Pride at 70

When John and Charlie met at a gathering of gay Catholics in 1993, marches for marriage equality were rare. Pride wasn’t a corporate spectacle and coming out could almost certainly cost you your job.

Nevertheless, love found a way.

Now in their 70s, Charlie Richardson and John Weslowski of East Lansing spoke with ELi about their journeys and how pride looks a little different these days.

John is outspoken, even bawdy at times. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything and more than once, Charlie interrupts his husband with the friendly request, “maybe don’t use that part, okay?” For his part, Charlie is more reserved and stolid, characteristic of the administrator role he played professionally.

Their paths to the life they now share are as divergent as their personalities.

Catholic Origins

John is a Michigan-native from Bay City. He grew up in what he called a devout but not “crazy devout” Roman Catholic home.

“I was an altar boy for as long as I can remember,” he said. “I always wanted to be a priest. I was a bookworm, the teacher’s favorite academically, but I was always very heavy and not athletic.”

John attended the Saginaw Diocesan Seminary school with other young men who were considering futures in the priesthood. He noticed attractions between other boys, but says he didn’t have the language to necessarily understand it.

“It wasn’t completely innocent,” he said. “But none of that was put together by me back then. There was no language or thought process to articulate it to myself, let alone to somebody else. It was only as I began to stumble into it as an adult.

“I had all kinds of heterosexual fantasy, you know, about idealized living; white picket fence, dating girls.”

Similarly, Charlie, who grew up in the Bronx, attended an all-male Catholic school in Manhattan. Despite being in the epicenter of the birthplace of the gay rights movement, he doesn’t recall any mention of the history happening in his own backyard.

“[My school] was run by Jesuits who, compared to many Catholic orders, are somewhat enlightened,” he said, “but there was no, I mean, the gay rights movement was something that existed only down there in Greenwich Village, that mysterious place down there that you were never supposed to venture into, and only after dark, right? Life back in the 70s was pretty closeted.”

When asked if he remembers the first gay person he knew, Charlie looks into the distance, trying to remember a place and time he left decades ago.

“In retrospect, I could figure it out,” he said after a pause. “At the time, I didn’t know what…I had a neighbor in the Bronx, on the same floor, she had a son. They may have even used the phrase ‘confirmed bachelor,’ which I now, looking back think, ‘oh, maybe that meant he was gay.’ But the neighborhood I grew up in was heavily Irish Catholic, very conservative [and] racist to be perfectly honest. I mean, it’s sort of like Archie Bunker-type territory.”

John, meanwhile, earned a law degree and had begun practicing in his hometown. He also experienced a deep love for a man he sang with in his church choir.

“It registered for me,” he said, “and I acted like a very close friend I wanted to be with. I finally came out at the age of 30. He was a florist and [had] a beautiful tenor voice. We began to jog together and do things together and I had lost a lot of weight. I began to feel like a sexual being and I was dating women. But I wanted to be with him rather than women.

“I’m an educated guy, so I began to figure myself out to some extent. But it was a real groping through some pea soup fog.”

The depression that followed John’s realization and the subsequent loss of his close friendship caused his family to wonder what was wrong with him.

“I finally fessed up that it was this relationship that had gone sour,” he said.

He said his mother was initially devastated because it meant her son would never become chief justice of the Supreme Court – a dream she had for him. However, both of his parents quickly came around.

Charlie never experienced coming out with his parents, as they both died before he acknowledged his sexuality. He did, however, have to tell his wife.

“I was married for 13 years,” he said, “and unfortunately, it was during that period that I began to realize that this wasn’t going to work out long-term.

“She was not happy and she was out of there immediately.”

Life Together

Charlie and John were both in Washington D.C. for the April 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Charlie was just going through with his divorce and was still in the closet at work.

“I remember when I went to the March on Washington,” he said. “I was grateful that I didn’t wind up in a film or [on] the front page of the Washington Post anywhere, you know?

