Donald Barthelme had a house in the neighborhood. For a while, the living was cheap enough that they didn’t have to leave. Queer folks and musicians and writers and artists found their way to Montrose. Much like whole swathes of Houston in the mid-1900s, Montrose inflated with Houston’s influx of money - but in lieu of the organized, conservative splendor characterizing the city’s other hubs, the neighborhood became the bayou’s bohemian epicenter by the ’60s. Thomas University, overlooking what was once the neighborhood’s streetcar line. Link, and he lived in a mansion that’s now a part of St. The neighborhood was organized by an oil baron named J.W. Houston’s epicenter for queer life got its start in 1911. If you take Montrose Boulevard toward the Rice campus, past Richmond Avenue and over Interstate 59, before you hit the rotunda by the museums flanking Main Street, you’ll pass block after block of effervescent homes, crowded but tidy, with porches spilling greenery onto the street.
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The roads bend and form soothing, economical loops. Shrubs spill from underneath pastel townhouses. Whole swathes of Houston are charming at best, sprinkled with strip malls and churches and overgrown parking lots, but Montrose is beautiful in a classical, fantastical way. I didn’t realize who they were talking to until they’d turned the corner, abandoning the block under the shade of some branches dancing above us. Like something that couldn’t have possibly been my life. A pair of black guys leaned through the window of their truck, blasting lazy R&B, and one of them called me beautiful. And I was still loafing around, smoking and sweating, when a car slowed down by the stop sign beside me. I smoked an entire pack of cigarettes on the curb, until my guy asked if I minded if he left, just for a little while, and I told him that was fine. I didn’t step into the club we’d driven down for, or any club at all. For the first time in my years in Texas, I could wonder if they were queer with the knowledge that I just might be correct.īut too many nerves were exploding across my stomach. People smoked on the streets, cis women and cis men and trans women and trans men, laughing or brooding or just lurking beside the bars.
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The first thing I noticed was that everything hummed. So one night, in the fall of 2011, we caught a ride to a club on Fairview. And I didn’t know what to look for, but I’d met a guy who did. Queer life in Houston had been otherwise inaccessible for me, raucous and sloppy but highly compartmentalized if you didn’t know what to look for, you’d simply never find it. It was a few more years before I made it there myself. If what I’d heard was any indicator, this place was the actual pit of sin, where Mephistopheles himself lived in a garage apartment with two Yorkies, a fuck buddy, and a painted porch. I was still in high school, and we hadn’t talked about the spectrum of my gayness just yet, or at least not in words, although it sat on every dinner plate and dollhouse and stray tile and stair the subject of queerness in general had only come up sparingly, usually in whispers about neighbors, or unmarried family friends, or the cousins no one had heard from in a minute.Īnd then there was also this neighborhood across the city, mentioned cryptically in my house, and only ever as the punchline of a joke out in the world: this place called Montrose. My dad handed it to me, wordlessly, one day in our suburban kitchen. My first encounter with HIV was a copy of the book And the Band Played On.