Out of this party arose another of Williams' contributions to the St. Louis LGBT community: Black Pride. A woman on the party committee saw the energy in the park parties and asked why there wasn't a black-pride event.
Soon enough, in 1999, there was.
Jennifer Silverberg
Rudy Nickens.
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"People get excited about Black Pride!" Williams says. "White people have said to me, 'Why do you have Black Pride?' It's not about being separate. We're not monolithic; we're diverse. There are some unique things that take place in both communities."
The two festivals have coexisted for years, and have been increasingly working to boost each other. This year, Williams turned over leadership of Black Pride; events leading up to that the festival have been going all spring.
"It's been a wonderful ride," he says.
Pam Schneider
Pam Schneider, 56, is happy to talk about her time as an LGBT media mogul in St. Louis, but if someone calls about a house she's got on the market, hang on. She's worked as a nurse, publisher and Realtor — Schneider's life, she says, has always been about taking care of things. She also spent nearly ten years publishing the Vital Voice, before turning it over to its current publisher, Darin Slyman, in 2009.
Schneider got into journalism almost by accident. In 1996, frustrated with nursing and not yet ready to leap full-time into real estate, she bought the Pride Pages, the LGBT business directory, her first foray into publishing.
"In my travels, I would see meaty papers for the alternative community, strictly LGBT papers. I'd come back here and see our little bulletin. I didn't know how to do a paper, nor was I interested in starting one."
And yet...
In 1999, Jim Thomas closed down his paper, the Lesbian and Gay News Telegraph.
"He didn't have anything to sell," she says. "I had to negotiate — he'd work with me for a year as my editor. In June 2000, we printed the first issues of Vital Voice."
Copies of the full-color broadsheet, headlined with Schneider's publisher's notes, are stored at the UMSL archive.
"When I first took on doing a newspaper, most people thought of publications for the gay community as rags — salacious, with so much skin. It looked like all you do is have sex and drink."
Indeed, even a 1986 pamphlet for Dignity St. Louis, a group for Catholic gays, featured burly fellas in bathhouse ads. Sex sells, of course, and every publication relies on advertising dollars.
But Schneider put her foot down.
"I would not do it. I turned down a whole revenue stream," she says. "Over ten years, I think it started to make a difference. The only place for distribution for magazines with skin was the bars. It would make me silently proud when you'd walk into a coffeeshop and see them reading the Vital Voice."
There was still blowback from the community.
"At the onset of me starting Vital Voice, most things in St. Louis had been by and large done by men. When I started the newspaper and called it the Vital Voice, it didn't take long until word got back to me that people were calling it the 'Vagina Voice.'"
But readership surveys, she says, indicated more men than women were picking it up: "They got over it being the 'Vagina Voice,' I suspect."
She still had to fight to get the paper distributed. Getting the paper into St. Louis Lambert International Airport in 2007 was one of her biggest coups.
She didn't always succeed.
"I wanted one of the boxes in Schnucks," she says. "They said we were too controversial. No skin, no sex ads, no dating services? What's controversial?" They never did get in.
Society has come a long way, Schneider says. In the early 2000s, gays and lesbians became so much more visible, with cultural touchstones like Ellen DeGeneres and Will & Grace coming onto the scene. Suddenly, there was a cultural cachet attached to being gay.
The Voice helped demystify the community in St. Louis by running prosaic profiles of people who'd come out, she says.
"This community spent time as the bogeyman. This put a face to it."
Kris Kleindienst
Kris Kleindienst was out and proud in high school, back in University City in 1970. Her mom was also a lesbian, she says, but never came out. Not after she divorced, and not even after a woman moved into her bedroom.
"It was a very different experience for her," Kleindienst says today.
If you're a book nerd of any orientation, it's likely you know Kleindienst, 58; she's co-owner of Left Bank Books. And it was a book, Kleindienst says, that helped radicalize her, bring her out of her shell and prepare her for a life as a lesbian feminist activist.
"In high school I waited tables in the Delmar Loop. A grad-student waitress gave me Sisterhood Is Powerful, and everything fell into place for me intellectually. I came out in this context of politics and feminism."
She started going to Gay Liberation meetings at Duff's in the Central West End in high school and quickly became aware of a burgeoning protest movement at Washington University. (While it was mostly antiwar, feminist and anti-racist activism was taking place there, too.)
