Michael Tubbs

Interview with Michael Tubbs
Interview Date: April 24, 2024
Interviewer: Tom Hamburger
Transcriber: Betsy Barnett
Editor: Elizabeth Lewis

This interview transcript is the property of the Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project.
Not to be reproduced without permission.

START OF INTERVIEW
HAMBURGER: This is Tom Hamburger. I am at the home of Michael Tubbs, 126 Tenth Street SE. Here with Michael on April 24, 2024. And, Michael, thank you so much for agreeing to participate in the oral history project.
TUBBS: My pleasure, my pleasure.
HAMBURGER: And I thought, for simplicity of organization and logical flow, we’d sort of conduct the interview chronologically to the extent that we can.
TUBBS: All right.
HAMBURGER: And I’m going to start by asking you to tell us about yourself. Where you’re from, what kind of family you’re from, when you came to Washington.
TUBBS: Well, I’m from Texas. And I was born in Corpus Christi and spent most of my life there—I mean my early adulthood there. I went to the University of Texas at Austin. Is that registering?
HAMBURGER: Oh, yes.
TUBBS: At Austin. And matriculated there in ’58 and lived there for six years. It was the happiest period of my Texas life. And I got a BA and MA there. And then I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself because I was proficient in Romance languages, which at that time was not burgeoning, by the way. I guess had I come along later it would have been worse. But, still, it was a field that was difficult to be in. And, so, I migrated to Washington basically for love. [Laughs.] I fell in love with a wonderful fellow named James Burks, and he persuaded me, sort of kidnapped me more or less. But I went to Washington, DC, to visit this place for a couple of weeks. I never left. [Both laugh.]
HAMBURGER: So, this is right after graduating?
TUBBS: Yeah. In ’64.
HAMBURGER: From U. T.?
TUBBS: Well, I did an MA there, too. So, I completed my MA. I was a teaching assistant in the Department of Romance Languages and had no idea what I was going to do. And I contracted to continue being a teaching assistant there in Austin and was persuaded to come spend the summer with friends, new friends, in Washington. And that sort of like lured me up there. And, then, I decided, I was persuaded to stay for another year because I was offered a job at a high school teaching. And I thought, well, why not, you know, take a break from my PhD, which I was doing? And that then …
HAMBURGER: Michael, that was summer of ’66?
TUBBS: ’64.
HAMBURGER: ’64.
TUBBS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I did six years in Austin. Left there in the summer of ’64, intending to return in September, but never came back. I did come back and do some graduate work in various things one summer, but that was it. I subsequently did a PhD program at Maryland, the University of Maryland.
HAMBURGER: In Romance Language?
TUBBS: Yeah, yeah. In French, French Literature. So, that was that. And I taught high school for a few years in between. I taught at the University of Maryland for a while. And, then, I saw the way that teaching was going, [laughs] and I decided that I wanted to make some money. So, then, I went into real estate. In ’78, 1978. And I remained in real estate, as you know, until old age kind of took over me and I couldn’t do the things I used to do physically. So, I think I left the field about 2018, ’19.
HAMBURGER: So, from ’66 to about ’78, you were teaching in the public schools in the District …
TUBBS: No.
HAMBURGER: … and then the University of Maryland?
TUBBS: No, I taught at Oxon Hill High School in Prince George’s County.
HAMBURGER: Mm-hmm.
TUBBS: For three years. Then, I got a French government grant to go to France for a year with a Fulbright travel grant. So, I taught in Grenoble, France, for a year, which was quite an experience. And I had lots of friends in Paris, so I’d go back and forth there. And that was interesting because it was the year of the riots and the Olympic games. And all that happened all at once, so I really taught, probably from November until May, a total of about ten hours. [Laughs.] Because we kept getting strikes and not showing up for school because the government was closed. And then, the Olympic Games came and they closed all that. There was a general shutdown of the whole country in May. May ’68, if you recall that episode.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: And I was in the middle of all that. Got tear gassed and all that stuff. And the railroads weren’t working. We had a network of private buses that took you all over France. [It] sprang up immediately and worked quite well. And, so, this was my year in France.
HAMBURGER: Well, now, let me take you back to the District and ask you what it was like when you moved to the District. Did you move to Capitol Hill or were you living in another neighborhood?
TUBBS: Tom, I don’t move much. [Laughs.] We moved in with friends of Jim who, you know, immediately told me over and over again I should stay here and form a household and buy a house. And I fell for all that stuff. I’m glad I did. And so. we stayed with them for the summer while saving money to buy a house. Because houses were just a whole different story than what we have now.
HAMBURGER: Yeah.
TUBBS: Most of the houses were for sale by owner with owner financing because this was a redlined neighborhood. The lenders would not give you a loan, so sellers had to hold the paper. And so, we bought that first house, 27 Seventh Street [SE] for, I think, $20,000, and I protested for years that we paid too much. We should have paid $18,000. [Laughs.] The owners were from Silver Spring and they had several properties, kind of like slum properties, which ours was. And I paid them a check every month in a little book, $200 a month.
HAMBURGER: Explain the redlining that you mentioned.
TUBBS: Well, this was …
HAMBURGER: How did that work …
TUBBS: This was a no-no neighborhood. Which I’m sure your other people you’ve interviewed …
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: … will tell you the same thing. It was kind of, you know—I loved it. I just loved this place. When I first came to Capitol Hill, it was kind of shabby, but had some really interesting people. It was mixed race. I wasn’t aware of any tension or problem then, at that time. It didn’t manifest itself. Eastern Market functioned perfectly, just like it does now. Some of the same vendors. The Calomiris[es] were the first merchants I met there, walking in there, June of ’64. And their sons still run the place. So, it was that, sort of, you know, closely knit neighborhood. Different and, you know, diverse. There were some, lots of, Jewish people here. There were a lot of blue-collar, sort of like, government people who worked for the Navy Yard. Leftovers from World War II and that was still a source of employment. And the Library of Congress and all that was [where people worked]. You met people from Northwest. They’d say, “Oh, how can you live there? You know, that’s a tawdry little neighborhood.” But I loved it.
HAMBURGER: Yeah.
TUBBS: And never left, of course. So I’ve lived in two houses since we bought the house in December of ’64.
HAMBURGER: How has the neighborhood changed since then?
TUBBS: Oh, well, dramatically. Dramatically. But you still find the same ambiance, I think, that I discovered then. Of course, you know, it’s become well-to-do in a lot of ways. And we have a diminishing black population, in the inner core of the Hill at least. And it’s more spruced up, of course. You know, if I showed you pictures of 27 Seventh Street, you’d be shocked. There was a mom-and-pop store next door and it was quite, you know, shabby. But the houses were solid and I loved the history of them.
