“No Gay People in Cambodia” 2006 – I’ve had the great privilege to work from age 26 to 70 educating people around the world with the truth on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people’s personal and professional awakenings, challenges, and strengths.
Ray would travel with me when the Investment Banks brought me to their offices in Europe and Asia. This photo was taken in Jaipur, shortly after I spoke in Mumbai.
I’ve described how, in 1976, I met Willie Wilson, who introduced me to the passionate joy of infatuation between men. While visiting DC and in need of a one-night stand, he ran into me, a “near-virgin” at 23, at the Pier 9 disco, and came home with me. While pondering the failing three-way relationship he’d been in for 18 months in California, he stuck around for 2 weeks, long enough to rock my world.
February 1992 – I went on consecutive RSVP Caribbean winter cruises in 1991 and 1992. The cruise line used to require its mostly male passengers to dress up in tuxedoes for two dinners each cruise, an annoyance to some of us.
1981-2017: If I had to select one photo from my archives which personifies the devastation wrought upon my generation by the AIDS epidemic, it would have to be this one: a group of handsome and fit gay men in their late 20’s, smiling while posing on a beach (July / August 1981, as the discovery of AIDS was being announced). Iconic, yet, also a parable for innocence about to be destroyed.
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 hated, unsure of what would come next, and open to the steady influence of a sexy “older” man (He was 39.), who found me alluring.
May 1983: From the moment the discovery of a “gay cancer” (GRID, or “gay-related immune deficiency”, later renamed AIDS) was announced in July 1981 right up through the mid-1990s (when protease inhibitors were developed, making the disease largely manageable), living as an active gay man in metropolitan NYC (and anywhere not removed from the possibility of sexual interaction with other men) was fraught with fear.
May 1985: Have you ever had a business relationship morph into a romantic one? Or, a friendship turn romantic? What happened when the sexual interaction ended?
August 1990:
Gay Games III in Vancouver (British Columbia) in August 1990 was a transformative experience for me and many others: it was the first time in my life-long athletic career that I observed the marriage of sports and gay life being publicly celebrated and promoted.
OCTOBER 1979: Shortly after I returned to Manhattan from my cross-country road trip spent trying to find my “gay self,” Bo, the guy I had been seeing in San Diego, and three of his friends (two of whom I’d also slept with) came to NYC for the Mr. Blueboy Contest (Blueboy was a Playgirl-like magazine with stories and male nudity that was popular then.). One of the San Diego crew was representing that city in the nationwide contest and was put up in a nice hotel in midtown Manhattan. The others stayed with me.
1981 – In this photo, I’m with my housemates and my weekend date from Boston (John Shade, with our arms around each other) on the beach in Fire Island Pines (August 1981). It was the first time I had taken a share for the summer. It was an innocent time. But, the discovery of a “gay cancer” had just been announced the month before in a front page article in the NY Times.
