Part One: Being Ordinary

A sign as you enter town says, "Welcome to Decatur, Pride of the Prairie." Another sign will advise you that Decatur is the original home of the Chicago Bears. Stick around a while and you'll also learn that the city considers itself to be the soybean capitol of the world.

Decatur, Illinois, the place where I grew up. An altogether ordinary small Midwestern city. But is it? Like most places, it has its own claims to fame. Soybean capital of the world? For as long as I can remember, it has been said that more corn and soybeans are processed in Decatur than anywhere else. Is that true? I don't know. But the town takes the nickname seriously. Everything is named soy this or soy city that. There is the Soy City Motel, Soy City Towing Company, Soy Capital Bank, and even one radio station's call letters are WSOY. Original home of the Chicago Bears? Yes, that's true. The Chicago Bears originally began as a company team, the Staley Bears, sponsored by A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company of Decatur. As for the "pride of the prairie" tagline, it was the most recent nickname affixed to the city. Added in a public relations effort back in the late 1970's, its intent was to take some of the tarnish off of the town after it hit its first real economic slump since the great depression. Now, the hype appearing across the top of the city's official web site states that Forbes magazine ranks Decatur the best small metropolitan area in America to do business. Really?! I find that a little surprising, but who am I to argue with Forbes magazine?

Those familiar with Decatur also know that it is one of the most fragrant communities in the Midwest. But don't go there expecting to smell the roses. Corn and soybean processing, or refining essentially, gives off a brewery like odor that is just foul enough that only a native can learn to love it. Over the past thirty years Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) has eclipsed Staley in the volume of agricultural products it produces, so the familiar smells of the town have hardly abated. However, Decatur isn't just about corn and soybeans. It is a factory town. Caterpillar Tractor Company has a huge presence there as did Firestone Tire and Rubber until recently. The Firestone Decatur plant was the one that got pegged with having produced the tires that were supposedly causing so many problems on Ford Explorers. Firestone's answer to the problem was to close the Decatur facility and put about 4000 people out of work. However, it's not just a factory town. Both Staley and ADM have corporate offices there including major research and development facilities. Illinois Power Company, a large gas and electric utility in downstate Illinois, also has its headquarters there. Decatur is the county seat of Macon County, there are two large hospital complexes, and it is home to Millikin University, a small private school of some 2000 students that consistently ranks among the top small universities in the Midwest.

Decatur also has more claims to fame. When Abraham Lincoln's family came to Illinois, they first settled along the Sangamon River about 10 miles west of Decatur, near the present day hamlet of Niantic. Lincoln would later argue one of his first cases as an attorney in a log cabin courthouse that once stood on Decatur's old square.

Worth mentioning, there are a few oddities in the way the town was laid out. It has one town square, the old square known as Lincoln Square, but there is also another public square, Central Park, a block or so away from the old square. For more than a century, each would vie for retail and commercial prominence before Hickory Point Mall was built in the early 1980's on the northern edge of town, taking most of the downtown retail with it. Decatur also has four Main streets; North, South, East, and West Main Streets. Intersecting at Lincoln Square, they divide the city into four quadrants. That part makes a little more sense.

There is yet another Decatur oddity worth mentioning. The principal east/west artery through town is U.S Route 36, running almost the entire length of Eldorado Street. In true midwestern fashion, the street name is not pronounced El-do-Rah-do, it is pronounced El-do-Ray-do. It has a companion parallel street named Cerro Gordo that is not a thoroughfare and carries mostly local commercial traffic. But as a kid, I didn't think much about the origin of those names. Both of the streets however, have a bit of history associated with them. It seems one of the town's early leading men, a man by the name of Richard Oglesby, traveled with some other early Decatur men to California during the gold rush which began in 1848. Having a bit of luck, he returned with a small fortune and purchased land on the north and northwest sides of the fledgling community. He brought the names Eldorado and Cerro Gordo back with him from California, and being an influential sort of fellow, managed to get two streets named in memory of his escapades. Richard Oglesby would later become a governor of Illinois. His home is now a museum.

Decatur was also an early railroad town. To this day, the Norfolk and Southern Railway maintains a major switching and maintenance facility there. At one time, Decatur was a primary hub for the Wabash Railroad, but Wabash was merged into Norfolk's system about thirty years ago. Although Decatur was founded in 1829, six years before the founding of Chicago, the arrival of the railroads gave the town its biggest reason for existence. Around 1845, the first rail line in Illinois began at a point on the Illinois River approximately sixty miles west of Springfield. As construction pushed eastward, it soon reached Decatur where it was later joined by another rail line that had been built west through Indiana from Toledo, Ohio. Once the two lines were connected, they provided the first Midwestern rail link joining the shipping activity on the Great Lakes with the riverboat trade plying the inland river systems.