There were ten people living in our house when we bought it. And so it was a tenement. And we had to, you know, go to work ourselves because we had no money. That’s what a lot of people were doing, especially the gay people. Not lesbians, they weren’t really a presence at the time, weren’t making themselves known. But the gay guys were. And a lot of them were, you know, fixing up houses. We had no idea of what we were doing. If you looked at my workmanship, [laughs] it’s laughable and probably illegal. But, you know, we made do. The houses were solidly built at the time. They still are, all built in the 1870s. We knew we had a good foundation. But the work we did was [laughs] ridiculous. Like, the first day we moved in, which was January 5th, I think, of 1965, and Jim’s parents were coming for the LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson] inauguration, which was, I think, in the second or third week of January.
HAMBURGER: Right.
TUBBS: And they had no idea what … They’d never met me and they didn’t know anything about, you know, what their son’s orientation was. They had no clue. So, I think that was a shock, to find this other man living with him. And, then, they were shocked by the look of the place. [Laughs.] It was really … The first day we moved in, we put Pine Sol all over the place. And why did we do that? Because before we moved in, we were working on the place and there was a knock on the door and it was a public health nurse. She was in—they used to wear uniforms. And they’d go out and find people who were sick. And she said, “I’m here to see Mr. So-and-So because he has tuberculosis.” [Laughs.] And that’s when we got the Pine Sol and started scrubbing and bleaching and all that stuff, thinking that would sort of, like, immunize us. I remember vividly that day because I’d never seen a public health nurse in uniform. So that was the kind of place … But everybody was used to do that. It was very, um—it was fun. It was a lot of fun.
HAMBURGER: And was Capitol Hill known as a place that would be receptive to gay couples, gay lifestyle?
TUBBS: Yeah, yeah. It was. There were quite a few of us here. A different breed, so to speak, than what you found in Georgetown. Georgetown had sort of a well-to-do gay presence. But I think those were the only two neighborhoods that I can think of. Everybody was closeted in those days. So you didn’t really know, but you suspected, you know. “Gaydar,” we called it. But a lot of people would never reveal themselves. Especially people, like, working for the State Department. They could be fired on a dime. And they were.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: And that wasn’t changed until, I think, was it President Johnson? I think it was ’68 or ’69, something like that, when they—’71 it was. So, I mean, who was president—Richard Nixon maybe. When the Civil Service Commission changed its rulings, so we weren’t that threatened with our jobs, as we were before. [The U.S. Civil Service Commission ended the ban on homosexuals in federal civil service in 1975 under President Gerald Ford.]
On an aside, I’ll tell you another thing. Jim was teaching at GW [George Washington University] in the Romance Languages Department. We were both in the same field. And one night, I guess it was about as late as ’69 or so, I said, “Oh, it’s so boring here. Let’s go to that gay bar down here on [500] Eighth Street [SE].” It was called Johnnie’s. And he said, “I can’t go there.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, if a student saw me, they’d turn me in and I’d be fired.” [Laughs.] I was ten years younger than Jim so I wasn’t as, you know …. I was more developed in my thinking that we’d be okay. But he was terrified always of losing his job. Somebody might find out, you know. I asked him, “Well, what’s the student doing there?” [Laughs.]
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: Are they going to turn you into the dean?
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: But that was his thinking and that was pretty much consistent with our outlook on life. We were always threatened. I wasn’t feeling that way because I was younger, but he did.
HAMBURGER: I’m very interested in what that environment was like.
TUBBS: Yeah.
HAMBURGER: I did take a look at the book Secret City [by James Kirchick].
TUBBS: Oh, yeah.
HAMBURGER: Which I think you recommended to me.
TUBBS: Well, very well done and very documented.
HAMBURGER: Documented, and it really describes vividly the homophobia that gripped Washington, DC.
TUBBS: Exactly. Well, we had Roy Cohn and all those people doing nefarious deeds and, you know, making us even less acceptable. The atmosphere was … as I said, I never felt really threatened. Jim did. But you had to be very careful. You could go around—there was no drag or anything like that in those days.
HAMBURGER: Mm-hmm.
TUBBS: And, certainly, there was no concept of marrying a person of the same sex. That was totally foreign and inconceivable. And children? I mean, that was impossible. It was another planet. So. I’m now still shocked. The other day I was at a coffee shop and there were two young men and there was a baby next to them and they were, you know, giving the baby his formula. [Laughs.] And I still remain surprised at that. I just shake my head. It’s very shocking to me but I’m glad it’s happening.
HAMBURGER: You describe going to Johnnie’s. Was Johnnie’s a place that was gay friendly?
TUBBS: There weren’t many gay friendly places. They were gay bars or they weren’t.
HAMBURGER: Yeah.
TUBBS: And, so, places with a mixed clientele, that was unusual, very unusual.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: In fact, it didn’t happen. Later on, it became that way. And now, I think, it’s totally de rigueur. I mean, you know, straight people and gay people mingle together …
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: … with no thought about it. And that wasn’t the case. We were totally segregated. And there were some black gay bars, too. There were white gay bars and black gay bars. They were a little more mixed than straight versus gay bars. But not totally. So, Johnnie’s was THE neighborhood gay bar, at the corner of 8th and E [SE]. I think it’s E Street, yeah, E.
And it was very curious back then. I’m sure people know about this and think about it. But you couldn’t get a drink standing up. You had to sit down, unlike Baltimore. We would go to Baltimore because you could stand up at bars. But in Washington, everybody had to be seated and you had to be served by a waitress. And the bar had to serve food. It had to be under the, you know, cover of a restaurant serving food. And they did serve food but nobody ordered it. But you could order a hamburger. And, then, a waitress would come and take your order for a drink and she’d bring it back to your table. Never leaving the table. And I think a lot of flirting happened that way because people would send drinks to one another’s tables to be introduced. And, for a while, there was a bar here in the 70s called—Oh, what’s that? It will come to me in a minute. But, anyway, it was down on Half Street SW and they had telephones on each table. It was like a copy of the cabarets in Berlin. [Pier 9, a gay dance club at 1824 Half Street SW, opened in 1970 and featured tabletop telephones.] And you could ring that number and that table and say, “Gee, you’re a handsome person,” or something. You’d start flirting and, then …
HAMBURGER: Right. Let’s see. You mentioned to me another …
TUBBS: Oh, there were a lot of them. The Follies [24 O Street SE] and there was the …
HAMBURGER: Follies was the one I was thinking of. That’s not The Follies …
TUBBS: Lost and Found [56 L Street SE]. But this was … Donn [Culver] owned all those bars together. And this particular one, its draw was to have the phones.
[A buzzing sound.]
HAMBURGER: That’s you. Want to get that?
TUBBS: No, no. [Pause until buzzing ends.]
