“I didn’t begin to realize I was gay until college,” he said. “I had an experience in high school, a few in college, but that was at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s, so it was suppressed.”
It didn’t help that Wolz was born in the 60s, when gay representation was practically non-existent. “I don’t remember seeing gay people in the media growing up—like none at all.”
After college, Wolz felt a drive to explore Milwaukee’s gay scene, but another newsmaking event at the time quickly stifled that urge.
“I remember stumbling onto a gay event at the Performing Arts Center [downtown], and it felt so ‘cool’ and comfortable,” he said. “But shortly after that, Dahmer was arrested, and suddenly it didn’t feel like a good time to explore.”
During this period, Wolz described living something of a double life.
“I would hang around with coworkers and friends at night, then leave them around 11 to go to the gay bars,” he said. “I wasn’t quite ready for those folks or my family to know I was gay.”
It wasn’t until Wolz went to his first gay bar—one of Milwaukee’s most well-known gay bars—that things finally clicked.
“In the mid 90s my friends and I went to Mad Planet a lot. One Saturday, we were at Mad Planet and decided to go to another bar, which just so happened to be La Cage."
"I was ‘freaking out’ being at a gay bar,” he said. “But around that time is when I finally accepted who I was and I came out to my friends one at a time. They were all like, ’duh’ and ‘finally!’”
Unfortunately Wolz didn’t get to choose when he told his family—he was outed to his family by an ex-boyfriend.
“In the spring of 2005 I was working on a project at GAP Inc. in San Francisco. I was dating a guy, and we had lived together for about two years,” he said.
“My boyfriend was angry that I had been gone so long, so he sent my gay.com profile to my parents and said, ‘Thought you’d really want to see who your son is.’
Wolz had tried to broach the subject with his family in the past, but found it difficult.
“My printing company donated our time for a set of awesome Christmas cards for the Milwaukee Aids Project (MAP) [now ARCW]. MAP even put a special ‘thank you’ to me on their sell sheet,” he said.
“One night, I proudly showed my parents, and they said, ‘We won’t be getting those cards.’ I asked them why and they said something about not approving people’s poor choices. It hit me very hard. I worked hard on this project, and it was pretty innocent (being Christmas cards.)"
"I remember thinking: ‘How can I come out to them now?’”
Once his family did find out, Wolz said they were nothing but accepting.
“They were completely supportive and compassionate! No issues at all with my family then, or my boyfriend at that time.”
Coming back full circle to La Cage
Fast forward a few years, and Wolz ended up buying La Cage, the first gay bar he ever visited.
It took several months of due diligence, financial planning, and headaches, but in June 2022 Wolz was officially the owner.
‘Wide open windows’
“LaCage is an iconic Milwaukee gay bar,” said Wolz. “It’s been around for 40 years on a prominent corner with wide open windows in a beautiful, historic building.”
Open since 1984, LaCage is one of Milwaukee’s best-known gay dance clubs and also one of the city’s oldest continuously running gay bars. It’s also notable for being the first gay bar in Milwaukee with windows open to the street.
The wide open windows to the street makes LaCage unique, according to Wolz. “It always had wide open windows to the street. It says: ‘This is a gay bar. Here we are.’” At a time when gay bars blacked out their windows to protect the identities of the people inside, LaCage openly declared itself as a gay bar with its unapologetically large windows on a busy corner in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood.
Wolz’s journey
From struggling to come out to owning Milwaukee’s most iconic gay bar, Wolz has seen the city’s gay community change a lot.
“The community is stronger now than it’s ever been,” he said. From being a scene that was “still rather underground and something that wasn’t openly talked about” to queerness being something “less stigmatized and almost fashionable,” Wolz is grateful for his journey and to those who paved the way before him.”
“I’d really like to thank the first ‘group’ of gays that I got to know and hang out with a lot: Vinnie Hemmer, Toby Heney, Craig Pitzen, Drew Kopshinsky, Nick Tice, and Tom Morden,” he said. “Recently, of course I’ve learned a lot from [previous La Cage owners] George and Michael Prentice and Corey Grubb.”
Wolz also feels indebted to the early Milwaukee AIDS activists. “I’m grateful to those who were ‘demanding change’—folks part of ACT UP, for instance. I was on a very outer orbit when they were active, but I think they pushed things forward a lot,” he said. “I wasn’t part of the community they were fighting so hard for, and then their movement just kind of ended by the time I got here.”
Ultimately, Wolz is happy to be part of the Milwaukee gay community, and is proud of the many connections he’s made because of it. “I’m somebody who gets along with everybody,” he said. “Even now, when I walk into the Tiki Bar at the Public Market, depending on who’s there they’ll yell out, ‘hey, Big Gay Dave’s here!’ I just try to be a good person that works hard.”
The concept for this web site was envisioned by Don Schwamb in 2003. Over the next 15 years, he was the sole researcher, programmer and primary contributor.
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The concept for this web site was envisioned by Don Schwamb in 2003, and over the next 15 years, he was the sole researcher, programmer and primary contributor, bearing all costs for hosting the web site personally.
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