Historical mansion has been a comfort zone for gay community – Journal Times

JANESVILLE, Wis. (AP) — A 169-year-old mansion that housed Janesville’s first surgical hospital stands on a little-traveled street on Janesville’s near-east side.

The house was designed by the same architect who designed the famed Tallman House across the river.

It once housed an asylum for people with mental illness, and it was a drama school that produced a silent-film actor.

With a history like that and the house’s Italianate good looks, it’s no surprise some believe ghosts haunt it.

But this story is not about any of those fascinating topics. It’s about the house’s residents for the past three decades.

Their story began when Alan Callies bought the run-down, abandoned house in 1990. Windows were broken. Youths had played inside.

Callies, an architect, fell in love with the place. He was joined by Randy Gurney and Lisa St. Clair and others over the years who paid rent but also formed an unusual family unit.

This was at a time when gay people were not always welcome to be themselves in local society, they told The Janesville Gazette.

Their close bonds were evident as they told stories and joked about days gone by.

“They are my brothers,” St. Clair said. “They’ve been there through every good and every bad thing that happened.”

“That’s what family does,” Gurney said.

Gurney and Callies, a divorced couple who still live together, raised five children in the house. In 1996, they threw a 30th birthday party for St. Clair.

They liked the result so much that they all decided to hold more lawn parties, but in the summer.

That was the origin of the Sutherland Family Party, which happened each summer from 1997 through 2019.

Two former residents, Jen Schuler and Kevin Ruff, were also key to getting the party started, the group.

The party was a gay party, in all the senses of the word, although all were welcome.

“Today, you can just be gay anywhere. But back then, you just couldn’t. This was where it was OK to be gay,” said St. Clair, who no longer lives in the house.

Local gays would often socialize in Madison or Rockford to get away from socially conservative Janesville, the Sutherland House residents recalled.

While fun was a big motivation, and drinking was as prominent as in any summertime Wisconsin party, Sutherland House organizers had counseling available, as well as the AIDS Resource Center from Madison, which offered confidential HIV screenings in a secluded room.

House residents made all the food and provided the drinks in earlier years. More recently, it’s been bring your own booze and a dish to pass.

Guests came from far and wide, including a few from Colorado and Texas. Quite a few people who met at the parties later married, Gurney said proudly.

Wendt attended his first Sutherland House party in 2000. He remembered thinking, “I’m going to live there someday.”

And so he did.

During the peak years of the mid-2000s, 550 to 600 people attended, Wendt said.

They invited the neighbors and always told police, who on occasion turned up to tell them to turn the music down when it got late.

In all those years, Callies could remember only one unpleasant incident. It came the day before the party, when kids playing in the street used a slur for gay people while harassing a friend of theirs.

The Sutherland House residents would post signs around the 3¼-acre property on party days that said: “Some are; some aren’t. Some do; some don’t. Some will. Some won’t. Please respect everyone!”

The signs might have been superfluous. Gurney said the event became a great way for people to meet others of different lifestyles.

“It was always a party of love,” St. Clair agreed.

More than a dozen squad cars showed up one year when two straight people got into a fight, Callies said. The police apparently thought they were coming to the rescue in a gay-bashing incident. But it was a personal dispute, Callies said.

Parties featured “drag races,” in which participants dashed from station to station around the yard, donning an article of women’s clothing at each stop.

Drag queens put on shows. Other fun included corn-bag tossing tournaments, volleyball and lounging in the above-ground pool.

The group fondly recalled the lesbians beat the straights three years running at tug-of-war.

The house needs work, its residents freely admit. Paint is peeling, and it needs fixing in many places. They are working on it, bit by bit.

They recently built a fence around their vegetable garden, and someday, they’d like to re-build an octagon-shaped addition that was the hospital’s operating room.

They stopped holding parties when COVID-19 got in the way, but they hope to revive it when the pandemic allows.

The Sutherland House family learned this summer about younger people organizing a gay pride event, set for Saturday, Oct. 9 at Lower Courthouse Park.

They enthusiastically offered their advice, ideas, tables and drag-race clothes.

“Whatever they needed to keep the pride going,” Gurney said.

The Sutherland House group, like the house, is aging. And they’re mellowing.

“Instead of a drag show, now we end the night with dancing on the patio,” Gurney said.

They hope to throw many more parties, starting next summer, COVID-19 permitting.

For now, they’re excited to show up for a more public gathering of LGBTQ folks and other friends.