HAMBURGER: No problem. Let’s see …
TUBBS: I’m trying to remember the name of that bar but it’s not coming to me.
HAMBURGER: We were talking about phones. That’s the one on Half Street [Pier 9]. Did you feel safe in those places? Was it a comfortable place to be?
TUBBS: No, you never felt in danger. I never did. I remember about 20 years ago there was a semi-scandal with a cop, policeman, who was arrested and fired because he was taking down license plate numbers of cars that were parked around gay bars. And, then, he would find out, you know, particulars  and he would call a person and demand a …
HAMBURGER: A bribe.
TUBBS: Bribe. Because he’d say, “I’m going to tell your wife and children.” So, he made a living off of, you know …
HAMBURGER: Creep. And were these places like Johnnie’s or the [Pier 9] raided? Were the police actually intrusive sometimes?
TUBBS: They were. I never heard one around near me or anything, but I know there were. There were raids. Yeah. I’m trying to think. There was a famous incident in the 80s, early 80s, when there was a ruckus with the Marine Corps. At that particular point, the Marines were homophobic, openly. They may be now still. [Laughs.] I don’t know, but they were openly [then]. And they were, you know, harassing people they perceived to be gay, just the way they dressed or looked. And there was a bar on the 600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue [SE] called … I want to say The Renegade, but that wasn’t it. Something like that. It was written up in the papers because Marines one night—it was August, a hot night, and they busted into the place and tore it to bits. They were drunk, I guess. They were out of control. [On August 16, 1980, a brawl broke out between marines and gay patrons of Equus, 639 Pennsylvania Avenue SE.]
And the Commandant finally came to realize that this had to be stopped. And so they were disciplined. I never heard of another incident like that ever again with the Marine Corps. But it was very hostile in the 60s and 70s between the Marines and the residents they perceived to be gay. They were probably that way to some of the black people, too. It was so homophobic and racist.
HAMBURGER: Where was [Equus] located?
TUBBS: In the 600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, about—Let’s see, what’s there now? You know, my memory’s failing me. [638 Pennsylvania SE.]
HAMBURGER: The 600 block is where the East City Books is.
TUBBS: No, it’s further down.
HAMBURGER: Yeah.
TUBBS: It’s a nondescript building with some, like … mmm …It had sort of fake bricks and—That would have been ’81 or so. That was much later.
HAMBURGER: Mm-hmm. Were there other interactions with the Marines on Barracks Row?
TUBBS: Well, you know, I’ve told you that story before. Yeah, there were. It was especially in the early years, in the 60s. There was a bar, for example, called [Dobkins Bar and Grill, 1104 8th Street SE]. When they finally extended the freeway, which used to stop at Sixth Street for a number of years, they finally completed it in about the late 60s and constructed further on to Anacostia. But that section of Eighth Street was removed to build a bridge. I mean to build the freeway. I mean the freeway crosses Eighth Street right there. And there were a bunch of buildings there and one was Molly’s Bar. Her name was Molly [Schechter] and the name of the bar was Dobkins, D-O-B-K-I-N-S. And she and her husband ran it. They were interesting people.
And it was well known as a pickup place for Marines. So, if you wanted to have a Marine, you would go there and sort of book it. [Laughs.] And, in those days, Marines were … I think it was a different culture because, since there was so much homophobia, a straight soldier or Marine or whatever could make himself available for money. And had no thought about—you know, there was no conflict there because he was just doing it to gain some extra bucks, because he wasn’t gay. So he said. Or maybe they were. I don’t know. You know, everybody took that for granted. This was just a service fee. [Laughs.] And there were a lot of people who did that.
And, so, I think I told you this story. There was a man called Quantico Shirley. It’s sort of ribald. I don’t know if you’re going to edit all of this out. But he worked for Mr. Henry, Henry Yaffe, who ran Mr. Henry’s before he sold it many years later, at Sixth and Pennsylvania [SE]. And Henry Yaffe was quite a character. And Quantico Shirley, whose name was Bob really, was sort of like a major domo for Henry’s various affairs. His businesses and where he lived and all that. And he sort of organized things. And he made side money by organizing. He would take people’s orders on what they were looking for sexually and then he would hire a bus and go down to Quantico—that’s why he got the name Quantico Shirley—and pick up a busload of Marines and bring them up for the night. They’d make some good money and they’d go back on the bus to the base. So, it was a delivery service. [Laughs.]
HAMBURGER: Quantico Shirley. So that I can sort of put together the timeline here, there was a time when Marines going to gay bars was something that happened with some frequency and …
TUBBS: No, no. They only went to certain places which were like pickup bars. They did not go to the gay bars.
HAMBURGER: I see.
TUBBS: I mean, it was a gay bar but it was a commercial arrangement. And they would sit at the bar and you would sort of, like, cruise them I guess and, you know, decide.
HAMBURGER: And was there a time, Michael, when that practice stopped?
TUBBS: I think there was. I don’t—can’t date it particularly—but perceptions changed. And I think as the gay world became more known, exposed, and gradually accepted, this practice of straight guys just doing sex for trade, as it was called, stopped. There weren’t people doing that anymore. You know, the taboo had been found out, so to speak.
HAMBURGER: Yes. So, just so I can put this in perspective, this era of Quantico Shirley and the bus to Quantico, and so forth …
TUBBS: In the Vietnam war, for example, there was a lot of that. Because there were thousands of soldiers all over the vicinity.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: All the bases and all. So, you know, if you were . . .
HAMBURGER: So, it’s late 60s, early 70s?
TUBBS: Late 60s, early 70s, yeah.
HAMBURGER: You had mentioned earlier Roy Cohn.
TUBBS: Yes, Roy Cohn.
HAMBURGER: And can you tell me about him and what you know about his Capitol Hill presence and …
TUBBS: Yeah. Well, I sold his house. He had already bought it. It was in the 200 block of Fifth Street SE. Let me get this straight. Anyway, it’s just up from the corner of Independence and Fifth Street.
HAMBURGER: So, that would be the …
TUBBS: Thinking. 100 block or 200 block. You should know better about these things for sure. Anyway, it’s a lovely house. It’s a flat front and Joel Truitt, who’s a contractor here on the Hill, lives there now. But there was a brief period when Roy Cohn owned that house. And I was contacted by people who knew him and they said he needed to sell it. I never met him. I never met him and, so, I never had guilt, I guess, about selling that [house owned by] a man I considered to be a horrible person. Aiding him, being his agent, but he never met me.
