Before Indy Pride Week, the 'gay switchboard' offered a lifeline

This story originally published June 7, 2017.

Being gay in Indianapolis once meant living covertly.

Even the city's "gay switchboard" — a one-stop information clearinghouse run by and for gay men — didn't officially use the word gay. It incorporated, in early 1981, not as the Gay Switchboard, but as the Community Referral Service of Indianapolis. "We were very, very cautious and rightly so," said Geoff Lapin, who with five friends hatched the idea while sitting around his living room at Christmastime 1980. "This was new territory."

Such reticence seems quaint today, and especially this week when 50,000 people are expected to line the Downtown streets Saturday to watch Indianapolis' annual Circle City IN Pride Parade that will include hundreds of participants, including Mayor Joe Hogsett.

But the gay pride festival began cautiously, with a dinner at a hotel in 1981 where many of the guests wore masks "so as not to be seen," according to the group's official history.

The Community Referral Service of Indianapolis was a simple thing. It consisted of a phone number patched to an answering service. The answering service sent alerts to an on-call "operator" through a pager. Operators, armed with a three-ring binder they'd crammed with wide-ranging information, took shifts answering the page. 

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The incoming queries varied: Where can I find a doctor who's comfortable treating a gay man? A divorce lawyer who'd understand? A therapist? Where are the gay bars? Where are the bath houses?

Lapin, who was a cellist with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, took Mondays because the orchestra had that day off. On Tuesdays, he'd hand the pager and the three-ring binder to the next operator. The service was available every day of the year. Nobody got paid. Everyone was a volunteer. Most calls were returned in 20 minutes or less. 

Callers got more than just information, said Rusty Moe, one of the original operators. They got a kindred spirit, rare in those less tolerant times. "For people to connect with someone who didn't lampoon them or judge them, the switchboard was like having an ear with a heart attached," Moe said.

Today, there are many LGBTQ organizations, such as Indiana Youth Group, the newspaper the Eagle, the Indy Rainbow Chamber of Commerce and PFLAG. 

But in the early 1980s, gay men weren't so organized, and the mainstream was far less comfortable with homosexuality. If you were gay, said Moe, "societally it felt like you were viewed as being sick, like there was something the matter with you."

Today, many state lawmakers oppose same-sex marriage, but back then, there was opposition to even being gay. In 1977, for instance, some lawmakers tried to re-enact laws to make sodomy a felony.

And this: The switchboard operators promoted their service mostly by posting the phone number at the half-dozen or so gay bars throughout Indianapolis. But in June 1981, they appealed to the broader public by publishing the number in an ad in the Indianapolis Star for the first-ever Pride Week.

The next day, the answering service received so many phone calls from outraged people that $15 was allocated for a plant to be sent to the woman at the answering service "for her patience and endurance during the flood of harassing phone calls received the day the Gay Pride ad appeared in the paper," according to minutes from the Community Referral Service's June 28, 1981 board meeting.

Sometimes even the earnest callers were problematic. "I had a call from a pedophile one time," said Lapin. "He was in love with an underage boy who lived with his mom in a trailer park, with chickens in the trailer, and he was, 'I miss my Jimmy, but his mother won't let me see him.' I referred him to Midtown Mental Health."

Now and then, callers hit on operators. "You'd occasionally get, 'Well, you sound nice,' " said Moe. Operators had strict instructions to cut off any flirtation. "You'd tell them, 'that's not what this is for,' " Moe said.

"For this to work," said Lapin, "we needed to keep it professional." To that end, the operators didn't reveal their real names. Lapin went by "Derreck." Moe was "Eric." 

Some of the callers were in need of immediate help. The three-ring binder had a plan for that. If a caller threatened suicide, "Try to refer to CSIS (Crisis Suicide Intervention Services, a professional, certified suicide hotline)," it advised. "If a referral is unacceptable, A. Talk to caller; B. Try to get caller to feel more OK; C. Offer counselor referral."

And if the caller had already ingested something poisonous, "Determine Actuality and Lethality; A. What has been done? 1. method; 2. amount and type of drugs; B. Get hard, factual answers. II. Get help; A. Tell caller you are going to get someone to help. NOTE: Avoid using the word 'police.' CALL 911."

"We had training," said Allen McCormack, who was the switchboard operator "Jim" while a student at the University of Indianapolis. "We trained with professional, certified suicide prevention counselors. People were killing themselves, and we needed to know how to talk to them."

McCormack quit the switchboard after a year. He'd graduated and got a job in Minneapolis. Somebody took his place, and as the other original operators also bowed out, more new volunteers took their places. 

The switchboard went on answering phone calls for more than two decades until the internet rendered it unnecessary.

The other day, McCormack was thinking about those long-gone days, and he posted this on his Facebook page: "More than forty years ago a group of gay men in Indianapolis created the 'Gay Switchboard.' Geoff and Phil and Skip and Rusty and me and others I no longer remember built a network for folks to find entertainment, health care, and community in a time when folks like us were beaten or killed instead of provided services. This was pre-cellphone and pre-internet. We had a three- or four-inch ring binder and a pager.

"Seems antiquated now, but if I've never done anything else worthwhile in life, this is the thing that matter most."

Call IndyStar reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter: @WillRHiggins.