“We sat and talked for a long time, and then he said, ‘Well, you want to go into the building?’ I said, ‘Okay’ … The minute I he pulled out his badge and said, ‘You’re under arrest.’” Because he never actually solicited the officer, the misdemeanor charges were dropped, but the arrest forced Rogalski to reveal his sexuality to his mother. One afternoon, an undercover deputy approached his car after Rogalski had parked near the picnic shelter. Rogalski, an Army veteran and member of the National Rifle Association, was eventually apprehended as well. In just a few months plainclothes officers arrested seventy-two men and charged them with accosting and soliciting the arrestees ranged in age from eighteen to sixty-three and included an engineer, a salesman, a student, and a minister. 2 Soon Rogalski began to notice that the men were no longer there “all the time” in fact they were starting to disappear. You’d sit there in the evening, at the picnic table, and talk about what’s going on, who’s the latest tricks,” he recalls. “You see guys in the park you’d see them all the time … so you sit there and talk. Months earlier Rogalski had discovered the gay social scene in the picnic shelters of the park. One of the men was a thirty-two-year-old telephone lineman for Western Electric named Wes Rogalski. In the fall of 1975, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department staged a sting operation targeting men engaged in homosexual liaisons in Hines Park in suburban Plymouth.
The ASP was sparked by a mix of pride and defiance. To borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau, “they escaped it without leaving it.” 1 The ASP newsletter boasted that the group had “liberated one American Legion Hall.” In an era when it was assumed that gay space was urban space, the Association of Suburban People sought to assert its presence beyond the Motor City - and ultimately to recast the relationship of gays with suburbia.
The dance was sponsored by a gay organization called the Association of Suburban People, and it allowed the 150 or so attendees, mostly closeted, to stake a claim, temporarily and discreetly, to public appearance in the middle-class Republican stronghold of Oakland County, Michigan - and to do so in a time of entrenched homophobia and national anti-gay campaigns. In many ways an ordinary Saturday night in suburbia yet not ordinary at all. The time was March 1978 the setting was American Legion Post 374 in Berkley, a few miles north of Detroit the event was a dance. Wes Rogalski and friend, near Northville, Michigan, 1976 this image appeared in the suburban newspaper Observer and Eccentric.
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