At any rate, he had bought this house and I found out in the course of my working with him or for him or his company that he had a practice of buying houses and getting the owner to hold the finance and he would not pay on a regular basis. He would drive them crazy because he was using the money to do something else. It was, you know, a leveraging, I guess you’d call it. But there was a woman—Mrs. Hoytsma  was her name—she was the owner of the house. And, somehow, she had sold it to him. She was a widow by then. And the Hoytsmas—he had died and she moved to the Watergate. And she was constantly trying to get money from him to make payments because she had bought her apartment at the Watergate for a lot of money and needed the money to, you know, continue her life. And it was a constant struggle for her to get him to pay.
HAMBURGER: And are we still in the era of redlining?
TUBBS: No. That had, I guess, more or less ended by then. This was the 80s. It was ’82 when I was involved with that, or ’83. And he died probably not long after that [Cohn died in 1986]. So he had bought the house because—and I believe, in truth—I’ve been told that he bought it because his idol, who was Joe McCarthy, had lived at [20] Third Street NE. And he wanted to be as close as possible to the house of Joseph McCarthy. And, so, this house was just a few blocks away. The McCarthy house has a subsequent history which I could get into, but I won’t, probably not today. But they always flew a flag out, 24/7, because they could put a light under [it]. In those days, you couldn’t put out the flag after dusk unless it was lighted at night. So they always had a light on it. And somebody told me the flag pole is still there, at Joe McCarthy’s house. Be that as it may, McCarthy had already died, of course. But it was a shrine to Mr. [Cohn]. And so I listed the house. I never had an open house because it was being occupied by transients. There was evidence of drug use there. It was in disarray.
HAMBURGER: To clarify, are we talking about the house on Sixth Street now or the McCarthy…
TUBBS: Fifth. Fifth.
HAMBURGER: Fifth. Not the McCarthy house on Third.
TUBBS: No, no. McCarthy’s house was long sold to a Congressional representative that—I think we talked about. But anyway, Roy Cohn never lived in the house. I don’t know what his intentions were because he was already sick. Even when he bought the house, he had been diagnosed with AIDS [Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome]. And I think his thinking was at times erratic, although I’ve seen the famous sixty minute interview with a famous NBC correspondent who was the interviewer who said, “Sir, are you sick with AIDS? He said, “No, I’m not.” You can watch it on YouTube and it’s quite revealing.  [See “Roy Cohn is Not an Enigma,” a recap of Cohn’s 1986 60 Minutes interviews with Morley Safer and Mike Wallace.] He was still deft in that way, in speaking and handling himself. So, he denied that he was sick. He denied a lot of things. Liar, liar, liar. And could get away with it.  But he was at this time, owning this house. And, when I sold it, I was told he was sick and I don’t think he lasted much longer after that.
HAMBURGER: Did you see the interior of the house while he was living there?
TUBBS: He never lived there, to my knowledge. He bought it and, I don’t know what his intentions were, but it was only a short, maybe a year or two, period. And, when I entered, I could tell it was in disarray.  And I was told there were boys, go-go dancers, from The Follies [24 O Street SE], which was a movie house or dance place. Go-go bars, dance on the bar, and all that. And that was, at that time, at the corner of—was it Half Street SE? There was a whole row of gay bars at that time there. And one of them was The Follies. And they had dancers. And I was told some of the dancers were living at Roy Cohn’s place. But it looked like a—I’m looking for the word—just a place where you just crash.
HAMBURGER: Flophouse?
TUBBS: Flophouse, right. And I never saw any of the boys either. It was empty. And it was just full of detritus. I won’t go any further into it. But it was disturbing—things lying around and the condition of the house itself. And, now, my mind fails me. I never had an open house because it was too filthy. But Joel Truitt bought it right away, because he would restore properties …
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: … and so forth. And I believe he still lives there.
HAMBURGER: And why was the interior disturbing?
TUBBS: It was filthy and full of, you know, sexual stuff. So, obviously they were using it—I think it was drugs and sex. So it was kind of disgusting. But I never saw the boys. They had cleaned out somehow. Because I will tell you that, I think I’ve told you this before, when it was the day we settled on the house, then the buyer arrived, Joel, and his agent, nice lady. And I was there. And there was no one there—Mr. Cohn was not there. But about the beginning of the proceedings this door burst open, so to speak, and there were three thuggish looking men. They were scary. And they were from his law firm. And they were there to make sure everything went okay. Three of them. They looked like Mafia to me. And very clearly they were of another world. [Laughs.] And they were scary. You’d expect them to have guns or something. But the thing happened and they cleared out and then I guess went back to New York. But he was not there.
HAMBURGER: He hadn’t died yet. In a sense, his enforcers were there but the transaction, despite their presence, went along as you had planned.
TUBBS: It did, it did. And I never met Mrs. Hoytsma. I’m sure she got paid off. She had attorneys. Maybe her attorneys were there, too. I don’t remember. But she came out okay.
HAMBURGER: You mentioned the McCarthy house earlier. Is there a story behind McCarthy living there that you could tell?
TUBBS: Well, it brings us up to the present because the people who bought the house were  … Why, what’s his name? It escapes me now. He was a one-term congressman from Orange County. And he was extreme right wing. In fact, he was so right wing he was thrown out of the [John] Birch Society for being too reactionary. [Both laugh.]
HAMBURGER: Off the charts.
TUBBS: It’s a true story. But he was sort of loony. He was a very Roman Catholic man, large family, and he idolized Joe McCarthy also. That’s why he and his wife bought the place. They had a huge family. If I could think of his name right now. It’ll come to you. But, you know, his daughter was Mary Kay Letourneau. [His name was John Schmitz, Congressional representative from 1965 to 1970.]
HAMBURGER: Wow.
TUBBS: Yeah. It’s a very muddled and sad story, her. But she was their daughter.
HAMBURGER: Oh, my.
TUBBS: And that ended horribly and tragically. It went over a number of years. Now there’s been another movie made of it, I understand, on Netflix about her and about her [Samoan descent] husband, her seventh grade student I think he was. A very tawdry tale and sad.
HAMBURGER: I had never heard before the McCarthy connection.
TUBBS: Yeah.
HAMBURGER: It was her father …
TUBBS: Her father.
HAMBURGER: … who was buying the McCarthy home as almost an homage to the …
TUBBS: It was.
HAMBURGER: To the Senator.
TUBBS: Right. But his wife [Mary Suehr Schmitz], she was a real estate agent. And I did a couple of transactions with her. And she was very snappy, very bright and focused lady. But you could tell she was rigid, too. And she’d run a talk show, a regular talk show in California, which was like, you know, Laura Ingraham’s. She was of that sort, very articulate and very, you know, horribly unprogressive. I could put it that way. Gosh, the name will come to me in just a minute. And he died, the congressman, after all the disgrace with Mary Kay. And her brothers became assistant attorney generals under the Bush administration, I think. And I think one of them is still active in politics. Why can’t I think of the name? If you stop this, I’ll find out her father’s name. Siri, who is Mary Kay Letourneau’s father? [Apparently addressing a digital assistant. Pause while waiting for a response.]  I can’t do that. I’m just typing it in. Schmitz. John Schmitz and his wife was Mary. John Schmitz. He ran for president once.
