Sign of the Times

Jerry DeGrieck and I are pacing the 100 block of W. Washington St. in search of some evidence of the scenes of his well-spent youth. Google tells us that the Flame Bar, the first and for decades only gay bar in town, was at No. 115 and the Del Rio Bar, a hippie hangout where DeGrieck worked while serving on city council from 1972 to 1974, stood across the street at No. 122.

Hours earlier, at City Hall, DeGrieck helped unveil Michigan’s first LGBTQ-focused historical marker. In raised gold letters on a forest-green background, it commemorates Ann Arbor’s first-in-the-nation milestones in queer history: the 1972 ordinance that protected gays and lesbians from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations; the coming out of DeGrieck and fellow Human Rights Party councilmember Nancy Wechsler in October 1973; their work with gay activist Jim Toy to win passage of the city’s first gay pride week declaration; and the 1974 election of out lesbian Kathy Kozachenko.

The September ceremony featured speeches both lofty and bitterly political; a serenade from a transgender singer; the dramatic lifting of a white sheet from the marker; and a steady parade of attendees snapping selfies with DeGrieck and Kozachenko. (Wechsler, who lives in Boston, could not attend.)

Then, suddenly, it was over. Everybody else moved on, leaving the guests of honor alone on the sidewalk with a couple of friends. Kozachenko, whom I’ve written about extensively over the past decade, asked me where we should go for lunch, so I led them to Jerusalem Garden. There, we ran into Joe Halsch, the executive director of the Jim Toy Community Center, who’d already invited DeGrieck and Kozachenko to tour the newly relocated LGBTQ center on S. Main later in the day. He joined us for lunch and walked us there afterwards.

Related: Jim Toy Center Reboots

As we made our way back to our cars at City Hall, DeGrieck hunted for any sign of the Flame and Del Rio. A fit seventy-five-year-old Seattleite with biceps bulging from the sleeves of a navy V-neck, he wandered the block manically, even quizzing a hapless cashier at Frita Batidos about the building’s history.

“Maybe there’s a plaque?” DeGrieck groans to me. That’s a tall order for a city that only a few hours earlier had finally addressed its LGBTQ history, but it’s not unheard of; New York, Nashville, and Milwaukee all have markers at the sites of early queer bars. (I didn’t have the heart to tell DeGrieck how, since he lived here, Braun Court had become the hub of local queer life, only to now be slated for demolition to make way for luxury condos.)

The Flame left W. Washington in 1995 and closed in 1998; its spot is now Frita Batidos’ dining room. The Del Rio closed in 2003 and its space was absorbed into Grizzly Peak.

Both, DeGrieck says, were pivotal to his coming out journey. As a U-M student, a councilmember, and civil rights activist, he’d wanted to identify as gay but felt self-conscious about having never “done anything gay.” He had been flirting with a man who hung out at both, and eventually he took the leap to ask him to a Del Rio company picnic. He came out publicly six weeks later, in October 1973.

“The rest,” he says, “is history.”

It really is—but no one realized it at the time. It didn’t even occur to DeGrieck and Wechsler that they might be the first elected officials in America to come out. Even Kozachenko’s election the following year began with a shrug.

“Hey Kathy, I’ve got an idea,” HRP member and U-M law student Frank Shoichet had told the twenty-one-year-old English major as she prepared to announce her council candidacy. “Why don’t we run you as openly gay?” 

Kozachenko, an apple-cheeked radical with long blonde hair and a little gap-toothed overbite, hardly blinked. “Yeah, okay, Frank. Let’s do that.”

The New York Times did write about that election—mostly to note the wackiness of voters in a Midwest college town passing a referendum that reduced the penalty for pot possession to a $5 fine. The Times also listed the winning candidates and noted of Kozachenko that she was “a student at University of Michigan who described herself as a lesbian.” But there was no indication that the vote was historic. It didn’t occur to Kozachenko, either—she just assumed that somebody somewhere had done it before her.

