Portrait of a Gay Adolescent

STORY: I’ve just come in from coffee at my downtown spot, the Zoot Cafe—downtown being all of two blocks long in the quintessential...

Jul 11, 20203 min read

BAMMER and Me: Cliff Morrison, The First AIDS Ward (Part 1)

PODCAST—EPISODE 10: Cliff Morrison arrived in San Francisco as a nurse in the late 1970s, as AIDS was about to erupt. In 1983, while...

Dec 4, 20191 min read

Unlimited Possibilities

STORY: March 1976: The year was 1975 and I was 23 at the time, living in D.C. I was working in the U.S. Treasury Department for a...

Jun 9, 20182 min read

Same Sex Marriage, 1972

STORY: Spring, 1972 – As a third-year American student at the University of Manitoba (UM) in Winnipeg, Canada in the early 1970s, I was...

Jun 9, 20183 min read

Guilty Pleasure

STORY: August 1972 - I chose this photo for a reason. It was taken one month after, at 20 years of age, I’d had my first sexual...

Jun 8, 20182 min read

No Queens

STORY: My first boyfriend, Jim Fragale, was turning 40 and I was 27. It was 1979. He’d moved to NYC from West Virginia in 1963 at 24....

Jun 8, 20181 min read

The Queen of Disco

STORY: June 1978–The cracks in my closet appeared slowly. By 1978, I was out with my family and my college fraternity brothers, but I had...

Apr 4, 20182 min read

My David Kopay Story

STORY: I was raised in the arch-conservative Florida panhandle near the Alabama border in the late 1950s and 1960s. In those days, and...

Apr 4, 20186 min read

Willie

I’ve described how, in 1976, I met Willie Wilson, who introduced me to the passionate joy of infatuation between men. While visiting DC...

Mar 27, 20182 min read

We Are Family

STORY: 1979-2017: My first relationship with another man began when I met Jim at the YMCA in 1979. I was 26, about to leave a job I...

Mar 11, 20184 min read