A living witness puts a 1950s Austin gay bar in a back room on Congress Avenue.

Some background: Readers loved this photo from the 1950s. Even more, they loved guessing the name and location of the Austin cafe.

READ MORE: Do you know this downtown Austin cafe form the 1950s?

Austin Nelson, whose family design firm operates out of 905 Congress Ave., persuasively argued that their building had been the pictured Manhattan restaurant and deli.

READ MORE: A winner in the 1950 Austin cafe mystery.

A few weeks later, we stumbled on another astounding coincidence. We were interviewing activist and journalist Randy Wicker, who was a radical student leader at the University of Texas during the late 1950s. He also is gay. (A full interview with Wicker will be published soon.)

American-Statesman: So was there a gay bar in Austin back then?

Wicker: Oh yes. It was in the back room of a deli on the avenue. A couple of blocks south of the Capitol.

It wouldn’t by chance be the Manhattan deli?

Yes! Yes! That was it!

Did you enter through the alley?

No, you walked right through the restaurant. The back room was very small. It held maybe 18 people. You knew everybody there, except on (Longhorn) game days, when it would fill up and there would be some fresh faces.

By the way, Wicker’s description of the treatment of UT’s LBGT community in the 1950s is harrowing. For instance, one could be dismissed out of hand if the administration knew for a fact you were gay. If they just suspected you were gay, you were called into the dean of students’ and given a choice: A lie detector test or a quiet withdrawal from the university.