to other health care.
Figure 3. The initial main entrance to the Fenway Community Health Center was in an alleyway off a side street in the heart of the Fenway neighborhood. Fenway Community Health Center records, 1972–2007, M172, box 10, folder 27, Northeastern University Archives, Boston.
Far from being focused on the gay population, the Fenway Community Health Clinic, both in its nascent stage at the Boston Center for Older Americans and in its first official home in the basement on Haviland, reflected and served, according to its patient demographics, the diverse neighborhood residents. A third of the Fenway population lived below the poverty level, scraping by with a median annual income of $2,027.9 One reporter writing in 1977 described the area as a “low-income, low-rent neighborhood, its population of 4,000 is somewhat transient, consisting mainly of students, welfare families, young working people, and elderly people. It has long had a reputation for street crime, drugs, and prostitution and was once one of Boston’s more notorious red-light districts.”10 In a city infamous for its racial segregation and tension during the 1970s, the Fenway was a rare example of integration of not only blacks and whites but also a considerable immigrant, mostly Latino, population. Responding to the neighborhood’s needs, the clinic treated almost all nonemergency medical issues, from child immunizations, blood pressure tests, and the flu to testing and treating VD, pre- and postoperative care for most surgeries, and gynecological services.11 A longtime volunteer physician described the clinic services as a “basically primary care model. If you had high blood pressure, you’d come in. If you had diabetes, you’d come in. If you needed an annual physical, you’d come in.”12 While at the Boston Center for Older Americans, the clinic served a small but diverse population that included the elderly, women, children, and gays.13 After the move to the Haviland basement in 1973, there was more physical space and more volunteers to reach out to each of these groups specifically. In addition to its regular daytime operating hours, during which anyone could schedule an appointment or drop by, the clinic opened its doors to specific populations in the evening and on weekends, including a gay health clinic on Wednesday nights.14 The clinic’s services and outreach to these specific populations reflected the diversity of the neighborhood and illuminated the deficiencies in the existing health-care system of the early 1970s. However, gay liberation rhetoric and politics were just a faint background hum to the neighborhood’s chants against gentrification and for access to affordable quality health care.
Clinic board meetings, which were intended to include and galvanize the entire community, looked more like town hall meetings and easily lasted several hours, which undoubtedly made them inaccessible for some in the community with limited time.15 One resident described how meetings would last “anywhere from three to five hours; yeah, they were long. Most of us on the board with some exceptions didn’t have experience in health care, or the management of clinics or human resources … we were the blind leading the blind.”16 In the early years, anyone who was associated with the clinic (founders, volunteers, patients, or even just neighbors) was welcome to attend the meetings, create agenda items on the spot, engage in debate, and vote on any and all decisions.17 This democratic structure reflected the political approach of many young, New Left–affiliated organizations of the period and was meant to foster personal investment in the clinic and larger Fenway community in the face of the encroaching redevelopment.
The way in which services specifically for gay patients became established within this very open structure illuminates how indirectly gay liberation influenced the Fenway clinic and the tight-knit community it served. With the clinic’s dedication to serving the entire Fenway community (of which gay men were a small part), creating and maintaining a gay health collective to formalize the clinic’s already established treatment of gay men was relatively easy. A doctor at Boston’s Homophile Community Health Center, which provided gay-friendly counseling to gays from around the city, asked clinic cofounder David Scondras if the Fenway clinic could provide medical backup to his patients. Taking advantage of the open, town hall–style board meetings, Scondras pitched the idea in April 1974 and received a warm reception. The Gay Health Collective of the Fenway Community Health Clinic began offering Wednesday night sessions on May 22, 1974.
Neither the inclusion of gay services at the Fenway clinic nor their formalization in the Gay Health Collective’s weekly sessions should be mistaken for gay liberation activism. While a handful of the Fenway activists were gay, Scondras among them, few were explicitly out or active in gay liberation organizations, focusing instead on the antiwar movement or the struggle with the Boston Redevelopment Authority. In fact, those who had insisted on the inclusion of gay health services at the clinic’s founding were often not out to one another or the Fenway clinic community. According to Scondras, “It was sort of an unspoken thing. No one ever got up and said, ‘Hey, I’m gay.’ ”18 Shedding more light on the political affiliations of the Fenway clinic during this period, one activist recalled, “It never really became a gay anything, it was just a place where gay people came … you advocated for anybody who needed help … we never thought of ourselves as gay, straight, white, black.”19 From this vantage point, Fenway residents never thought the Fenway Community Health Clinic directly related to gay liberation, and neither did the clinic itself. Rather, the clinic was an embodiment of progressive New Left politics, including the antiwar, antigentrification, labor, hippie, women’s, student, and civil rights movements, which challenged oppression in all forms, including homophobia. The clinic and many of its activists appear as gay allies rather than as actually gay. In this way, the New Left political and cultural milieu appears a better political point of origin for the Fenway clinic than gay liberation. However, the existence and success of gay health services at the Fenway Community Health Clinic from its inception did make the clinic unique.
While Scondras, who couldn’t remember ever specifically disclosing his own gay identity to the Fenway clinic community, was central in creating the Gay Health Collective, Ron Vachon was, perhaps more than anyone, the “gay face” of the clinic.20 Vachon was “the backbone of the thing … big, tall, strong, French Canadian, very gentle, but six foot three, bearded, probably could have been a professional wrestler if he didn’t go into medicine. He was working full-time at the Fenway clinic as a physician’s assistant and was gay.”21 While finishing up his degree as a physician’s assistant at Northeastern University in 1975, Vachon literally “wandered into the Wednesday night clinic for the first time because the man he was dating came in to pick up some files. There, he met then-medical director Sandy Reder, who on learning that Vachon was a physician’s assistant, put him to work on the spot. Vachon stayed to become part of the collective, and ultimately, the center’s first paid staff person.”22 He quickly became a leader at the clinic, even being considered for the position of executive director in the late 1970s, and always making sure that the clinic considered and met the medical needs of the gay community.23 In short, because they “were already part of the we,” already part of the Fenway community, a few activists who were gay were able to use the clinic’s organizational structure and mission to shape the services of the clinic and meet the medical needs of the gay community specifically without appearing to be outspoken gay activists.24 Gay health services originated at Fenway as part of the clinic’s community health activism, not because of any specific gay organizing. In this way, both the activists and the clinic itself have a very different relationship with the closet—they were more in the closet or at least downplaying their gay affiliations—than appears typical in the existing history of out and proudly vocal gay institutions of this period.
Boston’s gay population welcomed the opening of the Gay Health Collective at the Fenway for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it offered the only local, free, gay-friendly health services, which allowed gay men to avoid the ridicule they faced in many public clinics, the price gouging that was common in private doctors’ offices, and the inherent risks of using medical insurance.25 Moreover, the clinic was within less than a five-minute walk from the eastern border of the Fens cruising grounds, which made it
