If B.K. Brittain had retired at the age of forty, in 1968, he
would have had a record of personal achievement and civic
involvement that few people could hope to match in a lifetime.
If Life, like high school and college, issued yearbooks perhaps
only a few of us would be willing to stand in line for annual of
our fortieth year. In the book of 1968, Bunch would have had a very
large block of tiny type devoted to his activities and
achievements, just as he had in his real high school and college
annuals: editor of his high school newspaper, officer of his
college fraternity Delta Tau Delta, professional Boy Scout
executive, two years in the Navy, Disaster Chairman for the
American Red Cross, assistant to the Speaker of the Texas House of
Representatives, health care administrator and regulator, and of
course there would have been much more.
The yearbooks of our lives would not record our reversals, no
more than our high school and college annuals do. And in 1968,
Bunch had experienced his share of reversals and then some. In
retrospect, it is easy to say that whatever career Bunch might have
undertaken in 1968, whatever course he might have set for himself,
he probably would have succeeded in one sense or another. How few
of us ever know what we choose, when at every point in our lives we
choose one from among the myriad diverging paths before us. Surely
Bunch saw further down the path ahead of him in 1968 than most of
us are privileged to see at most times in our lives. Surely he
meant not only to move toward the future, but also to have a part
in shaping what that future would be both for himself and for us
all.
Yet it passes credulity that he could have anticipated how much
the future was subject to change, how quickly the world would turn
on the pivot points of time, or how big a role he would come to
play as the future day by day changed to history. Some of us were
half his age in 1968; we thought all things possible and we thought
the world was ripe for reinvention, yet even we were caught by
surprise.
Let those of us who can remember, try to recall what 1968 was.
It was the year Bobby Kennedy was shot. It was the year of the
Chicago riots. Matt Crowley was the author of The Boys in the
Band and Tom Wolfe, of The Electric Kool-Acid
Test. Lyndon Johnson was still President, but declined to
run for a second full term. The movies were Funny Girl, The
Odd Couple, The Lion in Winter, and 2001: A Space
Odyssey. It was the year before Richard Nixon took office,
the year before Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw was
produced posthumously, the year before men first landed on the
moon, but most of all it was the year before the Stonewall
Rebellion.
In 1968 Bunch Brittain began to come out as a gay man, and in
that year, more or less, the bar that would become The New
Apartment opened. In 1972 the paths of the man and the bar
intersected. In the whole nation it was still a relatively rare
thing for a gay bar to be owned and operated by a gay person. Even
the Stonewall Inn, site of the Stonewall Rebellion had been owned
by an organization outside of the community.
Gay bars have always been more than just bars in the gay
community; they have become the principal institution of the gay
subculture. Gay bars became so important because historically they
were the only gay-identified places that the majority culture would
tolerate. In 1972, aside from the bars, there simply were no public
gay institutions in Austin. There was a little news of the progress
of the gay liberation movement elsewhere from time to time in
The Rag. The resolution calling for the repeal of the
anti-sodomy law at the Democrat precinct convention that met at the
Methodist Student Center in 1972 was hastily scribbled in pencil on
notebook paper there was no organization, even in so safe a
precinct, to have prepared a resolution beforehand.
The New Apartment was not the first gay bar in Austin, and never
was the only gay bar in Austin, but it was one that spanned the
years from those days to these from when the community hardly
existed apart from the bars until parts of the community could
afford to snub the bars and ignore their history. If Bunch's only
contribution to the community had been The New Apartment, we would
all have been in debt to him.
It was not Bunch's only contribution to the community. Hardly
any aspect of our community would be what it is today without
Bunch's contributions.
If Life, like high school and college, issued yearbooks, there
would be a whole new big block of tiny type next to the picture of
this 1995 graduate: organizing president of the Bar Owners'
Association of Texas; March on Washington I & II; March on
Texas I; columnist The New Voice; board member
Waterloo Counseling Service, board member Gay and Lesbian Business
Alliance of New Orleans; and much more. Of course, the little lines
of tiny type mock the reality for most of what Bunch did for us and
most of what he was for us cannot be expressed in titles and
activities. Bunch was not building a résumé, he was building a
community. That was not done with drums and trumpets, but mostly so
that those who have most benefited knew the least of their
benefactor.
We live in an age in which celebrity has become a substitute for
greatness, in which appearance has taken the place of merit, in
which virtual reality is sought and actual reality avoided, and in
which fame and infamy are entangled beyond our ability to unknot
them. We are not sure something is funny unless we hear the laugh
track. We do not know what is news unless the network vans with
their satellite dishes arrive. Little wonder then that we are made
uncomfortable if we encounter greatness without pomp, leadership
without ceremony, strength without special effects, and grandness
of character without heroic theme music. Little wonder then that we
feel we have to make a roundabout preamble before we can pronounce
the simplest expression of the reality we knew.
Bunch King Brittain was a great man.
