Ticket to Pride: Event honors Buster Hughes, gay rights activist and streetcar enthusiast

At the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, he was “Buster,” a founding volunteer with a long gray ponytail who spent half a century sanding, painting, rewiring and renovating old streetcars.

To gay activists, he was “Charles,” a founder of the some of city’s seminal queer organizations, an organizer of Baltimore’s first Pride celebration and a fixture in the city’s progressive Abell neighborhood.

Until his death at age 78, Carl Patrick “Buster” “Charles” Hughes kept his passions on separate tracks. It wasn’t until his’ funeral in 2023 that some of his friends from the streetcar museum realized he was gay.

“He grew up in an era when being gay meant you had to hide who you were,” said Chris McNally, the museum’s vice president and a longtime friend.

On Friday, two of the most important parts of Hughes’s life will come together when the streetcar museum hosts its first Pride party. The event, organized by the Clifton Pleasure Club, an LGBTQIA+-centered social organization, is BYOB and includes a DJ, food and — of course — streetcar rides.

“It’s a perfect way to honor him,” said Erin Stellmon, a streetcar museum volunteer who is also vice president of the board of the Clifton Pleasure Club.

It was Stellmon, along with Clifton Pleasure Club executive director Amelia Reitz, who conceived of the idea of holding a Pride event at the museum.

“We wanted an old-school block party vibe,” Reitz said. “The club is a super radical place. We don’t have a single white cis guy on our board. We’ve all had to make our own spaces and make our own communities.”

Hughes knew well the struggles — and joys — of making community.

He and his roommate of 50 years, attorney Jim Becker, were among the first members of the Baltimore Gay Alliance.

One evening in 1975, Becker was at Leon’s, a Mount Vernon gay bar still in operation, and came outside to find a flier for a gay organization tucked under the wipers of his VW bus. Becker and Hughes decided to attend.

At the meeting, the men met others who wanted to make the world more welcoming. While other queer activist groups of this era often centered around white men, the Baltimore Gay Alliance was a diverse group and led by a Black woman, Paulette Young.

Hughes was part of the group that held a first informal Pride rally around the Washington Monument in 1975, said Becker, who later owned the Baltimore OutLoud newspaper.

The group met in an apartment in the 900 block of Charles Street, but avoided the Hippo, a now-closed gay dance club around the corner, because it was not friendly to their Black members in the early 1970s, Becker recalled.

The Baltimore Gay Alliance planted the seeds for other queer institutions in the city, including the Gay and Lesbian Community Center and Chase Brexton Health Care. Hughes, who worked as a carpenter and handyman, helped build out the health care center’s original headquarters at Chase and Brexton Streets, Becker said.

From their Abell Avenue home, the two friends helped run a hotline for queer people, especially those trying to come out, Becker said. Hughes spent many shifts advising callers about coming out and directing them to queer-friendly institutions around the city.

Photos from the ’70s show Hughes marching in parades and sitting at a table with a sign reading, “Coalition to Stop Vice Squad Arrests,” a reference to police task forces that raided gay establishments.

All the while, Hughes was also logging thousands of hours each year as a volunteer at the streetcar museum.

“He got involved with the museum before it was even a museum,” said McNally.

Hughes and other streetcar lovers worked with city officials in the late ’60s and early ’70s to secure the museum’s location in the 1900 block of Falls Road, lay tracks and preserve old streetcars. This third task is where Hughes shone. He took apart, refurbished and reassembled the streetcars piece by piece.

Take Car 417, one of the oldest in the museum’s collection, which was drawn by horses in 1883 before being converted to a cable car. Hughes spent a decade on the car, refinishing woodwork; reupholstering seats; reworking wiring; and choosing vintage advertisements for Ivory Soap, Uneeda Biscuits and Cocaine Toothache Drops to display inside.

“His hands touched every inch of this car,” McNally said.

Hughes’s legacy lives on in the museum’s car shop, where he spent about 56,000 hours volunteering, according to McNally’s calculations. There are bins of hardware he sorted, a fuse test he constructed and a photo of him posing shyly in front of a red-and-gold streetcar.

Hughes was not closeted, per se, Becker said, but he was a quiet and private man who learned in his youth not to discuss his sexuality in the company of straight people.

What would Hughes think of his beloved streetcar museum hosting a celebration for the queer community he helped foster?

“He might be surprised,” Becker said, “but I think he would be very proud.”