I grew up in Decatur in the 1950's and 1960's when the city experienced the latest of several periods of growth and prosperity. At that time, the city had a vibrant central business district, and most of the older central residential core was still in good shape, even though subdivisions on the outskirts of town were sprouting up in all directions. It was a safe place too. The cliché about never locking your doors was true there. For many years, we only locked our house when we went on vacation. Decatur wasn't without its problems though. There were some tough neighborhoods, problems in public housing projects, and in the early sixties a whole section of ramshackle houses and rundown factory buildings near the south end of the downtown area was leveled in the name of urban renewal. In many respects, Decatur was a microcosm of much larger Midwestern cities.

My family lived on the west side of the city, not far from the university, close to one of the largest parks in town. Amidst a rolling and wooded landscape, Fairview Park had everything a kid could desire. The park also had a huge annex section that was like a small state park, extending to the western edge of the city limits. The "new part," as we referred to the park annex, was a more natural space with big open meadows and wooded hillsides overlooking a broad bend in Stevens Creek. The "new part" was the part of the park I loved. In the summer, we could ride bikes on some of the trails, climb trees, and hike along the hillside and creekside trails. In the winter, fun in the snow could take on many forms, from sledding to fort building and unbridled snowball fights.

Living in Decatur, no one was ever very far from a farm, both literally and metaphorically. A substantial portion of the city's economy rested on agriculture, and many of us who grew up there had direct ties to the farm. Although my mother was from an agricultural area in northwestern Illinois, she grew up in the small city of Kewanee. My father grew up on a farm outside of Tower Hill, a small town an half hour's drive south of Decatur. My dad was from a large family, and many of our relatives on his side were either farmers, or they lived in small rural towns nearby, preferring to stay close to the land. Some of them owned land they rented to other farmers.

Only one of my father's four brothers chose farming as a way of life. My uncle Beatty was the oldest of my dad's siblings and went to work in farming before he ever finished high school. Despite his lack of a more formal education, he had good horse sense, was a good farmer, and he prospered. His farm was near Lovington, a short drive southeast of Decatur. Some of my fondest childhood memories involve going out to my uncle's farm and exploring the fields, pastures, barns, by the pond, or down by the West Okaw River, a tributary of the Kaskaskia. My uncle Beatty's wife, my aunt Helen, was the consummate farmer's wife. A wizard in the kitchen, she seemed to be able to put a meal on the table in an instant, effortlessly. In the summertime, she would pick fresh green beans, sweet corn, tomatoes, and raspberries out of her garden, all destined for that evening's dinner table. One of the adults, certainly not my mother however, would always see to it that a freshly dressed chicken or two was ready for frying. People talk about fresh off the farm flavor. If you've experienced it, you know what I mean. It can't be matched. Those meals were memorable, and so were our summertime visits to the farm. Despite my hay fever and my God given talent for getting into chiggers, I loved going out to that farm almost more than anything else we ever did, especially since I was, well, a city kid.

At the other end of the spectrum was my mother's brother, Francis Lucas, who lived in the Chicago suburb of Westchester. Our regular visits to Chicago were entirely different experiences, but they were ones I relished just as much if not more than going to the farm. My uncle Francis and his wife, my aunt Eileen, took us to all kinds of places. Having worked as a service man for Sears for many years, my uncle knew the city of Chicago intimately. His knowledge of the city fascinated me, and by the time I was a teenager, I imagine I knew my way around Chicago better than most kids who grew up there. I had been to all of the major museums, many of the theaters, a zoo or two, polo games, numerous restaurants, both airports, several train stations, I'd ridden the "L", and had been on countless adventures both in the Loop and on Michigan Avenue. But, I think I was most impressed when my uncle showed me where Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion was on North State Parkway. Yes, my uncle Francis, or uncle Lukie as we called him, was definitely tilted toward the cool side. Finding out that he even knew where the Playboy mansion was merely confirmed it in my mind.

