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We did, and Judge Ginger Lerner Wren stepped in as the county’s mental health court jurist to insure Gary got help in his final days. The staff called the police who came to arrest Gary for criminal mischief, but Butch intervened, called me up, and asked me to just take Gary home. You see, he was so outraged about President Ronald Reagan’s treatment of gay and HIV related issues that when he went into the restaurant one evening and saw a framed picture of Reagan on the wall, he went into a rage, turned postal, took a hammer to it, and ripped it down. A true activist, Gary also almost got arrested at the Floridian one night. He also became a very real victim of the HIV virus, and suffered dementia along the way, getting taken into custody by the police for being homeless on an evening when he could not find his way to his half million dollar canal-based home that he had hosted dozens of community functions in.Īs early as the year 2000, our community did not have the treatment modalities in place for those who suffered from AIDS. And boy did he piss Butch off one night.įrom being one of the fiery and fierce founders of AIDS Center One in the Marlin Beach Hotel in 1984, Gary became the heart, soul, and voice of the Dolphins Democrats and our community. Yeah Butch, but a meal at least comes first!Ī fellow grad from Hofstra University, Gary was perhaps the most well-known liberal gay activists ever to grab a bullhorn in South Florida. “Hey, what was I supposed to do,” he asks. I jump in, sit down, buckle my seat belt, and Butch reaches over, grabs my dick, squeezes my crotch, and I scream, “WTF?” Had him pick me up at my townhouse in his fancy Jaguar. Then there was the night I took this very heterosexual man to an HIV benefit in the 1980’s at a hotel on the beach.
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Probably should not have included that paragraph where I had Butch paying for his son’s Bar Mitzvah. I even handled his divorce decades ago, but I was not exactly a family law counselor, so I just copied some rich Jewish Boca doctor’s settlement. Here are some stories from the 1980’s that you may have missed on your social media account in 2017.īutch and I have been friends for 40 years. Gays looking for late night scandalous alliances or real big portions of scrambled eggs would wind up at the FLO.įour decades later, the eggs are still fresh, Butch Samp is still the owner, and history has been written on the street- good and bad. The FLO on ELO was home plate not only for the makers and shakers of Fort Lauderdale, it was virtually the place where the downtown business community in shirts and ties would interact daily with tourists in flowered shirts and sandals vacationing across the country. I became the radio host, publisher and gadfly. Guess through good and bad, we have been here a while, still eating many of our lunches at the Floridian. I was saved by the fish tank taking the hit.Ĭoincidentally, no one pointed any of their guns to the quiet lawyer working on the second floor mostly doing transactions law for a civil firm. It was a pretty decent gig, until I went on the radio one day, spoke about legalizing marijuana, homosexual teenage prostitution and gay rights, and someone shot up my suite the next day. I opened my first law office at 1700 East Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale 40 years ago, in a beautiful corner office overlooking a canal. Hell, that’s one of the reasons I started the Express Gay News in 1999, to ensure that the history of our lives is documented in print and on the net. Couldn’t do that if I wanted to, as our past was not accurately recorded. The best way to approach this is just to share vignettes of the stories which illuminated our lives, in no historical order. But the ceremony set off this shockwave in my brain, reminding me that most of Broward County’s gay history evolves out of stories you can tell about East Las Olas Boulevard, once the mecca of all things gay in Fort Lauderdale. If I am going to be honored as a pioneer, hell I will show up naked in my Daniel Boone coonskin hat. All you had to do apparently to get honored was live long enough, have a lesbian daughter, or have heard of the Cathode Ray Nightclub - which brings me to today’s column. Let’s face it, that won’t even cover all my tricks for the last year, let alone the last 40.Īnyway, it’s a nice gesture and anytime you can get to eat the baked clams oregano that Marco creates at Café Vico the evening is going to be fun. In fact, in what is going to be one of the weirdest ceremonies ever they have decided to honor about 82 of the region’s local gay pioneers and straight allies in a dynamite restaurant that can seat no more than a hundred for that occasion. October is LGBT history month, and apparently, it has just dawned upon the Dolphin Democrats that South Florida has a gay history.