Right after high school, she started working at Left Bank and got involved with a women's collective.
"We were the women's house. It was a euphemism — you never said 'lesbian,' you said 'women.' It sort of protected you out there," she says. The house was in the 4300 block of McPherson Avenue, before that part of the Central West End was gentrified.
Jennifer Silverberg
Steven Brawley wants to preserve history, one bar matchbook at a time.
Jennifer Silverberg
Richard Trennepohl, above, recalls partying and Pride events.
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"We decided women needed places to gather besides bars. Bars are associated with hooking up — we needed a place to talk politics," she says.
It was a big change at first for women used to the bar scene, but everyone adjusted.
"Eventually, our coffeehouse moved out of our house and into an apartment in south city," she says. But the place came to an early demise when it was firebombed.
Indeed, a 1979 clipping from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, preserved in the archive, notes an arrest following a fire at the Mor or Les bar on South Grand. The article notes it had "a reputation as a gathering place for lesbians." It also mentions that "a women's coffee house near Louisiana Avenue and Miami Street in south St. Louis had been open only about six months before it was firebombed in 1974."
"There was a lot of looking the other way," she says. "Women's spaces were firebombed in the '70s."
Around the same time, a friend from high school telephoned Kleindienst, looking for help setting up a show in St. Louis. The artist was Meg Christian, whose 1974 record, I Know You Know, is widely considered one of the first albums of "women's music."
Thus began Tomato Productions, a women-centered music production company Kleindienst and her friends ran for five or six years out of Wash. U.
"These concerts were places women came. It was transformational. They spent an evening being OK, having their love celebrated instead of dismissed," she says. "We had a lot of people tell us how much it meant to them. Culture is the best way to reach people."
Running and volleyball are also pretty good ways, as Kleindienst learned.
Kleindienst was part of the St. Louis contingent at the first-ever Gay Games in San Francisco in 1981, a gay- and lesbian-sporting festival modeled after the Olympics.
"To actively be celebrating us was unreal," she says. An article she penned a decade after first participating in Gay Games appears in the 1991 Pride Guide and clearly displays a sense of the energy that she and other athletes took back with them to St. Louis.
"You come back a real evangelist. Some people didn't understand the big deal about a bunch of gay people playing volleyball," she says. "To do something in a teamwork setting — there's an element of social health."
Rudy Nickens
If you wanted tofu in the Midwest in the mid-'70s, well, good luck with that. But if you did manage to find your way to the Sunshine Inn in 1974, you probably enjoyed Rudy Nickens' smiling face.
The Central West End vegetarian café opened in 1972. Until its 1998 closure, the place served as a community hub.
Now 56, Nickens will eat seafood and his mother's Thanksgiving turkey, though other than that, he's a veggie lover himself. But there was more to his interest in the café than food.
"I walked in and knew I wanted to be a part of it," Nickens says.
He was twenty, and he'd moved to St. Louis from his native Washington, D.C., to attend Wash. U. It was two years after the Sunshine Inn, a collective, had opened, and Nickens was quickly tapped to run the place.
"We were just a bunch of free-thinking, interested visionaries. Some call them hippies — I call them smart people," he says. In a business known for employee turnover, the Sunshine was unique: "The core staff was there for twenty years."
Campaigns and movements were launched out of the space. The city's first black mayor, Freeman Bosley Jr., held fundraisers there. Lectures on soybeans and the world food crisis fascinated Nickens and his customers. Author Frances Moore spoke about her vegetarian call to arms, Diet for a Small Planet.
"We had Buckminster Fuller — we made his last birthday cake. It was a carrot cake, and we tried to shape it like a geodesic dome," Nickens recalls. "The National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays had a national meeting there in 1987. It was important. It was important, and now it is history."
Nickens' memories of the community he helped build make him nostalgic. His co-owner was a straight white woman, and Nickens allows that they might never have developed the close relationship they did without the café.
"For a long time, 'vegetarian' meant 'lesbian,'" Nickens explains — a cultural shibboleth in much the same way that mention of the Central West End neighborhood was. "It was the lesbian influence on our culture. I was part of a very woman-centered organization for much of my life."
It didn't last. The financial reality of trying to run a left-of-center business ultimately did the Sunshine in, Nickens says.
He's had a string of corporate jobs, including his current one as the equal opportunity and diversity director for the Missouri Department of Transportation. "I went from an apron and Birkenstocks to a suit and tie overnight," he says.