The kind of neighborhood where we lived in Decatur could best be described as dead center middle class. Middle class, right in the middle of Illinois, and right the in the middle of middle America. It was a good place to grow up though. Growing up in that neighborhood, it seemed like there were kids everywhere, although now I realize there weren't. But there were enough kids around that it was easy enough to get into trouble regularly. It also it seemed like everyone knew everyone else in the neighborhood. My father was the Democratic precinct committeeman, so we may have known a few more of our neighbors as a result of that. Most of the fathers in the neighborhood worked either in a skilled trade, in sales, or in some kind of white-collar job. Most mothers were housewives or homemakers, the latter being the more euphemistic term. Besides my mother, I can only remember one other friend's mother who had a profession and worked outside of the home, and she was a teacher like my mother.

Although our neighborhood seemed homogenous, I realize now that it wasn't entirely. Everybody seemed to be pretty much alike, but it would occur to me later that our neighborhood was filled with surnames that were Irish, German, or Polish. But, I didn't think about ethnicity much when I was a kid. We were all just Americans to me. Assimilation was the norm, anyway. My mother's family was half German, having first settled in central Iowa around 1865. I know my grandmother's family only spoke German at home. To them, speaking anything but English in public was not acceptable. My dad's family, on the other hand, had been in central Illinois for so long, no one really knew for sure how long they had been there. Years later, someone would do a formal, published genealogy on my father's grandmother's family and trace it all the way back to one Henry Garvin, an indentured Irish immigrant who arrived in Philadelphia before the Revolutionary War. After working off his passage, the war broke out and Garvin fought with Washington's Pennsylvania Army. For their service, many soldiers of the war were paid in land. According to the genealogy, Garvin was deeded land in Pennsylvania not far from Cumberland, Maryland. Birth records indicate that his family pushed on through the Cumberland Gap, into Kentucky, and eventually into Illinois around 1830, about the same time as Abraham Lincoln's family.

My father was a high school geography teacher, although it was not a career he entered until he was in his mid-forties. He had a degree in business when he first graduated from Millikin and began working for Illinois Power Company as an accountant. For a dozen years he then managed a coal business that belonged to his uncle before he went back to school to earn his master's degree and teaching credentials. My mother was a musician and teacher. She was a classically trained pianist who worked as everything from a school music teacher, to an accompanist, to church organist, a job she held for 55 years. She also taught piano at Millikin. She's 92 now and still gives a few piano lessons in her home.

I have two older brothers. We got along reasonably well most of the time, but there were lots of fights between my two older brothers. Of course, I was an angel. My oldest brother is eight years older than me and has always seemed to be in a different world. The next is three years older, and we got along fairly well except for his incessant belittling of me. But I was closer to him, regardless. My father was often aloof and unavailable, so in many ways much of the parenting that ordinarily would have come from him came to me courtesy of my two older brothers. But somehow my dad managed to be there when he was really needed, even if I had preferred otherwise.

Understandably, education figured prominently in our young lives. Vacation trips became field trips. My parents also saw to it that we did everything from scouting to sports, dance lessons to music lessons. And, we worked. I carried one of two different newspaper routes from the time I was in junior high school until I was a senior in high school. There was an extraordinary amount of emphasis placed on not just doing well, but excelling at everything any of us would try. Fulfilling my parents' expectations would be among the most difficult tasks I would ever experience. Even when I excelled at something, I always got the impression that somehow it was never good enough. Now I know it was their way of encouraging me to do better, but I remember feeling frustrated a good deal of the time because my parents seemed to be so hard to please.

Ours was a tumultuous household. I suppose any family with three boys would likely be nothing less. Amidst all of the pressure to excel in school, in scouting, in sports, with the dance and music lessons, and the learning that was expected to occur on those field trip vacations, each of my brothers and I received a most precious gift from our parents, a variety of interests. We were permitted, encouraged even, to think independently. They told us, and we believed it, that we could do anything we set out to do. As a result, my parents ended up with three sons, each with individual personalities and distinct temperments. What's more, my brothers and I were willful, and we could be stubborn. All of that could spill out onto the kitchen table during dinner on any given evening, and the circus would begin. Dinner at our house was never a peaceful event. Despite my parents' best efforts, our dinner table often took on all of the characteristics of controlled mayhem. I had friends whose family dinners resembled those on "Leave it to Beaver" or "Father Knows Best." But our family dinners were nothing like that, except when we had company. Even then, some kind of eruption was always imminent lying just beneath the dining room table.

Part Two: Not So Ordinary Anymore?

It was a blazing hot Sunday afternoon in late June, the kind of midwestern summer day when the sun is intense, the air hangs thick with humidity, and there is no breeze whatsoever. If you happen to be outdoors, the only relief is to find shade or to somehow get wet. It was that kind of day, the day of the 1976 Chicago gay pride parade. I had just turned twenty-six.

