How they brought the lesbians to Port Chester

This is the way my mother told the story Thursday night.

It was back in the 1930s. Lives that were lived in anything other than the traditional heterosexual model were lived in secret. Gays kept their sexual orientation to themselves; there was no advertising your “interests” in Facebook. There was little if any crossing of the boundaries between the apple pie heterosexual world and, at least to the heteros, the hidden, shadowy gay world. Society not only did its best to make certain people disappear; it acted as if they didn’t exist at all. If you were gay, you kept this knowledge to yourself. If you weren’t gay, you had little idea of what a gay life was like.

My grandfather ran a bar/restaurant in Port Chester, New York—more of a bar than a restaurant, if the truth be told. Everyone in his family had a job; there was no goofing off in my grandfather’s world. My uncle, who was in medical school, apparently read anatomy books while tending bar. My father, who was in high school, was a singing waiter.

Apparently it was my grandfather who, in the apocrypha of my family, officially brought the first lesbian to Port Chester. There was entertainment in his bar/restaurant. He hired a woman my mother called Frenchy, who had a very Dietrich approach to life. She was a singer, and she performed in a man’s tuxedo. And her partner was the other half of the entertainment package. While Frenchy sang, her girlfriend danced around the room on roller skates.

Entertainment wasn’t always exactly A list in the 1930s.

Frenchy and her girlfriend were a big hit in my grandfather’s bar. So much so that when my father’s high school was looking for some entertainment for a show of some sort they were putting on, my father suggested that Frenchy would make the perfect choice. And the next thing you knew, Frenchy was singing in her tuxedo and her girlfriend was roller skating to the music at Port Chester High School. The principal of PCHS, keeping his hand in school affairs, showed up for the performance, and hit the roof. It is unclear whether he was aware of Frenchy because of previous exposure at my grandfather’s bar, or whether he had in his own adventures run into her in one of the darker corners of Manhattan, where Frenchy originally came from, or whether he simply had a fine-tuned sense of sexual identity, and he knew a lesbian act when he saw one, even if it was for the first time. Regardless, the principal immediately expelled Frenchy and her skating partner from the school, in such a noticeable fashion that the event was recorded on the front page of the local newspaper, the Daily Item. I do not know what the headline read—”Lesbians Invade Port Chester High School” is unlikely, given the euphemistic nature of the times—but in any case, the event was something of a cause celebre. Port Chester hadn’t seen anything like this in years.

Surprisingly enough, Frenchy and her partner were not particularly shaken by this less than enthusiastic reception by the local academic establishment. In fact, they fell in love with the area, and shortly after these events, they moved into Port Chester and became among its most famous and productive residents. They did this, according to my mother, by opening a brothel. It was in a vast victorian on the top of a hill overlooking the Italian neighborhood where my grandfather’s restaurant/bar was located, and it catered to all tastes. Again according to my mother, the local police force were among the most satisfied customers, assuring the longevity of the enterprise. In fact, it survived into the fifties, when it burned down, thus putting Frenchy and her partner into retirement. I remember well when the town’s most famous brothel burned down. Even though I was still a kid, and had no idea exactly what people were talking about, there was no question that they were talking about something special. Now, all these years later, I finally know what, exactly, was special about it.

And that’s how the Menicks officially brought the first lesbians to Port Chester. According to my mother, the worst of it was that when she and my father were out and about in town, grocery shopping or whatever, she never knew when they might turn a corner and there would be Frenchy, the town’s premier madam, who would espy my father and let out with a big welcome, saying, “Hello, Frankie,” and giving him a big hug. For some reason, my mother always found this just a little too much, even for the Menicks.

There is no doubt in my mind that every word of this story is more or less true.