Interviewing Chuck Honse

By Silas Switzer

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            I was just coming off of doing a project about the AIDS crisis in Pittsburgh. I had spent hours upon hours finding any information that I could about what people experienced here, what they went through, how they fought it, and where they spent their time. There wasn't a lot available to me — there isn't a lot available in general. I quickly discovered that it seemed a lot of this history was held in people's memories, not on paper.

            One of the biggest archives of Pittsburgh's queer history comes from the Pittsburgh Queer History Project, headed up several years back by CMU student Harrison Apple. The PQHP holds old photos, videos, and documents centered around the city's gay nightlife. As it turns out, the gay bars around here were a major part of the culture. Not only did they exist as paragons of the community, but they also did things like organize the biannual picnics in North Park. With regard to the AIDS crisis, many of the bars allowed the Pitt Men's Study — the nations largest AIDS study — to set up shop in their backrooms, allowing them to get the blood draws they needed from gay men to continue their research. Some bars even offered a free drink if you got your blood drawn!

            Once I had zeroed in on the fact that the bars were central to life here, I knew that that was the path I needed to follow in order to know more. I wanted to know about my own history, the history of my community. This was my first clue. One bar was incredibly dominant in the PQHP archives — The Holiday. The Holiday was open for decades, all the way through the AIDS crisis, only closing its doors in the early 2000s. In the PQHP archive there were these little cards from the closing of The Holiday where people could write their favorite memories or express their thanks for the bar. I poured over those cards for hours, and one name kept coming up over and over: Chuck Honse, the co-owner of The Holiday.

            Like I said, this history is held in people's minds — you won't find it in books or movies. So I looked him up. I found interviews he had done from when The Holiday closed, and eventually, after some digging, I found his Facebook page. My desperation for information overrode my apprehensiveness over messaging a stranger, and I reached out asking to talk to him. He responded warmly, setting my anxious little college freshman heart at ease. After a couple exchanges, we scheduled a time to meet over Zoom.

            I was expecting to talk for maybe thirty minutes — I didn't really think he would be all that interested in telling me stories. In the end, we talked for two hours — he told me about the bar, about gay life back then, really about anything that he could think of. I was amazed at just how much history he had to offer, and it was at that point that I realized that if I could do this same thing with even just a handful of people, I would begin to be able to reassemble the queer history of Pittsburgh, one piece at a time.