In 1976, parade organizers in cities across the country had not yet changed parade monikers to include lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons. Somehow it all seemed simpler then, at least to me. It wasn't that I hadn't known a few lesbians or self-proclaimed bisexuals, and in a few short years a transgendered person would come to figure prominently in my life. However, at the time it seemed like young gay men were the ones who were carrying the banners, doing the marching, stepping out in front, risking whatever they had to risk in order to just be themselves and not lie about who they were. But in all fairness, even though the roots of the gay rights movement can be traced to events which took place early in the 1960's, and even though it was primarily young gay men who were steering the movement, it took a bunch of New York drag queens to pop the clutch and propel things forward.

In 1976, the parades in Chicago and other large cities were held in part to commemorate the 1969 raid on the Stonewall Bar in New York when a rag tag group of drag queens took on the New York City police department. In 1976, Anita Bryant's "Save the Children" crusade had not yet happened. When it did, it would challenge gay rights legislation enacted in Dade County, Florida. It would also garner national attention. In 1976, California's Proposition 6, known as the Briggs Initiative, lay some two years in the future. The Briggs Initiative was so broad that any teacher found to be "advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting homosexual activity" could be fired. It too would wind up in the national spotlight. Looking back, it's almost hard to remember that those pivotal battles were among the many that were yet to come.

In 1976, gay pride events around the country celebrated the progress that had been made in roughly the ten-year period that preceded 1976. Many of us vividly remembered how police raids on gay bars had been common in many cities. Entrapment was also common. Anywhere gay men gathered was fair game for law enforcement agencies. It was also customary for bars to make payoffs to police to keep from being raided, but that never provided any guarantee. In spite of the payoffs, police raided bars at will. People who were arrested in the raids, for no other reason than just being in the bar, found themselves facing trumped up charges. If that wasn't enough, it wasn't uncommon for their names published prominently in the next day's newspaper.

Those kinds of events continued to take place in Chicago throughout the 1960's despite the fact that the state of Illinois had decriminalized homosexual acts, a de facto decriminalization of homosexuality. Furthermore, psychiatrists and psychologists at the time no longer considered homosexuality to be a mental illness. Nowadays it's almost difficult to see what the fuss was all about. It's not like there was all that much going on in those bars anyway. Dancing wasn't even permitted in Chicago's gay bars until around 1970. Ironically, dancing was permitted before then in Springfield and some of the other downstate cities, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

The Stonewall Riots, as they came to be known, galvanized the resolve of many young gay men. But as I mentioned before, Stonewall was not the beginning of the gay rights movement. The gay rights movement was in many respects an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and the counterculture mentality that existed during the sixties. It dovetailed with notions like "Question Authority." With a nod to the phrase "Black is Beautiful," "Gay is Good" was coined. Lampooning a 1968 Nixon presidential campaign bumper sticker which read "Nixon's the One," the sticker was easily altered to read "Nixon's One."

Many early gay rights organizers were involved and were familiar with the tactics used in campus protests, political rallies, and demonstrations during the Viet Nam war era. They would also use those tactics effectively in the gay rights movement as well. Between 1969 and 1976, grassroots gay organizations all across the country became more sophisticated. They began to aggressively and effectively challenge everything from discriminatory laws to the conduct of law enforcement. Long before Peter Finch ever uttered "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore" in the movie "Network," gay men, younger gay men in particular, were demonstrating for fair treatment. They became focused on changing the situation once and for all, regardless of how long it might take, even if it took a lifetime. For some of us, it did.

Even in small Midwestern cities like the one where I grew up, the seeds of gay liberation were already germinating. Young gay men instinctively knew that there wasn't anything wrong with them, yet by just being gay they experienced wrongful treatment from their schools, churches, employers, the authorities, or even worse, their own families. Harassment was common, but the net effect of it all merely served to strengthen their resolve to do something about the injustices they were experiencing. They were mad as hell, even out there in the corn and soybean fields of central Illinois. No one wanted to have to take it anymore.