HAMBURGER: I didn’t know that. I didn’t know he was Letourneau’s father. And it sounds like there were some other Schmitz who were in the Justice Department.
TUBBS: Yep, yep. It’s very much—hold on and I’ll find out. [Apparently scanning digital information.] He was a member of the House of Representatives and from Orange County and John Birch Society. Children, Joseph Schmitz, Mary Kay Letourneau, and John Schmitz. And there’s a picture of Mary Kay.
HAMBURGER: Michael, there were a couple of things that you mentioned earlier that I wanted to go back to.
TUBBS: Mm-hmm.
HAMBURGER: You described being here in 1964 and you mentioned the Lyndon B. Johnson inauguration. Do you remember anything about the inauguration or what that was like?
TUBBS: Yeah.
HAMBURGER: What it was like to be on the Hill while that …
TUBBS: Well, you couldn’t park anywhere. There was parking banned, I think, all the way up to Lincoln Park.  I don’t know where people parked their cars. In those days, you know, the streets were not jammed, the parking spots were not jammed. You always had plenty of parking on each block. But everybody had to remove their cars. No parking. I think I still kept one of the signs. I think it was, like, for four or five days. It’s a mystery to me now. What did we do with our cars? Because you couldn’t have them anywhere, unless you had a garage or something. And we didn’t have that. So.
HAMBURGER: Was that true for each of the inaugurations?
TUBBS: It was true in ’68, yes. In ’64, yes. I think it probably still continues but it’s not as restricted. It’s only probably in areas closer to the Capitol. But we were already on Seventh Street and I know it went out to Lincoln Park, which was crazy. Congress had its way much more in those days about, you know, what you were to do and what you weren’t to do.
HAMBURGER: And did you participate in any of the inaugural festivities? The swearing in of your …
TUBBS: No. Jim’s parents came up because they were Democratic Party people.
HAMBURGER: Right.
TUBBS: And, so, they got invited to various things. And they went to some of the balls and something else. No, I don’t think I went to any of the … wasn’t included in any of that. I think I told you we used to see LBJ and Lady Bird though, because they would come to church at St. Mark’s [304 A Street SE] because Reverend Baxter was one of their long-time friends. And they, you know, were very loyal to friends. And they went to church there instead of to St. John’s [Lafayette Park] at certain periods. I mean I’m sure they went to St. John’s, too. But they would come to service there occasionally.
And one day we were walking by. We had a dog. On Sunday morning we’d take her for walks and everything. And they were just coming out of church. And it was very, you know, very folksy. He was there with a few Secret Service men. I have a picture of it. And she was wearing a pretty yellow outfit. And seemed quite pert. And just a small crowd of neighbors just saw the president was there, so they came up and said hello and, you know, it was all very casual. This was, you know, before we had these heavy details surrounding the president.
And the funny thing is that I started talking to her, Mrs. Johnson. He was over in another area talking to other people. And I said, you know, “I love your dog,” and stuff like that. At that point, a girl, a beautiful, beautiful young girl came up and said, “Mrs. Johnson, I’m from Austin.” And I didn’t have a chance to say, “Well, I’m from Austin, too, you know.” [Interviewer laughs.] She was too much competition for me, but she was really beautiful. And she said, “You are? Lyndon, get on over here. This girl’s from Austin.”
Well, he took one look at this girl, of course, and came buzzing right over because she was a knockout. And, so, with me standing as a bystander now, that girl wheedled her way and, by the end of the conversation, she’d been invited on Air Force One back to Austin for the weekend. [Interviewer laughs.] And I thought, “What about me?” [Laughs.] But that’s the way they were. The Johnsons were very famous for, like, just being very folksy and friendly with folks, and, “Well, we’re going to Austin this weekend. Do you want to come with us?” You know? [Laughs.] And she said, “Sure I do.”
But the Johnsons knew a lot of people on Capitol Hill. And, allegedly—I never really knew this to be true—but we lived on A Street briefly while waiting, trying to get into our house. And two houses down was—I think his name was Bobby, Robert Best, B-E-S-T. He had a real estate company. And, allegedly, Lyndon would go there and have trysts with various women. I believe it to be true. [Laughs.]
HAMBURGER: Mm-hmm. But you don’t know for a certainty.
TUBBS: No.
HAMBURGER: You mentioned the photograph and it’s one of the things that—the oral history project is very interested in photographs.
TUBBS: Well, I’ll find that one. Yeah.
HAMBURGER: That would be terrific. And any others that you …
TUBBS: She looks really snappy in her yellow dress. She was a nice figured woman. She was really lovely.
HAMBURGER: See what you can dig up, okay? And we’ll want to get a photograph of you as well.
TUBBS: Today?
HAMBURGER: No. [Interviewee laughs.] You can either send me one or the oral history project has photographers that they’ll send over to take a portrait.
TUBBS: How many people do you have now on the roster?
HAMBURGER: Doing interviews you mean?
TUBBS: No. How many are now recorded interviews?
HAMBURGER: I think it’s—lots, a lot. Yes. And they’re all available online.
TUBBS: I know. I’ve read several of them. They’re quite, quite good, about life in the early 20th century, for example.
HAMBURGER: We were just talking about ’64 and that was a tumultuous decade. And I wondered how you experienced that tumult of the 60s and thinking of two. Wanted to ask you about that and specifically the Vietnam war became a source of protests …
TUBBS: Yeah.
HAMBURGER: … and then also in 1968, of course, the assassination of Martin Luther King.
TUBBS: We had several public demonstrations in the late 60s and early 70s, in fact. When did Nixon bomb Cambodia? [1969.] There was huge outrage then. I think that was in ’71 or ’72. So, it went on until finally the war was over in ’75, or more correctly, April ’74 or ’75. And so it went on for several years.
There were some major marches from about ’67 or so on—or ’66 even— until ’70-something or other. ’72 or so. But, you know, we went to all of them and it was very united and everyone was quite altogether about it, about protesting it. I don’t remember any mayhem much. Maybe there was some, you know, policemen dragging people away and things like that. There was no major counterforce there. As for the riots in ’68, happily I was in Berlin. [Laughs.] Since I was teaching in France that year, I’d been invited by a German colleague to meet his family in Germany. So we spent that weekend, Easter weekend I think it was, in Berlin. I opened a paper there and saw that it says—I remember the London Times said, “The Capitol Burns.” That’s all it said. Oh, my god! So, I immediately found out—you know, communications weren’t all that good then. I called Washington, found, yes, indeed, a lot of our neighborhood was, you know, in ruins. Especially Eighth Street and H Street and certain areas of Pennsylvania Avenue. So, I missed that. My friends told me what happened. They, you know, barricaded themselves in houses and things like that.
