On 28 June, 1969, the love of my life was a green Volvo 144. I had a beautiful and smart wife, but she was a beard. I consciously thought of the Volvo, following Marshall McLuhan, as my Mechanical Bride. I mean, what was more macho than having a car and being one's own mechanic? Surely having greasy fingernails meant that I was straight, right? (Perhaps I should have gone for a muscle car, but, whatever.) I was enrolled in a physics class at Memphis State University which somehow I had never quite gotten around to taking in order to finish my BA in history from Roosevelt University. Then, I was going to teach in an inner city Memphis public school as an alternative to going to Vietnam. i had tried for a conscientious objector's status, but my draft board wouldn't allow it unless I claimed a religion. I could have played the Methodist card--my beautiful and smart wife and i had been married in a Methodist ceremony, and the chairman of the draft board, also a Methodist, suggested it. But I refused. The chairman of the draft board was also the mother of my brother's fiance, and she suggested the inner-city teaching gig. Killing kids slowly with day imprisonment rather than dropping napalm on them. It seemed better.
If I read or watched the news then, it was probably about what was going on in Vietnam. Beautiful and smart wife and I had a television then. I remember another young man who was almost my first lover--we had been roommates, and we slept together and cuddled and wrestled and washed each others' backs but never did anything genital came over to watch the Moon landing in July. But I didn't see any news that June on either the television or the newspaper about queers fighting back against a routine police raid of a bar in New York, 2,334 miles away, even though that was much closer than the 238,900 miles that separated me from the Moon.
Indeed it would be nearly twenty years later before the ripples of the 'riots' at the Stonewall Inn would become strong enough to rock my boat and give me the courage to 'come out'. By that time my beard included two children, two golden retrievers, a mini van and a station wagon, and a large Tudor style house.
I have been thinking about my ignorance of the Stonewall Inn in 1969 as I have looked at the 'news' today. We only went to the Moon for about three years. and the repercussions of those trips have probably been more about how we see the Earth than in furthering space travel. The repercussions of the Stonewall Riots have been, in my life and in the lives of many of my friends, transformational. The idea that I would not need to hide my self behind a wife and greasy fingernails has led to far more than genital sex with some very beautiful men, as enjoyable as that has been. Once I realized how seldom things are as they have been presented, a whole new possibility of exploration has opened.
You may have noticed that I used the term 'queer' for the people who fought back at Stonewall, rather than the more politically correct LGBT+ that most of the stories I have read on this anniversary of the riots have used. That is because I think most of us are in some way queer, that most of us have some traits, traits that are often very valuable gifts, even if we happen to be cisgendered straight folk. So, I say, come out come out whoever you are. You never know when you might be the butterfly who will open a whole new world for some kid who grew up in a backwards small town in mid nowhere, as I did.
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