Coming out is a process, not an event. Essentially, it involves recognizing and acknowledging one's own homosexuality, being honest about it, and not denying it to others. Part of coming out also involves learning that being gay doesn't totally define who you are. It is not your raison d'etre. More accurately, it is an aspect of your identity, albeit a major one. My coming out began very early in my life, just before my eighteenth birthday in June of 1968. It was one year before Stonewall. At the time, I remember how liberating it was for me to stumble across a group of young gay men living right in my hometown. They came from all parts of town and were either in school somewhere or working in a variety of jobs ranging from assembly lines to offices downtown. Just learning that I was not the only one around was a tremendous relief. Sure you could pass for straight at school or at work if you were careful. But it wasn't foolproof. My coming out was also the cause for a tremendous amount of conflict with my parents. Not knowing what to do, they consulted with the minister from our church, who gave them poor advice, and sent me to see a psychologist. Sound familiar, anyone? At the time that seemed to be the standard protocol to follow, at least for loving parents. It seems it still is in many instances.

In the year following the summer of 1968, I also became acquainted with what could be described as a network of gay men who lived in a number of the cities clustered in central Illinois. Most social activity typically took place in someone's home or apartment. The get togethers were almost always quite tame. Someone might wind up having had too much to drink, or a friendly game of truth or dare might have gotten out of hand, but that was about as wild as things ever got. I'm sure many straight people believed otherwise. I'm sure they believed that such parties were wild hedonistic orgies. That might have been fun, but it wasn't true.

There were a few gay bars that did exist at the time in Springfield, Peoria, and Champaign, but there were no gay bars in Decatur or Bloomington, although some establishments drew a mixed crowd. However, all of these cities are within an hour's drive from one another, so getting to a party or a bar usually wasn't a problem. Even the bars were relatively tame. One bar in Springfield, Smokey's Den, had regular drag shows which could get little bawdy, but that was about the extent of it. The talent wasn't very good, but what was lacking in talent was more than compensated for by an abundance of makeup, costume jewelry, Dynel wigs, and raw energy. And, of course there were the gowns and costumes that were never subtle. The inability of some performers to lip sync a song, or to even get the words learned in the first place, was often hysterically funny. But it was all about fun. It was fun even when a six-foot, two-hundred-fifty pound butch dyke decided some new face in town was making advances on her woman. Chairs could fly then. Fun for the rest of us maybe, but not for them. It was all still a new adventure for me.

Against my wishes, my parents insisted that I live at home when I began my first year of college at Millikin. I didn't even want to go to Millikin in the first place, but my parents were intractable. They became keenly aware that I was socializing with a different group of friends who were not Millikin students, causing even more conflict, and they knew I was not becoming involved in any campus activities other than going to class some of the time. Though I would later meet a few other students who were gay at Millikin, initially I knew no one. Most of the guys I met who were gay and in college either went to the University of Illinois, Illinois State, or other colleges and universities close by.

During my first year at Millikin, someone I had known for many years told me that a fraternity brother of his had told him to be careful around me because I was a townie queer. Careful? Around me? It seemed to me that the inverse was more true. But, I didn't deny it. However, I did correct a few of his word choices. My candor cost me more than one friendship. Other students I grew up with in Decatur who were also attending Millikin either shunned me or stopped speaking to me altogether. Word was out. I was the campus queer. Fait accompli.

Eventually, that would prove to be a relief for me, but for the balance of that school year my status was extraordinarily burdensome. I'd been outed by some fratboy jock who didn't even know me. From then on, I just assumed everyone on campus knew I was gay. Since Millikin is such a small school, I was hardly going to start a one-person gay liberation movement on campus, certainly not while I was still a freshman. So, I just kept to myself and tried to be invisible. I didn't socialize on campus or engage in any extracurricular activities that first year at Millikin. Although I had been active in the student body in high school, at Millikin I mostly kept to myself. I sat alone with my books and papers in the student union and in the library. I would seek out seats in the back of classrooms or lecture halls. I spoke only when spoken to and kept a low profile. It was a role that was totally foreign to me.

Disillusioned and doing poorly in school for the first time in my life, I dropped out after the spring semester of 1969 and went to work. I was fortunate to find a job as a staff assistant at Illinois Power Company working with electrical engineers. Both my mother's father and my father had once worked for Illinois Power, so I was the third generation in my family to work for the company. It was a good job, and it had a future. I bought a car, and I traveled a bit on my own when I could. Two years later though, I would decide to return to Millikin. By then, I was a little older and wiser. Much happened during those two years, but one event would take place that would change my life immeasurably, forever.

My father first learned he had cancer early in 1967. Between 1967 and 1970, he had two surgeries at a local hospital, then received radiation therapy and finally chemotherapy at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. His bouts with the disease eventually took on a macabre kind of regularity. In a strange way, I think I almost adjusted to his cycles of illness and recovery. I assumed he would get better, because he always did. And I think we grew closer, oddly enough.

