I came of age before the Internet was opened to public commercial use, before the advent of amature computer bulletin boards, before the first home personal computers. So I never had Grindr or anything like it.

All I had to navigate my way through the maze of my own teenage emotions to find love in a world that was screaming hate at me from every direction, when it wasn’t expressing a kind of rancid pity, was the knowledge given to me by that first teenage crush that there was nothing more wonderful than falling in love, and there was nothing wrong with me. I’m in love. I’m gay. It’s wonderful. But I flailed my way through my first teenage crush like someone who doesn’t know how to swim trying to figure out the trick while in the middle of drowning. Because the first thing you know when you know about yourself is you have to hide.

So then I’m a position of trying to say something to my crush from inside my closet, terrified that if I say anything to him next thing is it gets all over the school. Which is bad enough, but then it gets back to mom and she breaks into tears and starts yelling at me, and I get dragged to church to pray it away every day of my life until I turn 21 and have to leave the house. If I don’t get thrown out first. I have never doubted that mom loved me. But the stigma back then was something I reckon you had to be there to experience and really appreciate. For years after grade school, whenever I tried to nudge the conversation some place where I’d feel comfortable coming out to her, the icy glare I got back would scare me to my bones. I’ve often wondered if there had been something like Love In Action or Exodus Ministries whether mom would have tossed me into one of those if she found out when I was an age I could not refuse.

One day after I graduated I discovered my crush’s family had left the country with him and I fell into a dangerously deep despondency, made all the worse for my self perceived cowardice in not telling him how I felt. Because I wasn’t brave enough to tell him that meant I wasn’t worthy of him. Maybe I wasn’t worthy of any love. I walked to one of my favorite bridges where I would watch the trains go by, and decided I would fall off in front of one. Maybe they’d think it was an accident. But while I was waiting I began thinking about what doing that would do to the engineer and I pulled back. The lesson I learned was if you can wait it out the urge to kill yourself will eventually go away. It has been helpful.

In high school I knew of one gay bar in DC, The Georgetown Bar & Grill, which was supposedly located somewhere on Wisconsin Avenue close to M street. It was spoken of like a dirty joke among the other kids and I would have died rather than be seen anywhere near it. I’ve told the story elsewhere about how I found I could get my gay newspapers and magazines in a seedy adult bookstore in Wheaton that sold hard core pornography. That was the world young gay hearts were confined to back in the 1970s, and for decades after. In some parts of this country that’s still where we’re supposed to stay.

Eventually, after I got my driver’s license I found my way to a gay bookstore in downtown Washington DC; Lambda Rising, where I discovered a world of gay literature and history that was much Much bigger than I’d ever hoped. It was as if a parallel universe had opened up to me, and in a way it was. There was a rich and deep history I’d never known or had a chance to explore in grade school. There were books that spoke to the honor and dignity of the love of same sex couples and I devoured those. The books of Mary Renault stand out for me in that period of my life. The books I found there gave me hope.

I attended my first Pride block party in front of what used to be the Earthworks comic book store and headshop, around the corner from where Lambda Rising had moved. I let myself get picked up by a cute guy watching the party with me on the porch of Earthworks, only to discover that being attracted to someone’s looks wasn’t nearly enough to make me ready for having sex with them. Took me some decades more before I began to understand that I am a demisexual: someone who experiences sexual attraction only after forming a strong emotional bond with someone. I still love to look at and draw beautiful sexy guys, but for it to go any further than that there needs to be at least a crush.

When Personal Computers became a thing I bought a Commodore C64 and the modem for it and discovered the world of computer bulletin boards. I found my way into a gay FidoNet echo board and suddenly the whole gay world opened to me and I didn’t have to go into a bar anymore to find it. Eventually that ability to socialize with others like me motivated me to dive into computers and programming, and I built an IBM PC compatible from parts I got at a HAM Fest at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds. This would eventually lead me to a career as a computer programmer, and to a job at Space Telescope Science Institute. I found my way to G.L.I.B., The Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS, and I was able to socialize on and offline with the other members.

That was my first experience with the idea of online gay dating which looked attractive because it meant I could try to find a boyfriend someplace other than a hook-up bar. It was a time before graphic user interfaces so we got to know each other through posting messages on the BBS echo boards, by private email, and the occasional meetup at a local gay or lesbian bar. I had high hopes but I got nowhere. Two of the members that I’d fancied ended up dating each other instead, and one of them, a guy I’d managed to coax out a couple times to let my camera, if not me, give him some love, apologised profusely about it which only left me thinking it was just as well he’d pushed me away. Many years later at a Pride Fair I ran across him manning one of the booths, I forget what it was promoting, and asked him how things were. He was single just then and began complaining about how relationships were So Much Work. I wanted to smack him.

