Private Birthday Party celebrates a gay old time in KC

Younger generations of gay men and women aren’t especially surprised when a Michael Sam or a Derrick Gordon comes out of the closet. But as recently as the late 1970s, police routinely raided gay bars, rousting its patrons with trumped-up charges. I was hauled off to jail myself a couple of times for being in the wrong bar at the right time.

Kansas City was among the U.S. municipalities where laws against cross-dressing or dancing in public with someone of the same sex allowed authorities to slap gay people with costly fines and humiliating exposure. (Newspapers often listed names and charges.) That’s why some saloons catering to a homosexual clientele tried to outwit police. One local bar, when tipped off about a possible raid, would flip on a red light to halt the dancing. And if a drag show or ball was scheduled, the venue often posted a simple sign on the door: “private birthday party.” That almost always kept the cops at bay.

Artists Robert Chase Heishman, Michael Boles and Emily Henson have taken that historic warning message as the title for a project celebrating what was once an underground culture. They have amassed an amazing collection of 200 color slides — images they saved from a landfill — of gay-bar life in Kansas City from 1958 through 1968. “Private Birthday Party” is the title of their Web page as well as a party that the three are putting on this week.

Private Birthday Party — from 7 to 11 p.m. Thursday, April 17, at the Guild (1621 Locust) — features digital projections of the slides, new paintings (based on eight of the slides) by artist Davey Gant, hors d’oeuvres catered by Succotash, and an auction and raffle. Tickets cost $10.

“The event will help us raise funds to continue our research into these slides and for future exhibitions,” says Heishman, who now lives in Chicago.

Heishman and Boles, longtime friends and photographers, found the slides independently of each other a couple of years apart, in different locations. That coincidence and the identity of whoever made or owned the slides (a local photographer named Jack, is the going theory) are part of the fascinating mystery surrounding this cultural-history project. Heishman found one carousel of slides in a salvage yard in the West Bottoms in 2006. In 2008, Boles uncovered a separate trove of slides in an old home near 33rd Street and Troost.

Both sets of slides depict parties and shows held at two popular nightclubs of the 1950s and ’60s: the Jewel Box Lounge (a show bar at 32nd Street and Troost featuring female impersonators that was patronized mostly by heterosexual audiences) and one of Kansas City’s very first gay bars, the Colony, at 3325 Troost. The images show a wide array of men and women (both in and out of drag), along with several well-known entertainers (including the late Skip Arnold, a Jewel Box star), in various festive situations. Many of the same faces and interiors are in both Heishman’s and Boles’ collections of slides.

Most of the subjects in the photographs would be well into their 60s and 70s today (or older). Kansas City’s longest-surviving female impersonator, Tommie Temple (the Jewel Box show director for years and then, decades later, the cashier wearing the cockeyed wig at the Linwood Super Mart), died three years ago, Boles says. Others in the party shots presumably died or moved to some other city a long time ago. Heishman and Boles say no one has come forward to identify himself or herself in the photos.

“But we’ve listed a hotline number on our website for people who might recognize some of the men and women in the slides,” Boles says. “We’ve had a dozen voice mails so far from callers saying, ‘I knew the guy in such-and-such photo. He was an old friend of mine.’ Or ‘The man with the bouffant wig and black dress was so-and-so. I recognized him immediately.’ We’re hoping to meet some of those callers and, even better, some of the people who were actually in the photographs, on the night of our fundraiser.”