assassination repeated itself in the twin murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy within two months of one another, further bringing into focus the divisions threatening to splinter America. That fall, Jack and I entered our final year of high school. For the first time, we were forced to think about what would happen when we graduated. As the country faced its own uncertain future, we looked forward and saw that we, too, could be torn apart.
It was my idea to apply to college. On the surface, this would seem like the perfect solution. There were, however, obstacles. First there was my father, who I discovered had been assuming that I would join him in the insurance industry. His plan was to get me a job at his office, where I could learn the business, and to then open our own shop, Brummel & Son. The fact that I’d never displayed the slightest interest in his profession apparently had passed him by, and my announcement that I intended to go to school was met with mute disappointment.
Jack’s father, being a scientist, was more open to the idea of further education for his son. Unfortunately, Jack’s academic success had been far eclipsed by his performance on the field of play. A fair student, he’d gotten by largely because of my assistance and his ability to win the affections of his teachers. As we investigated the possibilities for advanced study, however, it became apparent that he would need more than that to earn him acceptance at a university.
While I worried, Jack was as unconcerned as ever, telling me whenever I started to express my fears that “something would happen.” This being Jack, of course it did. It came in the form of a baseball scholarship offered by Pennsylvania State University. My academic achievements were enough to get me a full ride, thereby negating my father’s concerns over the cost and neatly settling our dilemma.
So as the final year of the decade dawned, Jack and I looked forward to our future. With the pressure off, we were free to enjoy the blissful last months of our high school lives, culminating in the spring formal, which we attended with two girls whose hearts we would break soon after when we told them that preparing for college would prevent us from dating on an ongoing basis. That night, though, we danced with them in the crepe-paper-bedecked gymnasium as the Fifth Dimension serenaded us with “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In.” Afterward, we took the girls to a party, where we made sure they drank enough strawberry wine that they wouldn’t notice when we dropped them off at home far earlier than they had probably planned. Then Jack and I drove in his car to a spot we’d discovered in a nearby park, where we quickly shed our polyester prom tuxes and made love in the backseat.
We thought we were almost men. At 18, we certainly looked the part. Our bodies had filled out. We had both allowed our sideburns to grow long in imitation of Jim Morrison, whose brooding sexuality aroused us and whose songs were frequently the background music to our sexual encounters. We carried packets of Lucky Strike cigarettes in our jacket pockets (although we were careful to hide them from our parents) and had once or twice tried marijuana.
Graduation was a relief. As I tossed my cap into the air along with those of my classmates, I was overcome with a sense of having made it to the end of a very long, very tedious race. It occurred to me that I would no longer have to see the same faces every day of my life, or move robotlike through the routine of class upon class. There would be no more dreary sessions of calculus, with Mr. Larson droning on about implicit differentiations while the afternoon sun made me struggle to stay awake, no more essays to write for Mrs. Peabody about Babbit or Of Mice and Men. High school and its petty obsessions with rules and schedules was finally behind me, and the open road of college awaited.
Jack and I did not go to Treasure Island that final summer, having grown too old for tents and campfire songs. Instead, we took jobs to save some money for our first year at Penn State. Jack worked for a landscaping company, putting his muscles to use, while I, in a peacemaking gesture to my father, toiled in air-conditioned boredom at the office of the Quaker State Insurance Company, filing claim forms and being flirted with by the middle-aged secretaries. At night we escaped, as our mothers before us, to the movie theater, where we saw a string of films seemingly designed to inflame our gay sensibilities. Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid all provided us with emotional kindling, and I still recall giving Jack a hand job in the balcony of the Milgram Theatre while watching Jon Voigt’s Joe ply his trade on the streets of Manhattan.
While we found Cowboy’s Joe and his seamy sexuality erotic, we saw ourselves more as Butch and Sundance. We were living in our own buddy movie, an idyllic place where two 18-year-old boys could be in love with one another and it was okay. In a short time we would be off to the beautiful town of State College and the campus of Penn State. We would be far enough away from our families that we would have our freedom. What this meant, exactly, we didn’t know. We knew only that we were about to fly.
We weren’t the only ones ready for change. In the early morning hours of June 28, the patrons of New York’s Stonewall Inn gay bar fought back after the latest in a series of raids by the city’s police department. The resulting skirmishes, taking place over several days and since given the somewhat mythological name of the Stonewall Riots, signaled a change in attitude on the part of the gay community. In Philadelphia, however, demonstrations for gay rights had been going on since 1965 in the form of the Annual Reminder, a protest held in front of Independence Hall each Fourth of July. Less theatrical but arguably much more political, the Annual Reminder following the events of Stonewall was the largest yet. (It would also be the last, as in 1970 gay pride parades took center stage and became the event of choice for proclaiming gay power.)
Jack and I, in Philadelphia to see the fireworks, witnessed the 1969 Annual Reminder in person. We watched from across the street as protesters stood in front of Independence Hall holding signs proclaiming messages such as 15 MILLION U.S. HOMOSEXUALS ASK FOR EQUALITY, OPPORTUNITY, AND DIGNITY and HOMOSEXUALS ARE AMERICAN CITIZENS TOO. We had heard about the incidents in New York, but only through newspaper articles. This was real. The neatly-dressed men and women standing not 100 feet away from us were real. When they saw us watching them, some smiled. These were not faceless people; they were like us.
We watched them for a long time, listening to the speakers who talked of equal rights and the importance of community. When the crowd began to disperse, we followed several of the men as they made their way west through the city, finally coming to The Spot, a small bar on Chancellor Street. I don’t know why we followed them, except that we were curious to know what real homosexuals did and where they went. For all we knew, they were ghosts, appearing for a moment to shock and frighten unsuspecting humans and then returning to some mystical place unknown to mortals. There they were, though, going into a very real place. Jack and I watched the door to The Spot for some time, watching men (and a few women) come and go as if it were the most natural thing in the world for homosexuals to gather in the middle of Philadelphia.
Neither of us suggested that we go in. We were still not quite gay, despite the fact that we regularly sodomized one another and thought nothing of it. To actually go into The Spot, though, to join the people inside, would have been to count ourselves among their numbers, and we were unprepared for that. Instead, we hurried back to Independence Hall to see the fireworks explode in all their patriotic glory, raining red, white, and blue stars down on our heads as we clapped and cheered.
In August, our parents threw us our annual birthday party. We toasted the end of our eighteenth years with the traditional barbeque, this time accompanied by bottles of Duke beer presented to us by our fathers like royal scepters being handed down to the next in line for the throne. We pretended they were our first ones, clinking them against our fathers’ and manfully overseeing the grilling of the hamburgers. It had long been a sore point with Jack and myself that we had been born in August and not been allowed to start kindergarten until we were six, resulting in our always seeming to be a year older than everyone else in our class. Now, though, the additional year gave us a certain cachet, and we looked forward to perhaps being mistaken for sophomores at our new school.
It’s no great revelation to say that it sometimes takes leaving a place to make you truly see it for the first time. In those last weeks of August, I felt that keenly. Not only did the people and places I’d known for nineteen years suddenly seem alien to me, but so did my life as a whole. I no longer fit, as if I’d grown too large for our house, our street, our town. Everything