![]() ![]() “It went back to the suppression or oppression that I felt in my life,” he said. He soon met others and became active in the nascent gay-rights movement, as well as the NAACP, though Adair was white. It was there that Adair met his first gay person, who assured him that he was not alone or unusual. After high school, he studied radiology science at Einstein Medical Center. Through it all, Adair was a good student and worked at the A&P and Strawbridge’s. Not only the kids that I was in school with, but also Bryn Mawr, Rosemont, Villanova, Radnor, Wayne.” And so we really knew everybody, and so it just spread. He started the first Parent-Teachers Association, and he organized the building fund for the chapel at Villanova. “And then when I got old enough, he started the first Boy Scouts. “My father started the first Cub Scout troop in Rosemont,” said Adair. So, the abuse continued through high school-aided, ironically, by his father’s philanthropic activities. Not wanting to embarrass his family, Adair said nothing. The encounters often included beatings some to make Adair comply, others as expressions of the abusers’ contempt. In the 1940s and ’50s, the area still had several large estates, and Villanova University had considerable tracts of open land and woods. This activity was surprisingly easy to conceal. And there was not a day, unless I was on vacation with my family, that I was not expected to perform on whomever presented themselves at the train stop.” “And I was made to perform oral sex on these kids. “As a result of that, I was picked up by five (young) teens and taken into the woods,” he said. For this, Adair became known among neighborhood boys as a sissy. The two played “house” together and pushed Nancy’s dolls around the neighborhood in a little stroller. At age 4, his best friend was a little girl named Nancy who lived down the street. Joe’s, they really wanted me to be less sheltered, in a way, and so I went to West Catholic High School for Boys at 49th and Chestnut.”Īdair’s childhood was less sheltered than even his parents imagined. “And though I applied for and was accepted at St. “My family very much wanted me to have a mainstream Catholic education,” recalled Adair. Thomas of Villanova for grade school, then back into Philly for high school. The Adairs were Catholic, so young Adair was sent to St. His father was an insurance broker and a musician who had played with Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. So they felt that it would just be safer … and it didn’t turn out to be quite that way.”īorn in Philadelphia, Adair and his family moved to Rosemont when he was 3. And pictures were taken of cars, and film was taken of people entering the Allegro and other gay bars. “The bars were being watched by Rizzo, who was head of vice. “Everyone was looking over their shoulder if you were gay,” Adair told historian Marc Stein in a 1993 interview. ![]() ![]() So, when local leaders looked for a site at which to organize a Philadelphia chapter of the Mattachine Society-one of the country’s first gay-rights groups-Adair’s offer of his mother’s property in Wayne seemed like a no-brainer. In the city, Frank Rizzo was still making his name on the police force, and harassing homosexuals was his specialty. It was 1960, and the local gay-rights movement was a wee embryo. As Jack Adair later remembered it, meeting on the Main Line was supposed to be safer. ![]()
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