HAMBURGER: And were changes visible when you came back from Berlin?
TUBBS: Yes. They were. But we were still, you know, this is ’68, we were still kind of a shabby kind of neighborhood. So you didn’t notice it that much. [Laughs.] There were a lot of houses being, you know, torn down, ripped up, and all that sort of stuff. So I was shocked by the condition of the storefronts on Eighth Street and H Street. H Street didn’t come back for—made several attempts but never came back until recently. And now it’s troubled again. So Eighth Street became a disaster area. I mean H Street. Excuse me. Not Eighth Street. But, yeah, I was shocked by that. But I didn’t get back into the United States until I think it was July and the riots were April.
HAMBURGER: Mm-hmm.
TUBBS: So, there’d been some recovery, repair work going on.
HAMBURGER: Michael, would you reflect on how race has changed on Capitol Hill, both the demographics and race relations.
TUBBS: It’s complicated. Very complicated. I’ve never really understood it myself. So I remember when I first came in June of ’64, hadn’t bought my house yet, was living with friends. I would say the composition of our part of the Hill was probably 60/40, something like that. It was more Black than White, but pretty well balanced. As I said, there were still a lot of old Jewish people living here because it was a Jewish neighborhood at one time. They were holding out, so to speak.
But it had been declining as a neighborhood for a long time. And we were that first, you know, wave of people looking to gentrify—which is not a word necessarily favorable these days, but I guess it’s what we were doing. And a lot of the Black people were not homeowners. There were a lot of them and there are still some here, over in the ten hundred block of North Carolina, nine hundred block, on the left-hand side. There’s still three Black people who have been there ever since I first came to Capitol Hill. Their families are still there.
But most of [the Black people] were tenants and rent control didn’t exist then and all that stuff. They were just thrown out. If a landlord wanted to sell his property, you know, they had to get out. And I was in terrible conflict about that, I will admit, because there were ten people living in the house we bought. And it didn’t—I guess it shouldn’t—it didn’t faze me that much. Suddenly, we were moving in a house that had to be emptied. And it didn’t concern me that they had to go somewhere else. And, to my shame, they didn’t move out and we had no place to go. And they kept delaying, delaying, delaying. And I think we called the real estate agent and said, you know, “We need to get in our house. You have to do something about this.” And they were given a deadline, I think by the agent. Be out by eight o’clock that night. And we parked the car about a block away. Because we were going to move in that night.
I mean, it was just that sort of thing. Parked the car and I’ll never forget this. They were loading this broken-down car, which was in terrible shape. It was dragging, you know. All the stuff loaded inside was just sagging on the street. And they left about eight o’clock. The car was full of people and things and children and it was just—I really felt bad about that.
HAMBURGER: Really?
TUBBS: Horribly. It’s haunted me. It still haunts me. I mean, what happened, where did they go? But we didn’t have that optic at the time, I guess. And I needed to move into a house.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: I had no place to go. So, that was my arrival at 27 Seventh Street. And there were numbers on the doors of the tenements. There were some rooms that had Number 1, Number 2. And there were a couple of rooms that had sinks for water. They shared the same bathroom. There were two bathrooms in the house. So, it could accommodate quite a few people. I think there were ten people living there. You know, children and all that. And it was very sad, very sad. So, that’s that.
HAMBURGER: You had described earlier gay people as sort of the vanguard of the buying new properties on Capitol Hill, gentrification.
TUBBS: Yeah, yeah. As I said, we just–we were the only place that I could think of because Georgetown was the other one and [was] out of our reach. Even, you know, there were still some unrestored, as we used to call them, unrestored houses. But they were twice as much as you would spend on Capitol Hill because this was a … People who lived in Northwest did not think Capitol Hill was suitable, in the sense of being civilized enough or being safe. It was a neighborhood you didn’t go to, they thought. I didn’t have any other idea, you know, and I didn’t feel threatened there. And I thought it was so, like, nifty and fun. I was 24 years old and it didn’t bother me. But I would meet people from Northwest and they were very disparaging.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: And, in those days, the Hill per se was really considered as being … An outpost was Sixth Street. Some people considered it to be Fourth Street. You didn’t stray beyond Fourth Street from the Capitol. Beyond that, it became a slum neighborhood. Then it expanded, became Sixth Street. When we bought, Sixth Street was the place where you didn’t go beyond if you wanted to get a restored house versus a slum house.
HAMBURGER: Yes. And why is it, Michael, and this is true in city after city, that gays are sort of the vanguard of rehabilitation?
TUBBS: I don’t know. Because I guess we had, you know, some spunk about us. And, I guess, we’re less fearful living in a neighborhood because some of us had to live in those kind of neighborhoods anyway.
HAMBURGER: Yeah.
TUBBS: And it was also more adventurous. We were not—we weren’t looking for—we were underground people. And, so, we fit in well with the nice Black population. Same thing, you know, not looked at that much. So we could operate under the radar more in this type of neighborhood. And, you know, if you were a federal employee who’s making a good salary, you were maybe living in Northwest, but you lived a completely sheltered up, closeted life. And we were less closeted here. So, it was more open and, therefore, more inviting. We had acquaintances and friends who are very correct gay people who lived in Northwest and they were just different from us. They were very socially comme il faut. They were very, you know, conscious of social levels––snobs I would say, really. [Laughs.] And it was less snobby. You couldn’t be snobby on Capitol Hill. So that made it fun.
HAMBURGER: Tell me how—if you could walk me through the changes over time that you observed.
TUBBS: You know, it’s very hard when you’re living in that milieu to realize how things change.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: It’s an ongoing thing. It’s a river and you don’t know where it stops and starts. It’s just, it’s hard to say. But obviously there was a change. I mean, completely changed. And I guess it was just housing stock. There were suddenly—I would say in about the early 70s, I noticed a lot of straight white people moving in. And that was visible, you know. We didn’t see that very much. And, yet, it changed  completely. And, of course, now, as I said earlier, when I was doing open houses—it was just about ten or 15 years ago—you never saw somebody arrive with children, ever. You never saw anybody coming to an open house. They were either a gay couple or a straight old couple or I guess straight younger—but they never had kids. Because everybody moved out the minute the kids got to school age and they moved to Montgomery County or Arlington. In fact, I sold a lot of houses in both areas because that’s where our business was going. And, then, suddenly, we had this … People would arrive with baby carriages, prams, and park them in the front yard. And I remember being struck by that. It was so shocking. And that would have been, you know, in the late 90s. That would never happen in the 60s, ever. Because the schools were still segregated, you know.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: They said they weren’t, but they were. I think  it’s [indecipherable] in a way.
