an exclusively gay event, even during the 1950's and 1960's when George Bush was a young man:
http://www.outsmartmagazine.com/issue/i07-00/history.html"...In the 1950s, gay men and women would go to Sunday tea dances at the black clubs on the island, according to Hank Hinkle, a friend of mine who used to travel to Galveston from Houston to attend the dances. At the gatherings, there was both same-sex and interracial dancing—which was pretty unheard of back then in pre-Civil Rights south. Another friend Gigi Desoto, who grew up in Galveston and graduated from Ball High, told me that Splash Day in the ’50s and ’60s was so popular with the gay community, who would pour over from Houston for a day in the sun to be themselves, that one year state police and the Texas Rangers closed the causeway, saying the island couldn’t hold an y more people.
(...)
Ray Hill Reminisces about Galveston in the ’50s and ’60s
To some beach boys and leathery lesbians Galveston was the summer haven. They would go there in May and stay until October and become unnaturally brown spending most daylight hours on the beach working beach jobs if they could find them. For the rest of us there was Splash Day, which was part of the Grand Tour. GT began in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, next went to Fiesta in San Antonio, then on to the opening of the beaches at Ft Lauderdale. The GT continued with Splash Day in Galveston, Mission Days in San Diego, and closed with the Texas/OU game in Dallas. Gay men if they could afford the GT went to all these events and found companionship easily. Back then, Galveston for most of the summer had only enough gay/lesbian population to be adequately served by two or sometimes three bars. The bars in Galveston were a better mix of men and women than the bars in Houston which were more numerous and could easily be divided into men’s and women’s.
During Splash Day weekend a dozen or more bars were needed to accommodate the influx from all over the country. The owners of Houston bars would rent warehouses and meeting halls that became gay bars for the weekend. Out on West Beach where the cops were not likely to bother people, they converted black bars to include gay/lesbian crowds and would serve liquor all night. The beach-front hotels were full of gay people as well, especially the lower-priced ones. The Buccaneer, now part of the convention center, was especially gay-oriented and no one knew who lived in what rooms and most doors were just not locked all weekend. I got picked up in the Stewart Beach Bath House (a public place to shower and put on or take off your bathing suit) every year from 1957 to 1964 and have many happy memories from that era. ..."
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