Then, in 1977, gay politician Harvey Milk won a seat on the San Francisco City Commission, only to be assassinated less than a year later. “Everyone referred to him as the first to be out in office,” says Kozachenko, now seventy-three. “But then periodically, people would do interviews with me and write that Nancy and I were the firsts, and people would get upset. They thought we were trying to deface the legacy of Harvey Milk.”

Kozachenko moved to Pittsburgh, worked in health care administration, and eschewed the spotlight for fear a homophobic backlash might impact her employment or the son she was raising with her life partner. “Sometimes I’d see it in writing about Harvey and I’d think, ‘I guess you guys don’t know about me,’” she recalled on the porch of Jerusalem Garden. “I figured, they’ll catch up.”

That’s where I came in. After I moved to Ann Arbor in 2011 and became aware of Kozachenko’s place in history, I was baffled over the paucity of national press about her. I began calling and writing to her, and in 2015, after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality, she finally responded.

She was ready for her close-up, she told me, because her son was grown and she was in a job with a gay-friendly employer. My Bloomberg Politics piece was headlined, “The First Openly Gay Person to Win an Election in America Was Not Harvey Milk.”

Kozachenko says she’s only recently learned to “use” her historic role. Earlier this year, upset about the deportation of thirty-one-year-old gay Venezuelan national Andry José Hernández Romero to the notoriously brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador, she contacted organizers of Pride events around the nation. She introduced herself as the nation’s first LGBTQ elected official and asked them for booths to raise awareness of Hernández Romero’s plight. Ann Arbor Pride was one that agreed.

Hernández Romero was released before the Ann Arbor event, but Kozachenko and her gay nephew attended anyway. She tells me she enjoyed the trip, but missed the radical edge the city had in her Ann Arbor heyday.

“It was no different than in other towns I had been in [for Prides],” she says. “I really was looking for people to talk to, and I found the ACLU had a booth, and I found one for the right-to-die campaign. Other than that, it wasn’t that political.”

Just as it took a gay journalist to spotlight Kozachenko, it took other queer people to rectify Ann Arbor’s failure to honor its pioneering queer politicians. Councilmember Travis Radina, elected in 2020, noticed the oversight, reached out to me for Kozachenko’s contact information, and then spoke to city clerk Jackie Beaudry.

Meanwhile, museum consultant Tim Chester, the first openly gay member of the Michigan Historical Commission, realized that none of the state’s 1,300 historical markers addressed anything LGBTQ.

Related: Pride, Reimagined

“We pondered, ‘What are we gonna do about this?’” he said during his speech at the unveiling. “Then, out of the blue, the Ann Arbor city clerk contacted me about doing this marker. By and large, our experience is that city government is not usually interested in historic markers.” But after getting the MHC’s approval for the sign’s text, Ann Arbor paid $4,740 to have it made.

The participants had kept the flame lit themselves. In 2012, the HRP gang gathered in Vermont for a reunion to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of DeGrieck and Wechsler’s elections. Last year, Kozachenko went to Seattle to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of her election with DeGrieck. About half a dozen no-longer-young radicals gather on Zoom every few months to talk politics and life.

Over ice cream at the Washtenaw Dairy the night before the unveiling, I did my best to get Kozachenko to complain about how long it took for this day to come. She wouldn’t bite. “Well, things take time,” she shrugged. The next day, DeGrieck was equally resigned when asked the same question: “It is what it is, you know?”

But in his speech, Radina said what I was thinking: “Since it’s been, like, fifty-two years, I would say [the marker is] a little bit overdue.”

Kozachenko figures she may be back if the city ever raises the money to build the statue of her that was first proposed as part of last year’s bicentennial festivities. It was delayed when the sculptor backed out, but this summer the city launched a campaign to raise $100,000 for the project.

“Oh, it’ll be very weird,” she says of the idea of her likeness standing outside City Hall. “Let’s see if they get it finished while I’m still alive.”