In high school I came out as a gay man. That was in 1974, my junior year. I told everyone I was gay. It was shocking for everyone back then. I was constantly threatened.

But this wasn’t new for me. Even as a little kid, I wasn’t into sports. I would be called a fag and a queer, and pushed and hit. I was beat up. My locker was set on fire and all my books were burned. It wasn’t only daily, it was hourly. Even during class I was harassed.

I’d walk down a hallway and the harassment would be continuous beginning around sixth grade and all the way through high school graduation. It was continuous, just continuous.

That’s what all gay kids experience. It makes you hard, tough, and mean. That’s what happened to me I got mean.

That’s why a lot of people ghettoize. They don’t have street friends, only gay friends. They patronize gay businesses and live in gay neighborhoods. I guess any minority does that.

I fought back. After being harassed for so long I finally released my anger verbally. I didn’t know it but I was quick and smart. And I had a mean mouth. That even got me in more trouble but I wasn’t afraid a fight back, physically too.

It makes it tough. It makes you be prepared for the worst. I was always funny and I used my sense of humor to make friends. But for a while I had only gay friends.

It was funny but one of my first gay friends was the guy who was teaching me to surf. After surfing all day he took me to a gay bar. He suspected I was gay, but I didn’t know that he was. All of a sudden all the guys with whom we had been surfing showed up. This was in Orange County.

It was a party scene. We had fake IDs even though we were only sixteen or seventeen. We would serve during the day and hang out at the beach, then go to parties and clubs all night.

Then I got into college and started to pursue different things.

When I came out, my father was fine with it. He had a wife and seven kids from a previous marriage and one of his sons was gay. My mother was not fine with it because I was her only child. It wasn’t a religious problem. My family wasn’t overly-religious.

She went through all the questions and wonderings if she had caused it, but to her great credit accepted it. Within a year she was trying to fix me up with some doctor’s son who was going to medical school. It didn’t work out at all; by the way, he was horrified!

My mother worked at a hospital and she approached him. She called me and said that she wanted me to meet this guy. She said he was really smart and that he was going to medical school. She told me he was nice and good-looking so he must be gay!

Growing Up During the Cold War

What I recall most about growing up was growing up in the nineteen sixties. I remember the Cold War. I have a really strong memory of a mis-fired missile from Vandenberg air force base. It caused a huge blue streak of light across the sky. I must have been about four or five years old. I remember all the adults being in the street and everyone being very, very frightened thinking that it was a nuclear attack.

I remember the duck-and-cover drills. I remember the fear and mistrust and the politics And the Kennedy assassination and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the protests. I remember the emerging hippie movement and the anti-war movement.

I was aware of times changing and the world changing, and all those dramatic things. Seeing the adults being terrified of what happened that night made me really aware of what was happening in the world. I remember the air-raid sirens going off and us crawling under our desks.