But in late spring of 1970, my mother told me that the chemo wasn't working. My father was dying. I didn't deal with it very well; in fact I didn't deal with it at all, really. I didn't know how to. I was in the most bizarre kind of denial even though it was very clear to me what was happening.

My father died on July 1, 1970. I'd just turned twenty. I remember riding back to the church from the cemetery with my older brother in a limousine furnished by the funeral directors. We both stared out the window and didn't speak much. I had never experienced feeling so numb. For three weeks afterward, I went about my days as if I were oblivious to what happened, completely disconnected from my emotions. Then it all caught up with me one night when I was driving alone on a quiet stretch of moonlit highway. The permanence of losing my father finally began to register in my mind. I pulled off onto the shoulder near a country crossroad and began to sob interminably, until I could no longer cry. Though my father and I had our differences, I respected him, and I realized then that I loved him more than I had ever imagined. I could no longer look to him for comfort or guidance. I was scared, and I felt alone. I felt more alone than I ever have since.

When I returned to Millikin, in many respects I was a different person, and I had a much different approach when it came to my studies. The first semester I returned, I made the dean's list. I also cared very little about what others on campus thought about me. I let a few people in on something, especially those who fancied themselves the campus elite. The townie queer was there again, and I wasn't tiptoeing around anymore.

I didn't finish my degree at Millikin, however. At the close of the spring semester in 1972, I left Millikin for good. Almost ten years would pass before I resumed working toward completing my degree elsewhere. However upon reflection, I think I wound up with a better education by finishing later in life. It was a formula that worked well for me, though I'm sure it would not be right for everyone. But again, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Just after my first year at Millikin, the Stonewall Riots happened in New York City. Although the event received little if any media attention in Decatur, news of the riots spread quickly among gay men throughout the country. It became like a call to arms, the Boston Tea Party of the gay rights movement. Many of us, even in places like central Illinois, began to feel that our presence need not remain so clandestine anymore. The Stonewall Riots emboldened us. In 1969, there was an emergence of what I like to call the "in your face" gay man. Although it wasn't my style, it became my style when I needed it to be. It was a sword I learned to wield well. When used, it was nearly always a battle of words, but it had everything to do with honesty, and confrontation only after provocation. Acceptance, or re-acceptance as the case may have been, from family members, straight friends, schoolmates, or work associates would come slowly at first. It would take time to gradually unravel the misconceptions and misunderstandings that were widely held about gay men. Ultimately, it would prove to be a lifelong, ongoing process.

I saw then how the gay rights movement would begin to change peoples' minds. It would be one person at a time. The rallies and the parades and the marches were all very necessary too, because the challenge was twofold. It was a legal challenge, and it was a challenge for social acceptance. In the struggle for social acceptance, each one of us would make a difference just by being honest about who we were. Only then could we begin to neutralize the fear and hatred that surrounded homosexuality. That had to happen one person at a time, friend by friend, family member by family member, co-worker by co-worker. I theorized that in time, if gay men and lesbians would just be honest and come out, everyone would eventually know someone who was gay. That would make a difference, wouldn't it? Easier said than done.

A familiar face had to be given to homosexuality, and the face had to be one's own. Personally, it didn't seem fair to me to leave that job to anyone else. I knew my territory, and I accepted my responsibilities. I expected others to do the same although I knew realistically some could not. But in order to gain acceptance, people had to know you were gay. If people knew you and knew you were gay, maybe they would begin to see and understand what was a choice and what wasn't. Maybe people would also begin to see that being gay wasn't contagious, and maybe they would learn there was no such thing as a gay convert. Maybe then people would begin to see that it was all right to care about one another. If they did, maybe those same people would help make a difference. And in time, I believe it was that kind of understanding and caring, starting at a personal level, which would prove to make the biggest difference in mainstream social acceptance for gay men and lesbians.

However, many Americans had to develop that kind of understanding before there were any kinds of significant advances in legal protection for gay men and lesbians. Those advances would prove to be the slowest in coming. The legal battles have always involved issues relating to whether gay men or lesbians are a group that needs legal protection. Slowly, that question is being answered in the courts and in the voting booths. Repeatedly, the answer is coming up yes. Any time a gay man or lesbian is denied housing or a job solely because of their sexual orientation, that is discrimination. Legislation which addresses that fact should exist, and it is being enacted one jurisdiction at a time. But, there still is much to be done.