HAMBURGER: Let me ask you, since you mentioned the baby carriages and you talked the other day about seeing a gay couple feeding their child …
TUBBS: Yeah. [Laughs.]
HAMBURGER: So, I was interested in getting your thoughts about the change that you’ve observed here on Capitol Hill, where once this was a place where it was more welcoming and wasn’t as buttoned down or closeted as you said as Northwest. But it was still, this was an era of homophobia, describing the 60s and 70s as an era of homophobia.
TUBBS: It was an era of that but our neighborhood didn’t have kids, didn’t have, you know—Gay couples did not have children, they just did not.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: That was unheard of. It was a foreign concept. And, so, when it started happening, I was sort of shocked by it. Now, of course, it’s completely accepted by everybody. I think. Which is a great thing. But that wasn’t the case. And I was part of that. I just couldn’t imagine two gay guys having kids. It just couldn’t be. There was no such thing as gay marriage. This can’t be! So, I was not a pioneer on that front. [Laughs.]
HAMBURGER: You described once—I was going to ask you to tell me again about your thoughts one day on Capitol Hill as you saw Pete Buttigieg and his partner [husband Chasten Glezman].
TUBBS: Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that something? What a change it’s been.
HAMBURGER: Yeah.
TUBBS: Yeah. You know, they used to live at the apartment building above Trader Joe’s and now they’ve bought a house in the 800 block of E Street SE. And I know they’re out—I think he goes to Trader Joe’s. I know he goes to Yes! [Market], which is the, you know …
HAMBURGER: Oh, yeah, yeah. Organic foods.
TUBBS: Organic foods, right down the street from him. And I’ve seen him in Eastern Market. And I’ve seen–I think his partner’s name is, his husband’s name is [Chasten].
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: And they were wheeling their baby carriage around one day and I guess the kids were beyond that, but the kids were in it and I admired them all and they were very proud parents. And it was just very natural. [Laughs.]
HAMBURGER: Yes. I’ve been thinking that it’s quite a bit of history you’ve seen from the days when you—from ’64, when you first moved in.
TUBBS: Yeah. Quite.
HAMBURGER: And now a cabinet secretary is with his gay partner and ...
TUBBS: And should, could, ought to be, you know, except wasn’t, a presidential candidate. I don’t think we’ve advanced that far or won’t in my lifetime. But it is staggering to think about this. But from your vantage point, it is shocking to me to see how far we’ve come. But I’ve been in the middle of it all and, so, it’s not—it’s incremental.
HAMBURGER: Right. I had a couple of things I wanted to ask you about. You had described, I have in my notes, spouses who sell houses.
TUBBS: Oh, well, that’s Tom and—Tom Faison and his then wife. So, I don’t know if it’s going to be good to bring up, but …
HAMBURGER: Mm-hmm.
TUBBS: There was an early vanguard of straight people moving in with kids. And that was one of their slogans at the time was, you know, “We’re spouses who sell houses.” Which was very clever and very smart and they had a lot of, you know, like minded people buying. They had children and were a straight couple and that was a smart thing to do. And they got a lot of business out of it. So. It was novel, very novel.
HAMBURGER: I wanted to ask you also about other sort of newsworthy moments on Capitol Hill. There was the Gary Hart …
TUBBS: [Laughs.] Yeah.
HAMBURGER: … a scandal which I was reminded was really blown up by the National Enquirer in the same …
TUBBS: Oh, yeah.
HAMBURGER: … and we were reading so much about it.
TUBBS: Exactly, exactly. It was the National Enquirer.  But he taunted them, I think. That was his mistake. He sort of, like, made fun of them and said, you know, “I don’t have to tell you anything.” He could have played along with it a little bit better and not been so brutal a fall. But he was never … They exposed him. He didn’t have a chance.
HAMBURGER: Did Hart live on Capitol Hill?
TUBBS: Mm-hmm. At Sixth Street, middle block, 700 block? No. Five hundred block of Sixth Street SE. [517 Sixth Street SE.] And that’s my neighbor next door to him. She witnessed when there were the famous reporters cornering him in the back [during coverage surrounding his extramarital affair]. And she escaped down the back stairway. The reporters were waiting for her. What was her name? The Bimini. Monkey Business was the boat.
HAMBURGER: Donna Rice.
TUBBS: Donna Rice, exactly. Yeah. Well, she was in the house at the time. Do you list the other scandals on the Hill? I told you about Roy Cohn. I told you … Well, there was a very famous broker here named Beau Bogan at one time, back in the 70’s, 60’s. And he had a very nice house the next block over from me here, in the 200 block of Tenth Street SE. And one morning, about four o‘clock a.m., the house was blown up. I mean there was a bomb set off that blew away the façade of the house. At the same moment, his business, Beau Bogan Real Estate, was at the corner of Ninth and Pennsylvania. It’s a lovely building on the south side of Pennsylvania, I mean the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue. And that was blown apart. It was a bomb set to go off at the same time. And it destroyed part of that building. It was a very powerful bomb. And no one has ever been able to explain it.
HAMBURGER: Were people killed in the bombing?
TUBBS: No. It was early morning and I think he lived in the back part of the house, you know, over on Tenth Street. Whether he was in residence at the time, I don’t know. But it was only the front part of the house, which was the living room area. No one was injured to my knowledge. And they were set up to go off really early in the morning. But there’s never been —there’s been speculation ever since. It was a sexual thing, about the Marines or something. But I don’t know.
HAMBURGER:  It was never resolved.
TUBBS: Never resolved. It was all covered up. It was a major—I mean, the bomb was quite loud.
HAMBURGER: People heard it all over the neighborhood.
TUBBS: Yes, the bomb was …. So it was bizarre somebody would set off at the business as well as the house.
HAMBURGER: I had not heard that.
TUBBS: Yeah.
HAMBURGER: And there have been other—I’m thinking of the other time we—were we here? Some in this neighborhood were hearing explosions. That was on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. Were you here?
TUBBS: Yeah, I was here. But I didn’t hear much of it. I was in the back yard and I’d already seen, you know, the spectacle of Trump addressing the crowds. So, I didn’t think it was going to be anything much more beyond that. And I kept hearing these alarmist things, but I didn’t hear the noise.
HAMBURGER: Right.
TUBBS: You were closer and so you did, obviously.
HAMBURGER: Yeah.
TUBBS: But it became full scale. I mean, it was shocking. But I don’t know anybody who was there at the Capitol.
HAMBURGER: Interested in your thoughts on the reaction, how it affected the neighborhood and can you tell me about that?
