Lounging around and GLBT history

I haven’t started off being nearly as productive this week of vacation as last week or as I may have hoped, but that’s okay. I putzed around some today with figuring out how to add links to weather forecasts. I ended up just going links to Weather Underground on the EGN calendar page. I tried a few other things, but I ended up usually missing some important point or technique. I am not sure how much anyone uses the calendar page for planning to go out of town anyway.
I went to a very nice holiday party that was sort of in honor of the late Neal. I didn’t really knew anyone there, for the most part, but it was nice. Then someone brought up some stuff about Erie GLBT history and my ears perked up rather quickly. It was really nifty to hear some of this stuff, as I had just been working on the history page.
We had included some stuff before about the Washington Bar and Grill, which is not far from my house. It used to be near 10th and Weschler, and closed around 1980 or so. It had been a long time gay hangout. One of the people at the party last night had worked there in the early 1950′s, and I guess it had started back in the late 40′s. Wow! Even Deb wasn’t aware that it went back earlier than the mid to late 1960′s.
I really want to follow up on this. There is so much history about the GLBT community that gets forgotten and buried, and I really think it needs to be recorded so we can see the progress that we made.
Another topic that came up when we were talking was about ‘chameleon clubs.’ This seems to have been an informal term used because many places that had a gay following were frequently straight before 10 PM or so, and only began to see a significant gay presence after 10 or 11 PM. See? Even today many gay folks (including myself) hardly go out before 11 or midnight. Apparently this is a long term thing.
There were the usual references to closeted folks who had been out in varying degrees. There was one case referred to involving someone who has voted against marriage equality who seems to have been involved with a minor of the same sex that got covered up. (I know. What a shocker.) That particular story I had heard before.
Someone I sort of know apparently had run a book store that carried adult titles for a while. One of the people there referred to a murder of a local gay man I had just written to my friend Greg about. It turns out that the guy I was talking with had found the body. Just a weird piece of synchronicity.
I am not certain what to do with this, or if I can get the chance to talk with these folks when I can write stuff down, but this does feel like something I want to do,