BackCAST Cape Ann: LGBTQ Community on Cape Ann Series
Episode 5: Charles Nazarian
This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Listen to the full episode: Episode 5: Charles Nazarian
The stories you hear as part of BackCAST Cape Ann’s series on the LGBTQ community highlights their contribution, care, and activism. It’s a look back at experiences, significant moments and persistent memories.
For this episode in our series, I talk with Charles Nazarian, president of the Gloucester Meetinghouse Foundation. He’s a resident of Bay View, a pipe organ designer, and an architectural designer.
Maureen Aylward (Maureen): Charles, you arrived in Gloucester in 1975 to work at CB Fisk. What was that like coming here at that time?
Charles Nazarian (Charles): It was a very interesting place to be. All of the liberation movements were coming together in the late 1960s on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement. All of these forces were in play along with the Vietnam War and the Nixon era. It was very intense culturally.
A lot of us, including myself, who came out either as gay or lesbian at that time had family members who may or may not have known, some of whom we came out to, some we didn’t. There were parents who could never go down that road of acceptance and others who were struggling with it. Arriving on Cape Ann put a little distance between me and my family in the Boston area and elsewhere. Those who I had taken into my confidence about my private life were actually remarkably forward-thinking, but it took awhile for the rest of the family to come along.
Cape Ann, for me, as it has been for many people coming up Route 128, was a place of healing and a place of finding oneself. There’s something about coming over that bridge that’s very magical. Some people say that there’s a crystal deposit under Cape Ann and that buzz that we feel when we come over the bridge is actually some kind of healing energy. I think there’s great truth in the fact that people of all different kinds have come here whether seeking to build their castle by the sea or simply finding a place by the ocean that is very beautiful and accessible while still not being far away from Boston as a great cultural center, and that combination is very alluring. It was for me.
Charles Fisk used to say that we had the best of both worlds here because you could go to the symphony and come home and then the next day go to the beach. Very few places in the country have that combination of quality of life and being in nature, while being near a great metropolitan center.
Boston, of course, was the place to party whether you were gay or straight compared to Cape Ann, but Cape Ann had a very interesting and long-standing history of gay and lesbian people here, and gradually learning about that was very interesting for me
Maureen: How did you start learning about this?
Charles: It happened in dribs and drabs. I remember the first time that I toured Hammond Castle. I was lucky enough to have a docent who knew quite a bit of the inside story about Jack Hammond and his background. As she took us through the house, she not only described all of the things to do with coats of mail and the various things that mostly had to do with the occult and oftentimes with death, but she also hinted at his personal life.
If you scratch the surface just a little bit, you’ll discover that even though Jack Hammond was married, he was quite well-known in social circles as a gay man. He had a very cordial relationship with his wife, and they were both into the occult. They had shared interests, but in many ways, he was just a completely unique individual. He was part of a circle here on Cape Ann of millionaire eccentrics, one might say. The tour of the castle was my first hint of who this group of people might have been.
Hammond’s story is really fascinating. His father owned the entire coastline from what was the Cardinal Cushing Villa, which had been the elder Hammond’s house, and is now owned by Reverend Moon, all the way down to Magnolia Harbor. His father had made himself a very substantial fortune likely through not very honorable means in the diamond trade in South Africa.
Hammond himself was one of four children, and it took me a while to put the pieces together, but all four of them were either gay or lesbian from what I’ve been able to discover. His elder brother I know very little about, but the two sisters, their lives are fairly well-documented. One of them had a lace collection and lived outside of New York City in White Plains, and her house is a museum, and the other sister lived on Dolliver’s Neck and built a compound of four houses.
I slowly discovered more about her because Charles Fisk and Virginia Lee Fisk, his second wife, bought one of those houses on the compound. I discovered that Jack Hammond’s sister kept a woman’s militia there, trained them on the grounds, and offered them to the United States government during World War II, but the government declined. It was fascinating to find out about this woman. I met the architect of her compound, a woman who was one of the few practicing architects in the 1930s in New England. Her name was Miss Raymond. That’s how she liked to be known. She designed this compound with some very forwardly-looking features. She got salvaged World War I oil containers and put them under a glass cover and created a solar heating system for the compound by heating glycol in these tanks and then using a heat exchanger in order to transmit the heat into the rest of the compound.
Maureen: That’s innovation at a time when this wasn’t even really an idea.
Charles: Right. But Miss Raymond was a very forward-thinking person. I asked her about this. She was in her mid-80s when I met her. She said it worked quite well, but oil was so cheap by the time the ’50s came along, she took it all apart because it just wasn’t worth the trouble.
Maureen: What’s the connection with Hammond and Sleeper and A. Piatt Andrew?
