LGBT History Study Group

Madison Gay Men's Center: An Early History

The LGBT Senior Alliance welcomes to our Madison LGBT History Study Group one of the early leaders of the LGBT community: Ron McCrea. Ron arrived in Madison from Boston in June 1970 to work on a summer volunteer project and, newly out, started attending MAHE (Madison Alliance for Homosexual Equality) meetings on Wednesday nights in the basement of St. Francis House. He took a job at The Capital Times in December, 1970, having decided to stay and get more involved in gay organizing and educational work.

The first Gay Center at 10 Langdon did not open until 1972. Crossroads was chartered early in 1973. Later that year the Center moved to the second floor of the building on Hancock Street at Johnson, which offered both office space and a big area for meetings and dances. Dale Hillerman became the full-time director. He was responsible for professionalizing the center, keeping records, building networks, and setting up a short course in counseling for volunteers with a group of social work students called Noah's Ark. They worked with the growing number of coops and alternative living communities to give them skills in conflict resolution.

Ron appeared regularly on Gay Center speaker panels, which always included lesbians. Ron won a journalism fellowship at the end of 1974 to take a leave for a year to report on the uses and abuses of behavior modification; 1975 was the end of his involvement with the Gay Center except for keeping a seat on the board of Renaissance of Madison, Inc. The name was changed after the IRS refused to give nonprofit, tax-exempt status to Crossroads because it was a gay service organization. Hoping that changing the name to Renaissance might fool them didn't work immediately. The pompous Renaissance name was Ron's idea.

The landlord for the Hancock building froze out the Center in 1974-75, literally cutting off the heat. The Center then moved to the basement at St. Francis House (Episcopal Student Center, 1001 University Avenue) and remained there from 1975 until 1982. When St. Francis decided to convert the space for student housing in 1982, the Center moved down the street to the    basement of the University United Methodist Church at 1127 University Avenue where it remained until its merger with The United in 1987. Prior to the merger, the Gay Center changed its name to the Madison Gay Resource Center in 1984 and finally to the Madison Gay and Lesbian Resource Center (MGLRC) the following year as its target clientelle and services expanded.

The subsequent history of the collaboration between The United and MGLRC leading to their merger on July 1, 1998 as a new agency, OutReach Inc., will be covered in the History Group's meeting on Wednesday, February 10, 2016.

For more information, please call OutReach at 255-8582 and ask for Steve or Angie.    Also e-mail at angier@lgbtoutreach.org