10 OCTOBER 19-25, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | tory article on its earliest and most valued advertiser reported that the Triangle had been open longer than any other Denver gay bar then in existence. Prior to the mid-1970s, gay Denver was deeply closeted. But gay bars had existed since at least 1939, according to Tom “Dr. Colorado” Noel, who wrote his master’s thesis on the history of Denver’s bars and penned a 1978 piece on gay bars for The Social Science Journal from the perspective of “a straight outsider.” Remarking on the fl eeting nature of the gay-bar business, he wrote, “Within this rapidly changing bar world, probably 100 Denver bars have been predominantly gay at one time or another. This striking instability…has been one indica- tion of the social pressures placed on gays.” Before the Triangle, Denver’s gay-bar scene was mostly underground, held in check by the Denver Police Department vice squad, which wielded antiquated laws against lewd behavior and men in female attire, among other things. Until late 1974, same-sex kiss- ing in public, even in a gay bar, violated the “public indecency” law. The kissers could be arrested and the bar cited — even closed, if too many violations stacked up. Police also harassed bar customers entering and leaving gay clubs by issuing jaywalking tickets and pulling over exiting late-night patrons and charging them with DUIs. Young executed military discipline over the Triangle’s atmosphere. It was all manly all the time, and occasionally he insisted that patrons wear at least one leather item. Women were not allowed through the door, and a “no open-toe shoe” policy kept out male drag queens. Over time, a select handful of queens he approved of got a pass. While gender politics provided a philosophical basis for lesbian separatism in the ’70s and early ’80s, Young was creating a separat- ist male space unencumbered by gender ideology. It was a place for men who loved men and manliness to hang out together without shame. From the beginning, Young was revered by his patrons. While he wasn’t known as an ad- vocate for gay liberation, during an extended era of police repression, he courageously carved out a space for masculine gay men to congregate and enjoy lusty camaraderie. According to writer George Seaton, the Triangle was a “singular example to all who entered that the legacy of Stonewall was ferociously alive in Denver as a new birth of freedom for gay men — an insistence that masculinity and all its trappings were not anathema to them.” Seaton recalls some of the early Triangle’s atmospheric details: the thumpa-thumpa music, the ring-ding-ding of pinball machines, the scores of miniature American fl ags waving in the rafters every Fourth of July, and the many times every weekend night when Young’s amplifi ed voice was “like shards of glass on a blackboard yelling, ‘Taxi at the door! Taxi at the door!’” And, long before smoking was outlawed in bars, “a gray-white haze lazily fl oated above our heads, shape-shifting with the opening and closing of the front door,” Seaton says. Ric Durity fi rst visited the Triangle in 1975, when he arrived from the Washington, D.C., area for graduate school at the Univer- sity of Colorado Boulder. The 22-year-old was already a veteran of leather bars. “From the outset, the atmosphere at the T made it a welcoming place,” he recalls. “For many of us younger men, Don Young was recognized as a ‘leather elder.’” At the Triangle, Durity met Gerard, a man twice his age and an infl uential fi gure in the region’s cultural scene. (Gerard is a pseud- onym, because he was not out during his lifetime.) Durity and Gerard spent the next seventeen years together, until Gerard died of AIDS in 1992. “Many times I would meet people traveling to Denver to perform at the DCPA, or business, or political events,” says Durity. “They were cautious about keeping a low profi le, especially during the earlier days when there was fear of a vice operation that could end their career.” For some, the Triangle was intimidating at fi rst. “Paul” (who requested that his real name not be used) was another CU grad student in the late ’70s, and he remembers driving down to Denver in 1977 with his then-boyfriend to check out the Triangle. “We drove around, a tad skittish, got scared and drove back to Boulder without going inside,” he says. A few years later, on Hal- loween 1982, Paul met his future partner at the Triangle. They spent four years together, often enjoying happy hours at the bar, until the partner’s health declined due to AIDS; he died in 1986. Paul, a public-health worker, later visited the Triangle on a different mission — to help Young and his team comply with regulations aimed at reducing HIV transmission. Now in his early seventies, Paul is a long-term survivor of HIV. Young understood the power of advertis- ing. He paid top dollar for the back page of the gay publications where he ran ads. For years on end, the ad was the same — a darkly lit close-up shot of a man’s crotch snugly clad in denim, with enough of a bulge to stir curiosity about what lay beneath. Usually the ad included only the bar’s logo, address and phone number, but it would occasionally announce a special event or carry a greeting targeted at Stock Show visitors or a motorcycle gathering. The Triangle was known in gay men’s circles as one of the nation’s premier leather bars; it was on the must-do list of any leather guy traveling to Denver for work or pleasure — or simply to escape more conservative towns in the Rocky Mountain West. Durity, who now lives part-time in Southern Cali- fornia, says that “even today among older leather men I meet in Palm Springs, they have a strong association between Denver and the Triangle.” The image of the hypermasculine ho- mosexual man was popularized by Tom of Finland in the 1970s, and it was this aesthetic that inspired the looks you could fi nd at the Triangle. Every Saturday night, you’d see the same Village People archetypes: the black-leather-clad biker, the construc- tion worker in the too-tight T-shirt, the plaid-fl anneled lumberjack (no Indian chief, however). You could fantasize about hooking up with a horny long-distance trucker in his eighteen-wheeler parked nearby, and you’d fi nd yourself with a shoe salesman who lived in Arvada. You’d imagine a quick and dirty romance with a muscular, greasy-haired mechanic and end up with a buttoned-down state bureaucrat. And that cowpoke in the skin-tight Levi’s smoking Marlboros? A piano teacher from Des Moines. The Triangle was a socially fl attened space where patrons projected some varia- tion of a blue-collar persona. All the guys were average Joes out to get a little snockered and, if lucky, laid. It was a democratic space where the bankers rubbed elbows with the bakers, the lawyers cruised the grocery clerks, the prison guards propositioned the trust-funders. In the 1970s and ’80s, if you were at the Triangle on a weekend night, you were prob- ably looking for sex — and for many, not just sex, but a specifi c kind of sex. If you were a leather/Levi top (the dominant or insertive role), you would dangle a keychain from the left side of your jeans; if you were a bottom (the passive or receptive role), your keychain hung on the right. For those with more fi nely tuned sexual tastes, there was the hanky code. You’d stuff a dark blue hanky in your left pocket to display your desire to play the top role in anal sex. Wearing a light-blue hanky in your right pocket meant you were looking to perform oral sex. Gray was for bondage, black for S&M, yellow for water sports, orange for “anything goes.” Some guys sported multiple hankies, some changed hankies depending on their mood. Men using the hanky code didn’t beat around the Hanky Panky continued from page 9 continued on page 12 COLORADO HISTORIC NEWSPAPERS Don Young, who founded the Triangle in 1973, on the cover of Out Front in 1983; after several other owners, the bar closed “indefi nitely” earlier this month. BILL OLSON JAY VOLLMAR