Charles: These three gentleman were probably Gloucester’s most illustrious, wealthy gay men. Henry Sleeper, of course, was the interior designer for the DuPonts. He was responsible for their home, Winterthur, in which every room is done in another period style and in perfectly correct period style.
A. Piatt Andrew was a local politician. He was known for his progressive viewpoints. I have one of the posters from his house, Red Roof, in which he’s described as a progressive Republican. Of course, this is the 1920s that we’re talking about. The Republicans at that time were considered more progressive in their thinking than the Democrats.
These three gentlemen were known for throwing big parties. They were also part of a larger group of people often referred to as the Boston Bohemians. There’s a wonderful book by a man named Douglass Shand-Tucci by that name and tells the story of many of these people, including women like Cecilia Beaux and others, people of fashion and background and wealth who partied up here on Cape Ann in the grand style.
Jack Hammond was something of a mischievous character from things I’ve been able to glean. He made a lot of money by creating patents for radio tube type technology that was used by the US government for defense and remote control purposes. He kept a little remote control submarine and liked to send it around the harbor and startle fishermen by bringing it up alongside of their boats.
Jack also, I believe from things I’ve read, was the first person to have a really powerful, high-fidelity system with large speakers. He delighted in blasting music across Gloucester Harbor so that his friends on Eastern Point could hear it.
He used a system like that in his house. He had a very large pipe organ built into Hammond Castle, but the pipework went up into the tower where much of it would not be audible from the grand hall. He microphoned it and amplified it through his theater speakers. That’s all gone today, unfortunately, and the organ is in terrible disrepair, but he was a great mind when it came to electronics and things like that. He was brought as a young boy to meet Thomas Edison, and Edison kind of took him under his wing and encouraged him.
Maureen: Wow. What an opportunity to meet Thomas Edison and be inspired by that.
Let’s go back to your experience when you got here in 1975. What was the gay community like? Was it easy to find? Did you know about it?
Charles: It was not easy if you didn’t know anybody here. It took me a little while. For example, I dropped by an antique store. I knew the owner, who was a very friendly guy. I was looking at the stuff in his antique store. My gaydar went on. Over the course of the conversation, I found that we had like-interests or I may have mentioned somebody else who I met. I got to know him very well, and later on, his partner. They had, for quite a long time, a wonderful place for sandwiches and all kinds of great food. They did catering work on Cape Ann. They threw some fabulous parties.
It’s through meeting just a few people initially that I gradually met others. Many of the gay men I met, and also gay women as well, were, if not already in couples, on their way to being coupled up. A lot of them had met elsewhere like in Boston, and wanted to settle down and found Cape Ann to be a lovely place to have a house.
That’s the pattern that I think still exists today. It’s still not that easy socially to meet other people in the gay/lesbian community. There are easier ways, certainly. There are gatherings of folks, and it’s much more open than it was in the ’70s, but nevertheless, I think this is one of the themes of Cape Ann being a refuge and a quiet place in which to enjoy your life.
Maureen: Did you find it welcoming when you got here, and do you find that same sense of welcome here now?
Charles: I found it very welcoming. There was a fellow who worked at the Fisk shop whose name was Joe Grace, he was a former mayor of Gloucester. Joe told me early in my apprenticeship that people on the other side of Cape Ann would know my business before I knew it. That turned out to be true on many occasions. I would run into somebody who would say, “Oh, I hear you’re going to such and such party.” I hadn’t gotten the invitation yet.
Maureen: Funny! I think that still happens. Let’s talk about a favorite story of yours.
Charles: One particularly favorite story is about going to Rocky Neck. Rocky Neck was, really, the only place in Gloucester where you could go on a weekend evening and have a likely chance of meeting other gay guys hanging out at different watering holes.
The Studio was one of them, and its piano bar was very popular. There was also a place called The Rockaway Hotel; it’s now condominiums. It was one of those old hotels that had seen better days, but was a lot of fun. There was an upstairs bar and a downstairs bar. The upstairs bar was probably the more polite of the two. The downstairs was a more raucous.
One evening when I was there a buzz started in the room, somebody was arriving by boat. This guy arrived, came through the door, and he had somebody with him who at first you might have thought was a woman, she had her hair up in a bun, but it clearly became obvious that this was someone in drag, a pretty good drag.
That alone was unusual. There were a couple of people who would show up in drag on Rocky Neck for an occasion like the Beaux Arts Ball, but it was not something one generally saw. That particular evening, Harry Chapin was the singer. This was before Harry Chapin became a nationally-recognized musician. The guy came in with the person in drag. They got drinks, and after about 15 minutes, this guy stood up and challenged Harry Chapin to a duel, a musical duel. He challenged him to sing something in iambic pentameter. If Harry would do that, he would return with another verse that was even more bawdy.
