transcripts

objects/videohistory003_transcript.txt

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+Montalvo: A test shot and some audio.
+
+Can you say like something?
+
+Carrington: Like…I mean
+
+Be like, “Hi, my name is Gary.”
+
+Hi, my name is Gary.
+
+And where are you from?
+
+Kansas City, Missouri. Born and raised.
+
+Born and raised? Never left? Never went anywhere––
+
+Um well, I lived outside of Kansas City for about three years when I was in St. Louis for school.
+
+You know people talk about living, I've even talked about living
+
+and moving somewhere else, but I'm I mean this is my city.
+
+I love Kansas City.
+
+I don't think I would be happy living any place else.
+
+I can go visit but, no.
+
+This is home.
+
+I'm boisterous.
+
+It's very rare that I don't speak my mind.
+
+I'm boldly, I've gotten
+
+learned. how to be honest and transparent with people.
+
+That was something I had to learn.
+
+I did learn that.
+
+But I'm very, I'm supportive.
+
+Like I said, I'm honest, you know, I'm someone you
+
+can if I say I'm gonna do something, then you can
+
+best believe that it's gonna get done.
+
+I always stand by my word
+
+Our gay community here in Kansas City, when
+
+I came out, it was surrounded by a whole lot of
+
+con artists.
+
+And what I mean by that, it was a whole lot of, oh, I can help
+
+you, oh, I can teach you, I can show you, but it was all based around sexual things.
+
+So you had to be real leery
+
+and real conscious about who you spent your time with and who you were getting to know
+
+During that time, that's when my
+
+gay family really showed up for me.
+
+That's when they turned into my gay family.
+
+Hey, don't worry about it.
+
+We got you.
+
+And that's when I started
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+realizing and seeing the the workings
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+of people who were outcast by their own family, but that
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+found each other and came together and built a family.
+
+And we've been those people stayed my
+
+friends to this day, so yeah, that’d be my family.
+
+Who are the specific people?
+
+Well one, my gay mom, they called her Mother Gooch.
+
+She passed away.
+
+She passed away in 2013.
+
+Then there was uh my gay dad, which was Carver,
+
+and he I think he passed away in
+
+2018, 2019.
+
+But they they were just together.
+
+I mean, they didn't live together.
+
+They were just best friends.
+
+And together as a group on a daily basis
+
+they just showed me, well not just me, the group of people they
+
+took in, like their kids, because Gooch was the type of person that
+
+I was the only person there.
+
+When I got to Gooch’s house, there were four other, you know,
+
+males that she had took in, having the same
+
+situation and she just raised us as a family, like
+
+she was like he was really our mother, you know, hey, rules and
+
+regulations, you know have to pay bills, you have to keep the house cleaned, stuff like that.
+
+This, I'm assuming, is the House of Carrington?
+
+or is it just a—
+
+No.
+
+At the time that this was forming, right as I was going off to school is
+
+when the, I won’t say the Ball[room] scene, but when the family thing
+
+was real popular and going around.
+
+But when I got to the St.
+
+Louis, we had never actually formed a family here.
+
+So when I got to St. Louis and started hanging around those people
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+and that group of my St. Louis family, that's when,
+
+you know, one of my friends Sable, he was a female impersonator.
+
+He was Sable Carrington, just said, “you're going to be my son.”
+
+And he said, as of right now your last name is Carrington.
+
+And when I came back to Kansas City,
+
+by then it already got around, “oh, Gary, Carrington, Gary Carrington, Gary Carrington.”
+
+And that's when I started the Carrington house here in Kansas City, that
+
+I was the very first one here in Kansas City, and that's when I started everybody else.
+
+Okay, yeah,
+
+You’re the Godfather.
+
+I love that.
+
+What was what was the scene like at that time, like were
+
+you having fun, like going to the clubs and stuff, uh, were you having a good time?
+
+I guess I was having a good time because, like I
+
+said, they were teaching me a lot. and then in the gay family group, and
+
+that they're one of the things that were always teach us, it's not
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+where you go, it's the people you're with.
+
+So, of course, all the clubs back in those days were designed.
+
+They were not designed for us.
+
+You know, they didn't play any of our music.
+
+You know, of course they let us in, take our money, but it wasn't designed for us.
+
+So, as long as we stayed together with the people we
+
+were with, of course, we had a good time because of the people I was with, not where was
+
+not where I was at, it was the people I was with.
+
+But back in the day, the clubs were very much adamant, you can tell, they were not designed for us.
+
+That's still how it is today. [laughs]
+
+To this day! In 2025. To this day.
+
+Because when Soakie's–
+
+Soakie's became such a hot item. Soakie's became that
+
+little small space became such a major
+
+foot in the gay community, but it was a foot in a Black gay community
+
+Back then pre-partying was, you know, the big thing.
+
+So let's go here, have a couple of drinks, and then by the
+
+time we get we having a couple of drinks here, everything will be ready to go. where we where we used to party at.
+
+So we would go down to Soakie's and stay down there for about maybe a couple
+
+of hours or so, and then it started catching on.
+
+The more and more people started coming.
+
+And then Tish, Jerry started talking to
+
+"Soakie" [Salvatore A. Rinaldo] about doing things down there.
+
+And that's when he found out he was like––
+
+They said in order for them to get a 3 o'clock license,
+
+They had their food revenue had to go up. because
+
+I don't know what it was, but they said, you know, they had them sell so much food
+
+in order to get approved for three o'clock license.
+
+So that was our goal.
