Sitting in Meshuggah Coffeehouse in the Loop, Johnson has a quick smile and a steely silver crop. She's quick to distribute one of a stack of handbills she's brought advertising this year's Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, a feminist institution she's been a part of since 1979.
"I didn't become a lesbian till I was, like, 28," Johnson says. "We just called ourselves gays. We didn't have the word 'lesbian' yet."
Jennifer Silverberg
Margaret Johnson, right, has been a feminist and activist for decades.
Jennifer Silverberg
Pam Schneider.
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A women's dance at Washington University changed her perspective.
"That was when I discovered a really different community. They were all political in a way I wasn't. They were lesbians — not gay! The incredible feeling of dancing, of being on a dance floor and looking around and realizing everyone's a lesbian, just knowing there's nobody here judging you. It's an energy you can't get anywhere else."
Johnson grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and came to St. Louis to teach mathematics at Meramec College in 1964.
"Talk about being in the closet!" she says. Her colleagues knew she lived with a woman, but nobody understood that when they broke up, and that woman moved out, she needed the same support as a divorcing male colleague.
Gender roles were rigid, even for the faculty president.
"I never dressed the way I did at school anywhere else. Skirts, dresses, little heely things I hated," she recalls. It was a female fashion teacher in a chic pantsuit who unintentionally smashed that barrier: "In the late '60s, women just started wearing pants."
Teaching was Johnson's profession, but activism has always been her passion. Evidence of her work runs through the UMSL archives. There are articles she penned as "Flowing Margaret Johnson" in LesTalk, an early lesbian magazine that featured everything from financial advice to party advertisements. There's a folder filled with pink fliers for a "Stop the Church" protest, from April 19, 1992, which Johnson attended as part of St. Louis Queer Nation. The flier called it "a non-violent, legal action to draw public attention to the Catholic church's policies of oppression," in the areas of homosexuality, AIDS and reproductive rights.
The group's longest action, however, was against Cracker Barrel.
In 1991, Cheryl Summerville, a cook at an Atlanta, Georgia, Cracker Barrel was fired. Summerville's separation notice from the Georgia Department of Labor, part of a lengthy file in the UMSL archive, gives the reason why.
"This employee is being terminated due to violation of company policy. The employee is gay," it reads.
And so on Sundays, Johnson's group would go to the local Cracker Barrel — sometimes, there'd be as many as 50 people.
"We'd get coffee and wait till everyone was seated," Johnson says. "We'd get coffee and put a five-dollar bill on the table and say, 'This is your tip. We're not going to order anything.'" Then they'd hang out until the cops came.
After taking a beating in the press all over the country, Cracker Barrel changed its tune, overturning the company's prohibition on homosexual employees.
Speaking of tunes, Queer Nation serenaded the home of St. Louis Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. at Christmastime in 1993.
The sight of a group of folks gathering on the lawn gave the Bosley family pause. When the carolers gathered in front of his house, she recalls, the Bosleys "turned the lights off, because they assumed it was an action." Then they heard the carols, popped the lights back on, and came out to listen.
And then they heard the group singing cheerily to the tune of "Good King Wenceslas":
We're your queer constituents
From the Queer Nation.
We pay taxes and cast votes
For your information.
Here's a thought you'd better heed
For this Yuletide season.
If next term you're unemployed
We might be the reason.
Richard Trennepohl
In his south-city home with his rickety old cat, Skinny, and a plate of elegant cookies for a guest, Richard Trennepohl, 58, looks back on the bad old days of elementary school, dressing hair for fancy west-county ladies and the bad-ass party scene that once thrived in the city.
"The apartment building I lived in had so many queers in it they called it Lavender Abbey," he says of the block of Maryland in the Central West End that he used to call home. "It was all the gay guys and a bunch of little old ladies, which was fun. Someone would pop up to see if you wanted to come for coffee."
In those days in the '70s and early '80s, he says, the neighborhood was called the "gay ghetto." Just mentioning the neighborhood might be enough to start a conversation: "I recall there was a time if you said you lived in the Central West End, people just assumed you were gay."
Both the Delmar Loop and the Shaw neighborhood's Magnolia Avenue were also considered gay parts of town. Indeed, it was for Magnolia Avenue that the Magnolia Committee, which launched the first Gay and Lesbian Pride Celebration in 1980, was named.
"It was a different crowd, different interactions probably. I was out every night — that was my thing. That was it back then — the bar."
He loved Clemetine's, NITES, Loading Zone. Back then, you couldn't just Google your way into bars like that, of course: "You found them through word of mouth, one of the bar rags — the newspapers. We've always had them."