“You didn’t go around saying ‘I’m gay’ at work. In most places, you couldn’t count on much acceptance. I mean, the AIDS crisis was still going on and people were making crude jokes about that. It wasn’t a sympathetic time at all.”

The two met at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church near DuPont Circle in the nation’s capital. They were attending a worship service of Dignity Washington, a Catholic ministry for gay men and lesbian women. They were not allowed to meet at a Catholic church.

The two men found understanding and love from one another. They found an acceptance of each other’s pasts and worries.

Early in their relationship, they lost a close friend to the ongoing AIDS epidemic.

“There was Eric,” Charlie said when asked if they had known anyone affected.

“Yes,” John interjects to complete the story. “Eric was Clark’s boyfriend. Clark was a researcher at the National Geographic and just cute as a button. [Eric] was an administrative nurse. They lived in Northern Virginia and I would babysit their beagle before I met Charlie.

“Eric could no longer work [so] he retired from the hospital. I remember going to visit him and he was shivering under the bed, almost delirious”

“He died in ‘95 of HIV,” Charlie said. “We were at his funeral.”

Because of his theological education, John worked in hospitals in both Detroit and D.C., comforting those who were dying during the epidemic, praying with their families.

The Road to Pride

I asked both men if they could pinpoint a time when they first felt pride in their sexuality.

“I guess being involved with Dignity Washington,” Charlie said. “It felt good being there and going to their social events. 

“But that having been said, once that was over, once you went back to work,on Monday, it was sort of back in the closet. I guess I didn’t really tell everyone I knew [about my sexuality] until probably 2012,” Charlie said. “I was in a new job as vice president of a community college and I figured a college environment was a safer environment than when I [previously] worked in local government.”

John was more philosophical. 

“That word pride is clever,” he said. “It can mean whatever you want it to mean. Pride means what? The freedom to share what I have, and if I don’t have it, I don’t share it. 

“Revealing myself to you is a consequence of me accepting myself, being proud about myself. The fewer secrets [because] you’re only as sick as your secrets.”

I asked them their thoughts about the current state of the gay community and its changing language: do they prefer gay, queer, LGBTQ, or something else?

“F—– works for me,” John says with mischief in his eye, causing his husband to laugh.

“I don’t attach much significance to the lexicon,” Charlie said, “You’ve gotta remember, we’re out of circulation. Aside from going to pride events once a year, my knowledge of the young gay community is pretty much what I see on social media. We’re sort of out of the loop.”

This was followed by the couple having a lengthy conversation about the ongoing national conversation around transgender athletes.

“In many places,” Charlie said, “the transgender athlete thing, you can push that button and that’s good for how many votes? Watching the ads on TV, you would think that transgender rights was the key issue of 2024, that it’s going to be shoved down everyone’s throat. It was just appalling to see a small group of people demonized.”

“And it’s a vulnerable population of people who are struggling to understand things about themselves,” John jumps in. “I don’t have to carry that burden, but I had a different kind of burden so I can empathize with that. Let me be my gay self and let them be [themselves] without the added burden of being a political cudgel. That is simply cruel and inhuman.”

John and Charlie were officially married on July 31, 2023, more than 30 years after they met and built a life together. 

Later that year, they moved to East Lansing, nearer John’s sister. In their time here, they found a church, friends and stood together when John received his cancer diagnosis. He had his esophagus removed and is now cancer free.

When asked about the lives they lead together, they are quick to celebrate–but still hold some reservations about the future.

“I never thought they would approve gay marriage,” Charlie said. “That was a surprise. I mean, we’ve come a remarkable distance from the days where we lived in the shadows.”

“I’m somewhat surprised that we’re able to live as openly as we can,” John adds, “but some of that is that we’ve self-selected into places that will accept us.

“I don’t know. One stroke of [Supreme Court Justice] Clarence Thomas’s pen can undo Obergefell [the U.S. Supreme Court decision from 2015, ruling that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry]. We talk about inalienable rights and human rights, but when push comes to shove, it takes the group in which I’m living to allow me to express myself. I wish it didn’t have to be that way, but those protections that we have are not etched in stone.”