I left Decatur and moved to Chicago late in 1972. After I found a job, I went about getting settled in an apartment of my own. At the time, some of the other guys I knew from central Illinois were also moving to Chicago. Guys like us were moving to Chicago from just about anywhere in the Midwest. Even if they were Chicago natives, it wasn't uncommon for them to move out on their own. We found we could be more effective politically by living in a few tolerant parts of the city, concentrating our numbers. We also found safety in numbers. So, we flocked to the more liberal neighborhoods on the north side near Lincoln Park and the lakefront, neighborhoods that would become gay enclaves. Birds of a feather, you know....

The four years I lived in Chicago, from 1972-76, were among my happiest. It was an innocent time really, filled with heady days. There were vacations in San Francisco. A group of us went every year to the Kentucky Derby and the Illinois State Fair. We played softball in Lincoln Park on Tuesday nights. We took weekend trips to Wisconsin or to Saugatuck, Michigan. Summer Sunday afternoons typically were spent by Lake Michigan at a spot known as Belmont rocks. A time or two we even chartered a bus to take us en masse to the beach at Indiana Dunes. Of course there were the parties in people's homes like Howard Miller's home movie premiers starring many of us in either leading or cameo roles. Also, there was the annual New Year's Eve bash at Ma Gammie's slightly worn four-story casa grande in Edgewater complete with basement bar and disco. And, never to be missed were Bill Lewis's Whore Dawg "events" in his huge downtown loft located six floors above the Chicago River. During this time, a place called Dugan's Bistro opened. Located just north of the Loop, it was the zenith of gay Chicago nightlife at the time. It was bigger and better than any place had been before. It was also right across the street from a police station. My, how things had changed.

In retrospect, I suppose I had achieved what I set out to do in 1968 when my parents wouldn't let me leave home. In 1976, I was on my own, and things were going well for me. Many of those thoughts drifted though my head as I lay in a shady spot on the grass in Lincoln Park that day of the gay pride celebration in Chicago in 1976. The parade was over, and a group of some thirty friends had gathered. We were relaxing from the hot and sweaty trek, having marched as an impromptu entry behind the parade for most of its route. I knew most of the guys in our group. Those I didn't know I recognized as friends of other friends. It was a remarkable day, and no one wanted our little party in the park to end. A suggestion was floating around that we continue our party in the park at someone's apartment, but who had a place big enough nearby that would hold some thirty reveling gay men?

I had a large flat not too far from the park. And, I had two strong window air-conditioners that were worth their weight in gold on such a hot day. But as I lay there on the grass, my thoughts were up in the clouds. So much seemed right with the world, and I wasn't aware that plans were being made to resume our little gathering elsewhere until my daydream bubble burst. In an instant, I found out that two of my best friends had already volunteered the use of my place for the gathering.

"Come on!!" they said. "Everyone's going to head over to your place."

"Whaaat?!" I said, snapping back into focus as quickly as I could.

Although my place wasn't far from the park, I had left my car near the beginning of the parade route, and I wanted to go and get the car before this party of "mine" started. Believing I would have enough time to retrieve the car and get back to my place by the time the troops made their way to my apartment, I headed out to get the car. I had not counted on one factor. Traffic. The traffic tie-ups after the parade ended were horrible, even by Chicago standards. By the time I finally did retrieve the car and drove to my place, everyone in the group was already there milling around and waiting. Waiting in the shade sitting on the small grassy parking strip in front of my building, waiting perched on the fenders of cars parked along the street, waiting on the sidewalk and leaning against the building, and waiting on the stairs that led inside. The wait didn't seem to have affected anyone's spirits though. Everyone seemed just as festive and boisterous as they had been when we left the park, but the razzing I took about being late to my "own" party was merciless.

Gay pride came to Kenmore Avenue that day, and the celebration resumed.

Part Three: Ordinary Perspective

I didn't know then how that day would become a milestone. In a sense, it marks a midway point between the first half and the second half of my life. Like most gay men my age, I've experienced great sadness and loss, but there has been great joy too. And love. I have been fortunate.

In October of 1976, I moved to San Francisco and became part of what could be described as the great gay migration of the mid-70's. I lived in San Francisco for twenty-one years. During that time, I finished my degree at the University of San Francisco, settled into a career, and bought a house. Also, during that time events unfolded which would comprise much of contemporary gay history. AIDS would also claim the lives of many of my friends. In 1996, I lost my two closest friends, my confidants, soul mates, kindred spirits, men I had known for more than twenty years. They died seven months apart. I was in the hospital room alone with Chas the night he died, and I would be the one to make the decision to move Joey to hospice a week before he died. After Chas and Joey were gone, it seemed like I had lost my anchors. For months afterward I couldn't seem to regain any kind of equilibrium. I suppose it was natural for me to look back toward happier times in Chicago.

