In keeping with Club Carousel’s birthday theme this month, let’s focus on the Society’s handcrafted monthly newsletter, Carousel Capers.
This publication, which ran from 1969 to at least 1975, was a hand-typed and drawn affair. In its heyday, it grew to 24+ pages with columns such as Chatter Box, Gertrude’s Gossip, and Cecil’s Secrets. Club business, including attendance figures, budgets, and meeting minutes, was presented—keeping the Club leaders accountable to their membership.
Members of Club Carousel had significant fears of being outed; they did not want to run into anyone they might know in the straight world. Ensuring the Club remained a safe space was a common refrain in the pages of Carousel Capers, the Club’s monthly newsletter. In April 1973, Ruth Simkin wrote a strongly worded letter to the Club’s Executive Committee:
It is with great regret that I can no longer continue with my membership and support of Club Carousel. The reason for this is the Executive’s decision of hiring a straight band for the Anniversary Party. I feel this is merely a first step in the total demolition of an all-gay club…..
I personally feel that a consolidated gay community is more important than a well-played guitar, at the only place in Calgary we have. When policy changes back (if it ever does), I would be honoured to once more be associated with what could be the best gay club around.
{Ruth would go on to be one of the founders of the important Calgary Lesbian and Gay Political Action Guild (CLAGPAG).}
The Executive responded in the pages of Carousel Capers that the band had been a last-minute substitution when their previously booked gay talent had had to cancel, and emphatically confirmed their commitment to the no straights policy.
Later that year, the Executive firmly noted that the newsletter itself should carefully be restricted from Straights.
“Out of the closets and into the streets is a great battle cry for gays who don’t have too much to lose but then – there are the rest of us,” referencing the generational divide as young gay liberationists were agitating publicly for social change (particularly at the University of Calgary).
Carousel Capers was also a vehicle for connecting Western Canada’s emerging organized gay community. Articles were written about sister clubs, and the community listings in the magazine are an illuminating time capsule of their era.
We often say that Club Carousel was the dawn of the organized gay community in Calgary, and one of its primary communication vehicles was Carousel Capers.
{KA}
Calgary Gay History 