Chapin started out with a perfectly humorous and slightly naughty song all in perfectly good iambic pentameter. Edward Albee got up and gave him one back a little dirtier, and then Harry Chapin came back with another one that was a little dirtier still. This went on for about half an hour, and by the time Edward Albee was finished, we were in the gutter without a doubt. But it was the kind of thing that would never happen in a typical Boston bar.
Maureen: Why did it happen up here?
Charles: I think part of it is the fact that Cape Ann has this illustrious history of artists and artisans and writers who have come here and painted or written or done wonderful things. We have this long, long history of incredibly talented people in the arts of all kinds, some of whom were gay, some of whom were straight. It’s an environment that invited somebody like Edward Albee to show up and do something like this. It was delightful for people here. There were also, in the 1970s, enough older gay men and women to know the history of the place. I was lucky to meet some of them so that even though I was in my mid to late 20s at that point, I met a number of people who were in their 60s who could fill me in.
Maureen: That must have been great to have those conversations and that oral history passed down between folks.
Charles: There is so much oral history, which is still really not well-recorded, because people don’t necessarily want the history to be known. Coming back to Jack Hammond for a second, I found out over the years that he had a favorite young man in his life, and he actually built this young man quite a remarkable smaller version of the Hammond Castle up on the hill above Freshwater Cove.
I would say that he was a young English actor. His last name was Buswell. I think Mr. Buswell today we would consider bisexual, and he eventually married and had kids. His family did not want this story to come out. I don’t think I became fully aware of this story until the late ’80s or early ’90s when two guys from New York bought the castle, known as Stillington Hall, and they opened it up for parties because there is a theater built into a separate building there. They had musical soirées. When some of us became aware of Jack Hammond’s connection to Buswell and the history that had gone down, we kept that history alive; otherwise, we would never have known.
Maureen: You’ve lost some of those people who you met over the years, some of them to AIDS during that really, really tough period. Tell me about your work during that time.
Charles: It was a very, very dark period in our history, for the country as a whole. There were so many awful things that happened. At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the virus was poorly understood. It was sometimes called the gay plague or the gay cancer. People had no idea of what was going on, and people were dying fast.
For me, the personal experiences were the hardest and that was true for most gay men, losing best friends and that sort of thing. I didn’t work with a specific group of people, but I worked with individuals who were close friends and did my best to be there for them. One friend in particular was on the football team at Boston College. If you met him, you would have thought he was the butchest guy you ever saw. He lived in Brookline, found out he had AIDS, and I made him a promise that when the time came that I would be with him.
It’s one of the more difficult memories I have because I saw him on and off and watched him go downhill. Then I got the call and rushed down to his place. There was a hospice worker there. His brothers were outside the house, unwilling to go in. My friend was losing his awareness, but I knew he could still hear me from the way he was reacting. I think he was also aware that his family was nearby.
I stayed with him until his last breath as I had promised to do. I remember going outside afterwards, and one of his brothers came up to me and thanked me. I said to him, “You know, you could’ve been there.” He looked at me and he said, “No. We couldn’t have done that. We just couldn’t have been close to him at that moment.”
It was shocking to me. It was a real eye-opener: the fear level, the lack of knowledge, that they were fearful that they might catch it from him just by being close to him, which would not have happened. His own siblings had not, in all that time, been able to find their way to being with their brother. It just blew me away. I’ve never forgotten it. The disease itself was horrific, but what it did to families was also horrific.
On the other side of that coin, I think it forced the hand of our society as a whole to come to a level of honesty about alternative lifestyles. One can’t say that even a single death is a good thing. I would never say that, but the whole experience for the culture, I believe, has led directly to the acceptance of not only gay/lesbian/transgender people to the degree we have today, but certainly the gay marriage movement. It also has helped with the interpersonal acceptance that you see with families and members of families who don’t necessarily fit into the typical mold. All of this has changed enormously in the past 40 years. For those of us who lost so many friends, in some ways, they were martyrs to a cause.
I think one of the things that’s happened is that people realize that one’s sexual orientation is an adjective. It’s not a noun. You are a human being with a wide array of characteristics, but you are still a human being, first and foremost. That right not to define yourself is very important. That’s a freedom that we only dreamt about in the ’70s and ’80s. I hope that this will remain ingrained in the society. There are certainly people who would like to turn the clock back and push people back into the closet and everything else, but I think the genie’s out of the bottle.
Maureen: Charles, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Charles: Thank you for asking me.
BackCAST Cape Ann is a production of 1623 Studios. This show was produced by Maureen Aylward with technical assistance from Becky Tober.