In 1997, I returned to Chicago not knowing if the move back would be permanent or not. Nearly five years later, I had my answer. My grief over losing Chas and Joey had eased, and I realized that living in San Francisco for twenty-one years had changed me. I identified more with my life in California than I did with my early years in Illinois, but I wouldn't want to change anything about those early years. Those years forged my personality, my character, my values, my hopes, my ideas, and my sense of humor. I came of age in Illinois, but I grew into manhood in California. So, I decided to move back to San Francisco, twenty-six years after I had first left Chicago in 1976.

Fate can often deliver the most unexpected developments. While making early preparations to return to San Francisco, a close friend of mine in Los Angeles told me that she was interested in starting a business. I had known Lauren for twenty years, and Lauren had known Joey since childhood. Both she and I had been to hell and back together during the final months of Joey's life as we struggled to manage his affairs. Knowing I was planning on returning to San Francisco, Lauren asked if I would consider coming to Los Angeles and going into business with her instead. It took me a few months to make up my mind, but I decided to join her in the venture. Once again I left for California, only this time I moved to Los Angeles.

I find it hard to believe that in another twenty-six years, I will be seventy-eight years old. Where will I be then, and what will I be doing? Time now for Ms. Streisand, "Where am I going, and what will I find?" But not so fast. Don't jump to conclusions. I'm certainly not some "oh woe is me, I'm not thirty anymore" person who is crying into his beer every night. Instead, once again I find myself planning for a future. If Lauren and I are successful in Los Angeles, we may open another business location in San Francisco, and I would move back. Realistically, anything can happen, and I know that. But for now, I'll play the hand I've dealt myself and see where it leads.

Time is often the biggest contributor to perspective. When I arrived in San Francisco in 1976, I couldn't even conceive being fifty-two years old. I could barely comprehend four years into the future. How awful turning thirty sounded. So with a bit more perspective, I begin the third twenty-six year period of my life. If I am lucky, and by the grace of God, I will be healthy and live to complete it. I think I have also gained enough perspective now to have a glimpse of what seventy-eight years old might be like, and it doesn't bother me. I've found that I am satisfied with each of my years as I have lived them. Not every year has been easy. While some have been very, very difficult, most have been enjoyable, and I feel blessed.

To this day, that party in 1976 after the gay pride parade in Chicago remains one of my fondest memories. Many who were there that day are gone now, taken prematurely, but they live on in my mind. They are there for me not as they once were, but they are there nonetheless. Who knew then that one day some disease called AIDS would wipe out half of the people I once knew. Half of my friends are gone, and perhaps half of my adult life has now passed by. But I have survived, and that is the kind of good fortune I will not squander. I don't know if I'm here for a reason or not, and I don't know for sure where I fit into His great plan, but I'll take my cues anywhere I can find them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson offered some observations on life we all can use when he wrote:

What is Success?

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.

I can look at each one of Emerson's ideas above and feel comfortable that I have met each one of those challenges. Do I feel successful? Yes. And, I know I have made a difference. Just as so many lives have touched mine, mine has touched others. I know that I haven't always done the right thing, but I also know that I have contributed in my own small way to something that is bigger than I am. And, I have done that step by step, person by person, and day by day.

I think about how far acceptance has come for gay men and lesbians in the last twenty-six years. In big cities, in entertainment, and in the national media, it is obvious how far we have come. In some cities, the gay pride parades (okay, the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendered parades) have become the biggest parades held during the year. But the message is getting out further, into small communities and rural areas too. With growing acceptance, there seems to be fewer and fewer reasons for gay men and lesbians to leave the small cities and towns or rural areas where they grew up, the places they may love. Many are choosing to stay, and that pleases me.

I learned recently that an anti-discrimination law for gay men and lesbians had just been passed by the city council in my hometown. The vote was nearly unanimous with only one dissenting vote. I know there are a couple of gay bars in Decatur now, a gay student organization at Millikin, and even a local gay and lesbian association known by the acronym GLAD. I'm glad for today's gay men and lesbians living in Decatur. I hope none of them ever experience the kind of ostracism I felt there before I left thirty years ago. However, many gay men of my generation felt they had to leave their hometowns and move to more liberal neighborhoods in big cities in order to find any kind of freedom or acceptance. We had to have some place to start if we were going to begin to make any kind of a difference at all. That was my lifestyle decision. Being gay never was.