In 1973, the Triangle opened in an old building on the edge of downtown, where it catered to the leather and denim community.
The original Triangle was the brainchild of Denver native and Vietnam veteran Donald Walter Young, a Marine sergeant and decorated tank commander. After leaving the service in his early twenties, Young returned to Denver and plunged into the gay-bar business.
Before the Triangle, Denver’s gay-bar scene was mostly underground, held in check by the Denver Police Department vice squad, which wielded antiquated laws against lewd behavior and men in female attire, among other things. Until late 1974, same-sex kissing in public, even in a gay bar, violated the “public indecency” law. The kissers could be arrested and the bar cited — even closed, if too many violations stacked up.
At the Triangle, Durity met Gerard, a man twice his age and an influential figure in the region’s cultural scene. Durity and Gerard spent the next seventeen years together, until Gerard died of AIDS in 1992. “Many times I would meet people traveling to Denver to perform at the DCPA, or business, or political events,” says Durity. “They were cautious about keeping a low profile, especially during the earlier days when there was fear of a vice operation that could end their career.
The Triangle was known in gay men’s circles as one of the nation’s premier leather bars; it was on the must-do list of any leather guy traveling to Denver for work or pleasure — or simply to escape more conservative towns in the Rocky Mountain West. Durity, who now lives part-time in Southern California, says that “even today among older leather men I meet in Palm Springs, they have a strong association between Denver and the Triangle.
While the early Triangle wasn’t a sex club or a back room, a few patrons sometimes got carried away...particularly in the basement bar. The Triangle was shuttered many times over the years, sometimes several times in the same year, for “lewd and lascivious” violations witnessed by plain-clothes vice officers. The gay grapevine worked well to alert patrons when cops had closed the Triangle, and when it reopened.
Ironically, given the Triangle’s reputation for promiscuity, all but one of the half-dozen former regulars I interviewed — all over the age of seventy — had found a long-term partner at the Triangle. All but one had also lost a long-term partner to AIDS. In 1976, my then-partner-now-husband Bob Janowski and I landed in Denver. We sometimes went dancing at the Broadway and the 1942, and sometimes went to beer busts at the Southtown Lumber Company . I’d mastered the gay-bar basics, but the Triangle was like the gay-bar equivalent of graduate school. I was a preppy, happily partnered young professional already running Denver’s brand-new Gay Community Center by 1977. Part of our mission was to provide alternatives to gay bars.
Excessive drinking helped many gays and lesbians drown shame, loosen inhibitions and momentarily escape an internalized sense of worthlessness. If youth growing up in the post-World War II era learned anything at all about homosexuality, they knew it bore the stigma of being sick, sinful and against the law — even unpatriotic. Society’s major institutions deplored homosexuals. The 1950s Lavender Scare promulgated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI chief J.
Employees and loyal patrons of gay bars were among Denver’s earliest diagnosed cases. Before long, gay bars, including the Triangle, collaborated to mount fundraisers to support AIDS organizations. But there was a disconnect between how budding AIDS service organizations wanted to use charitable dollars and the expectations of many of those raising the funds. Community organizers saw the need to develop a service infrastructure for people with AIDS and prevention programs to stop its spread.
Young died in 2000 at 53, having enjoyed wide admiration and some successes, but also enduring far more than his share of hard knocks. He is buried at Fort Logan National Cemetery. During his years running the Triangle, Thompson added dancing and an improved outdoor seating area. He welcomed everyone at the bar, though he says that the few female patrons were usually friends of his gay male customers. The RMMC continued to hold events there, while younger regulars of the Fox Hole, which had recently closed in the Central Platte Valley, found a new home at the Triangle. “Older patrons liked it because all these younger good-looking guys were there,” Thompson recalls.
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