran, Hollywood came calling.
Uber producer Jon Peters wanted to make a movie about Dave and his work with the queens. Dave and I had previously signed a contract that included me in any film project. Peters loved everything about the drag queen endeavor.
Except one thing: Me.
He and his minions did all they could to divide us. The crazy odyssey that would follow tested our friendship but in the end brought us closer together.
The working title for the project was The Witch’s Castle.
It never got made.
Today, Dave would be in his 80’s. Sadly, we've lost touch.
But this remarkable man and his mission of social justice came flooding back into my memory last year.
Taking on historic homophobia in the justice system, California Governor Gavin Newsom launched a new clemency initiative, a process for pardoning people prosecuted for being gay.
Across the nation, charges such as vagrancy, loitering and sodomy have been used to unjustly target the gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities.
Now California seeks to turn a page on those historic wrongs.
Would Dave have qualified?
Probably not. His charges came in another state.
But, Dave, I can’t help but think that if anyone, anywhere, deserved clemency for his perceived wrongs of the past, it’s you.
You were a civil rights icon who would not stand for the persecution of the gay men you always called “my people.”’
Wherever you are, Dave, you’re still a hero.
My hero.
A gladiator for gay men everywhere.
Even with that unfortunate last name.