Over the weekend, bears briefly became a part of the national conversation due to fringe presidential candidate RFK Jr. admitting he once left a dead bear in Central Park as a practical joke. (Yeah, that sentence is a lot. Take a second. Let it wash over you. Breathe in. Breathe out. OK, now we continue.)
The news was received on social media with the amount of levity you would expect. Which prompted someone to reminisce about a long-ago news story from the Associated Press with the headline “No More Bear Meat In Glory Hole”. A friend of mine spotted the reminiscence and knew I was the person to ask: was there ever really such a headline?
There was, my friends. There was:
As disappointing as this headline must have been for the horny young twinks who hang around in that one special restroom stall at the municipal fairgrounds, long-time readers of this blog will see the “Juneau, Alaska” dateline on the AP store and realize we’ve already discussed the glory holes of Juneau at length. The bear meat headline that looked so funny was in fact a blow to local charitable efforts; the Glory Hole mentioned in the article is a soup kitchen and the bear meat formerly went into the soup.
Why is there a small-town soup kitchen called “The Glory Hole”? That’s literally a long story. Short version: “Glory hole” was a mining term for a certain kind of big hole in the ground long before it was a gay cruising thing, and drunken down-on-their-luck laborers in an isolated (no roads to Juneau) mining town were thus said to be “down the glory hole”. And so it was, in a nod to that tradition, that the Juneau Cooperative Christian Ministry opened a soup kitchen in 1981 and named it The Glory Hole. As I wrote before:
Did they know about gay sexual slang, these charitable Christian people, back in 1981, in that little town with no roads going in or out, before the internet, before the cruise ships started bringing five million visitors a year? Was it naïve to name a soup kitchen by local tradition in a town of less than 20,000 residents that was 1500 miles from San Francisco? Would they have cared if indeed they did know about the gay slang? Or would they have laughed it off as an irrelevant oddity of far-distant urbanites?
A lot of people have gotten a lot of laughs about that long-ago naming choice, sure. But a lot of hot meals got served at The Glory Hole, too.
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