+
+So we did that.
+
+We would tell people go down there for lunch. At night, we would go down there and buy sandwiches.
+
+and we finally got the license.
+
+And then that's when that took off and we started like remodeling and taking, making, changes.
+
+because the man was making money.
+
+He didn't have no problem.
+
+He was an Italian, he was making money.
+
+Sounds like he was pretty accepting to you all.
+
+That he was.
+
+Whatever we went and asked for him, whatever we went to him and said we
+
+wanted to do or thought about doing, if it wasn't a problem, he didn't have any issue.
+
+Like I said, we went in. He was this old Italian man.
+
+These are Black gay people coming into your establishment.
+
+I mean, you serve lunch, you know, to people who are––
+
+you know, working in The Mob or whatever, you because that place was packed during lunch.
+
+In Downtown, that was a place.
+
+Businessmen down in your their their suits and making deals.
+
+They're sitting here eating hoagie sandwiches and drinking beer.
+
+And now at night we want you to flip the script
+
+and turn it into...he was very open
+
+Hell, he remodeled the four times for us. He was very accepting.
+
+Why do you think he was so willing
+
+to change the the shop at night?
+
+I believe it was Tisha [Taylor] and Jerry [Colston]
+
+I believe whatever conversation they had––
+
+And Eric [Robinson]?
+
+Yeah, yeah. I believe whatever conversation they had, they convinced him to trust them.
+
+And they within him trusting them, you
+
+know, they brought us on. "Hey Gary, I need you, you know, to be a, you
+
+know, to work the door for me" as those things started forming.
+
+My little brother Danny, before he passed, "hey, Danny, I need you to be a bartender."
+
+And I think
+
+they showed him what they could do and he trusted
+
+them and then he realized, hey, I can trust these people.
+
+Then it got to the point that [Soakie] wouldn't even come in.
+
+You know, he would, Soakie was usually there seven days a week.
+
+It got to the point that he would show up on Fridays.
+
+Fridays to write the checks and pay the bills for the liquor, and
+
+pay everybody payroll and he leave everything to Jerry and Tisha.
+
+What was it like, like, when Soakie's
+
+shut down, how did that impact you and the community and stuff?
+
+When I got the call,
+
+When Tisha called and said "hey, you need to come down and clear
+
+out all yourself out of the dressing room because, you know, they're not renewing our license, they're shutting this down."
+
+This is right before they started out remodeling the Power & Light [District]
+
+H&R Block, but we knew it was coming.
+
+They were getting ready put us out of there because they were redoing Downtown.
+
+it was a a blow, because we had been there, we put, and I
+
+do mean blood sweat and tears, we had painted walls, we had made floors.
+
+We had took out furniture.
+
+We had you know, hung doors.
+
+Our dressing room was an old storage room and we had to go in and hang
+
+light and clean out and gut and redo just
+
+so we have a place for the dressing room. so it was it was kind of bittersweet.
+
+When we went down and we cleaned out the dressing room and took mementos.
+
+I still have a bar stool from Soakie's in my house right now.
+
+[chuckles] I stole one of the bar stools.
+
+So and we took mementos, and so like I thought it was bittersweet and
+
+then it took us it took the community a minute to realize, okay, Soakie's not here anymore.
+
+It's done.
+
+What are we gonna do?
+
+If we can get one person to say, hey, I want to open a business here
+
+in Kansas City and I want to be a Black gay bar, that bar is going to make money because it's a need.
+
+It
+
+it's a need.
+
+Because we' can go into any bar in the city any and
+
+they're all, you know, catering to the our other counterparts, we
+
+can have a drink with whatever, but it's not gonna be for us.
+
+It's not designed for us.
+
+You know, it's not made for us.
+
+You'll take us in, but
+
+I believe that's what we need.
+
+I just need one person to say, hey, I'm gonna open this bar.
+
+And why is that so important?
+
+Like, why was Soakie's so important?
+
+Like, why are bars for us so important, or important to you?
+
+Well, important to me because it was basically our seat at the table.
+
+It was our voice.
+
+You know, at that time back in that era, everybody, you know,
+
+first of all, gay wasn't as out it is now,
+
+wasn't looked up on as it is now, so accepted.
+
+Back then, so it was our place.
+
+It was our place we could go and be us.
+
+We didn't have to put on any airs we didn't have to, you know, conduct
+
+us, we didn't have to we could go and just be us, be open and free.
+
+See, at the other bars, we have to, you know,
+
+you know, the way we talk and joke and play with each other,
+
+you know, they think we're fighting, or they think there's a problem or
+
+issue, or you know, I can tell that
+
+the drink I just ordered is not the same drink that you––
+
+You understand what I'm saying? The service [was different]. And I sense that. And I just got tired of faking it.
+
+And I think that's what Soakie's was. Soakie's was our place.
+
+Because a lot of people came to Soakie's, and they never even went inside the bar.
+
+They would come down park in the parking lot, pop their trunk, put
+
+out their lawn chairs and their cooler and sit right there in the park because they were around their people.
+
+They felt home that they they felt at home, so that's where it was.
+
+and that's the need here in this community that
+
+we, as a Black gay community, we need a place where we can say, hey, this is ours.
+
+This is us.
+
+A place where we can walk into a bar and see, you know, pictures of
+
+entertainers that went to win national titles, that does such-and-such, and we don't we don't have that here.
+
+We don't have any place that honors or
+
+respects or mentions, you know, anybody in our Black gay community
+
+because we have no voice.
+
+We have no place.