TUBBS: I think the neighborhood was just as much in shock as the rest of Washington. There was no feeling that we were even more in danger, I think, because they came from the other direction, didn’t they? If they’d marched through Lincoln Park, of course, we’d have been much more alarmed about it all. But it was on the west side of the Capitol and, therefore, it was, you know, not as evident.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: The coverage was sporadic. It was all panicky, you know. And we were getting these reports on the news and so forth that, you know, you know where Nancy Pelosi was and … It was chaos.
HAMBURGER: Afterward they erected those large, eight-foot fences around the Capitol, later around the Supreme Court. Had you ever seen this sort of fortification of the Capitol?
TUBBS: No, I had not. And I wonder why—I don’t remember during all those 60s and 70s riots. I wonder why. Because I think they were all centered on the White House, now that I think about it. We marched around, you know, Lafayette Park and places like that because ours was more focused on Lyndon Johnson and the administration.
HAMBURGER: Right.
TUBBS: So, I guess this was novel. Yeah. I hadn’t seen that. I remember when the Capitol was a parking lot. I mean, the whole east front here. What’s the word that I’m looking for? The east front was one huge parking lot.
HAMBURGER: Right.
TUBBS: Until quite recently, ten years ago.
HAMBURGER: Yes. It’s a little longer than that. I remember also. Because there were reporters who had enough seniority could park their cars.
TUBBS: Park there. And I think a lot of people were outraged that they lost their parking pass.
HAMBURGER: Oh, yes. [Laughs.]
TUBBS: Where am I going to go? [Laughs.] It took some bravery to do that, I guess.
HAMBURGER: Michael, do you have any memories, anything that’s Capitol Hill specific, that’s related to the AIDS epidemic?
TUBBS: Well, we knew lots of people. Not Capitol Hill specific but part of the gay community. Sure, I mean, I would open The—in those days, The Blade, The Blade newspaper was [sigh] … You’d open the paper and there’d be like six or seven pages of obits. Staggering, staggering. I mean, people were just dying right and left. And they were selling a viatical—I never even knew what a viatical was. It’s where people would buy your life insurance policy at a certain value and give that to you because they were betting that you were going to die. It was a bet, you know. And that was called a viatical. And a lot of people took that because they were dying. And they took the cash from the insurance company because they thought they were going to last two or three weeks. Then they discovered the miracle drugs and a lot of those viatical buyers, they were …  They got cheated out of their money [laughs] because the person lived.
HAMBURGER: Yes, that didn’t pay off.
TUBBS: No, that didn’t pay off. Yeah, on Capitol Hill, the gay community here was just as struck as any other, by percentage wise I guess. And I don’t remember us being that much of a locus—as much as any other place. By that time, gaydom had spread from, you know, Capitol Hill in small pockets elsewhere. It had become, you know, 14th Street and Shaw and—well, Shaw was a latecomer. But 17th Street. All those places expanded and, you know, Capitol Hill became, once again, sort of like a little sleepy byway as opposed to …
HAMBURGER: A center.
TUBBS: A center of gay activity.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: It still is.
HAMBURGER: You had mentioned earlier that you, when we talking about your arrival in DC in those early decades, you couldn’t imagine the idea of gay marriage.
TUBBS: No. No. Totally shocking. It was ludicrous. It was not in our ken, so to speak. So, we disparaged it. I mean it was never even thought of. Never. In the 60s, no. No. We were concerned about blending in because we wanted to keep jobs.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: And not make ourselves a spectacle. It was timid, if you wish, but it was all economically driven. We had no other choice. When I taught high school, no one would express themselves that way. I’d lose my job, for one thing, right away. They’d be shunned. So, people knew when it was [indecipherable] and fun life when we were living in a gay ghetto, or a gay society living in a straight society. You found kinship, which was a lot of fun.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: You’d have parties.  There was a really famous guy around. I won’t tell you his name, but he was an assistant secretary of HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development], I think, and he would have—every Sunday or every other Sunday he would have what he called a tea dance at his house. Over on Constitution Avenue. And it was so much fun. We’d go and we’d have brunch and stay until ten o’clock at night. Dancing, just partying. There wasn’t any sex. If you found somebody, you took them home or something.
HAMBURGER: Yeah.
TUBBS: No sex was going on at these things. But it was just really relaxed.
HAMBURGER: And what era was that?
TUBBS: 60s.
HAMBURGER: 60s.
TUBBS: And early 70s, too. They were called tea dances. [Laughs] Always Sunday afternoon, was fun. There was always good food.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: And people would bring food. And I guess people drank a lot and smoked a lot. But I remember I’d go, like, at noon and get home at ten o’clock at night.
HAMBURGER: So, since gay couples have become ubiquitous in Washington, has Capitol Hill lost some of its sense of community or fun for …?
TUBBS: You’d have to ask them. I don’t know. I only know my world.
HAMBURGER: Yeah, so what’s the experience from your world?
TUBBS: I think it’s more or less my age. I think it’s not a question of—I think there’s still a lot of lively gay life here, but of a different tone. Because people are married and they have couples and so forth.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: It’s not as wild as it used to be. Renegade like stuff. But, you know, I’m an older man now and I don’t go out like I used to. I don’t frequent that that much. That’s what happens. [Laughs.]
HAMBURGER: Yes. I’m familiar with that.
TUBBS: No, you’re generations away from me.
HAMBURGER: We’ve been visiting now for almost an hour and a half, Michael, so I don’t want to keep you much longer, but let me ask, are there things that I didn’t ask you that I should have?
TUBBS: Well, I probably will think of them later, after you leave. But, no, I think I’ve been as, you know, thorough as I can be. Things will come up to me later, but …
HAMBURGER: Yes. Well, it’s been a great pleasure talking with you.
TUBBS: Well, it was fun. This was fun. Yeah.
HAMBURGER: This is our neighborhood history.
TUBBS: I think about all my old friends of that day. They’re all gone. I’m a survivor in a way, which is shocking. But if I said, well, I’m going to call up so-and-so and find out what we really said then, I don’t have anybody to call anymore. They’re all dead. I guess because I frequented an older crowd. They were always about ten years older than I was. So, they’d be in their nineties now if they were alive. It’s understandable they’re gone.
HAMBURGER: Yes.
TUBBS: But I miss reminiscing with them. Old times.
HAMBURGER: Yeah. I’m so glad I had a chance to do that with you …
TUBBS: Well, it was very kind of you …
HAMBURGER: For a while this afternoon.
TUBBS: … to do this. I hope it helps out with [the project].
HAMBURGER: It will. It’s helpful and I’m going to turn the recorder off now and we’ll discuss photographs and a couple of other things.
TUBBS: Yeah.
END OF INTERVIEW
Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project
                                                                                                       Michael Tubbs Interview, April 24, 2024

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