Partner Melvin Cain
Queer Places:
115 Monroe St, Bossier City, LA 71111
1276 Delhi St, Bossier City, LA 71111
William
Edward "Billy" Glover (born September 16, 1932) was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. He grew up in Bossier City and attended Bossier schools, the high school being four blocks from his home on Monroe Street. He played flute in the band, which traveled over the summers to Lion Club meetings. Glover graduated in 1950 and went to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he says he "had more fun than learning". He had been religious throughout high school and most of college, but by the time he left LSU he sought elsewhere for answers to complex issues such regarding race, gender, and sexuality.
He graduated from Louisiana State University in 1950 and entered into the Army in 1955. A year later, he was accused of having sex with another man and promptly kicked out of the service. He then moved to Los Angeles, where he had been once before on a family vacation, and found work with a cotton wholesaler and a credit agency.
A few years after moving to Los Angeles, he found an issue of a gay magazine called ONE Magazine on a newsstand near Universal and Las Palmas and decided to find the publishers. Like several other homosexual pilgrims at the time, Glover sought out ONE Inc.'s downtown office to find others like him and to offer his support for the magazine. He first met with editor
Jim Kepner and learned of the upcoming Mattachine Convention-where several different Mattachine, a homosexual-rights group, chapters met annually-in Denver in 1959. He decided to attend and was so moved by the experience that he decided to work full-time for the movement. As a result, Glover moved to San Francisco for a while and worked with
Don Lucas and
Hal Call in the Mattachine office on Market Street. Then he moved back to Los Angeles and began working with Kepner,
Don Slater and
W. Dorr Legg at ONE Inc. He became the office 'go-for' and eventually one of ONE's first paid employees.
On the day that President John F. Kennedy was shot (Nov. 22, 1963) Glover met a young man named Melvin Cain and they almost immediately became lovers. They remained together for 15 years and remain friends to this day. The hand-holding couple graced the cover of two issues of ONE Magazine.
Additionally, Glover did much of the bookkeeping for the organization and was responsible for delivery of ONE. He and Cain did some volunteer work for the library but that was Slater's realm, and Glover worked more with ONE's business manager, Legg, as well as enrolling in Legg's sociology classes at ONE Institute.
This is predominately why Glover was surprised when he was nominated to the board of directors in January 1964 to find that while Slater supported his nomination, Legg was dead set against him.
Famed gay rights activist Harry Hay and his partner
John Burnside were elected to ONE's board that night but they resigned a few hours later, repulsed by the vitriolic infighting that ensued over Glover's nomination. The following year, the organization split with Slater taking most of ONE's archives and office materials to a new location in Universal City.
Glover continued to work for Slater and together they continued to publish a version of ONE Magazine, which changed its name to Tangents soon after the 1965 division. He helped to found the Homosexual Information Center in 1968, after a two-year court battle between the two surviving factions of ONE. HIC was among the first corporations openly dedicated to homosexual issues to receive federal tax-exempt status in 1971.
He has participated in dozens if not hundreds of events, from the 1965 motorcade through Los Angeles to protest the exclusion of homosexuals in the armed forces to the successful picketing of the Los Angeles Times on Nov. 5, 1969 because the editor refused to print the word "homosexual" in an advertisement. The most important work of the current GLBT movement, he believes, is "educating homosexuals and non-homosexuals and keeping up the effort to change laws. We need to make things better for younger homosexual men and women, and we need to provide them with the resources they are going to need, such as community, fellowship, heritage and history."
Even though Glover lives in Bossier City, he continues to travel to Los Angeles often to visit friends and work for the HIC. He participates every day in the GLBT movement by keeping up with the daily news via the various gay magazines and the Internet, writing e-mails to publishers and politicians on behalf of his past and present cohorts at the HIC. Through his work he helps dozens if not hundreds of people within the movement to stay connected to each other and be more mindful of their past.
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