At around that time I bought into a gay dating service, and when that one didn’t pan out, another. They never matched me up with anyone even close to what I was looking for in a date, and none of the ones they set me up on resulted in seconds. Usually we would both end our date complaining that the service kept missing the mark. One guy I was matched up with was a sports jock whereas I said one of my interests was hiking and wilderness backpacking and those are two very different sorts of personalities. But since we both ticked of the interested in outdoor sports box it must have been good enough. Except it wasn’t. We met in a parking lot and chatted for maybe five minutes and mutually decided to go our separate ways. I remember the look on his face when he laid eyes on me, and in all fairness I probably gave him the same look. It took a lot of time and money, neither of which I could afford to finally figure out those things only existed to extract money from lonely people.

I got older. The years went by, the universe expanded, I never found a boyfriend.

I have no idea what I might have done had something like Grindr been available to me when I was young, let alone the kind of social media we have now. But I don’t think I would have gravitated to a hook-up app because hook-ups were never my thing. I have always been looking for a boyfriend. Well, until I hit 70 and figured all that was in my rearview mirror. Would I have posted sexy selfies of myself like they used to do on MySpace until they clamped down on it shocked, shocked that anyone would even Think of using social media for such things!? Probably not. I have always had a poor body image, and I mentioned the time I was shocked to learn about group showers in gym class didn’t I?

But I look back at those few photos I have of myself back then and I was pretty cute for someone that skinny whose hair was always a mess. Maybe I would have learned a better body image of myself from the examples of others. Maybe I would have dressed myself better, worn better fitting clothes. (My butt is the only part of my body that ever reliably got complements…and a few straight up feels before I could object. One guy almost got slapped for it. I am not a touchy-feely kind of guy.) Maybe I would have found someone to give me better haircuts and learned to use a straightening iron, and got my teeth fixed so I could smile back at people without hesitating. And then maybe I could have attracted some attention and found a date without feeling like a beggar for asking. Or maybe all that would have just made me a target for sexual predators and gay bashers. For every better world there is an infinite number of worse ones.

[NOTE: This blog post is dedicated to the betraying older gay jackass who kept telling me that I was single because I was too shy didn’t get out more…then fucked me over by keeping a slender probably impossible chance at love from me because people who look like that want people who look like that.]

I’m such a bundle of stress lately it’s really making it hard to live my days. If I could just get some of it out of me in my art room or with my cameras I would feel a lot better. But I can’t concentrate on anything, even just mindless housework, enough to do any of it.

The best I can manage is write some stories and work on my ghost-ish novel, but that’s only because how I write. I don’t start at the beginning, I start in the middle, and write pieces of it from the inside out, then try to connect everything together and make it flow. It’s hard, but doable even in my present state.

The only time in my life I ever started at the beginning of a story and wrote through to its end was my first ever erotic short story I finished a couple days ago. It riffs on something that was bothering me and I had it practically all written out in my head even before I sat down to it (which is kinda how I do my cartoons and art drawings) and I just blasted through it in one sitting and that’s never happened to me before. I remember reading that when James HIlton got the idea for Goodbye Mr. Chips he finished it in one sitting and I could not imagine how anyone could do that, even one as short as that one was (it’s more of a novella). But I did it and I’m pretty happy with it and no one will ever see it. Connoisseurs of pronography can laugh but I’m the kid who was shocked to discover there would be group showers in Jr. High School gym. I’m the gay adult who wouldn’t take his clothes off while staying in clothing optional gay resorts at Key West and Puerto Vallarta. Normally I write my fiction on Google Docs and my essays on my blog, so I can have them to work on no matter which computer I’m sitting at. I’ve got that story locked away in one of my IronKeys. I think Google Docs censors stuff like that anyway.

I have an MRI scheduled for Monday morning at Union Memorial, and a session with a neurologist later this month. Hopefully I get some answers as to why I can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, why I’m getting more and more forgetful, and why I’m slightly dizzy all the time. I keep wanting to sit down at my drafting table and I don’t because I can’t concentrate.

The seductive thing about nicotine is it calms you down but doesn’t dull your mind. To a degree it actually improves concentration and deep thinking. But today, just now, I only needed some calming. The stress was really getting to me. It’s probably not doing my heart any good either. 

There are certain kinds of crimes against youth that really get to me. They press all my buttons, and I have to find some way to distract myself from it. Maybe it’s just the natural adult reaction to monsters who hurt kids. But my reaction is so intense I wonder if I don’t have a suppressed memory in there somewhere from way back when. I just get too angry about it. Maybe there is no suppressed memory, it’s just I can see it could easily have been me.

So I continued watching the second season of the Disney+ Percy Jackson series. Maybe work on finishing the book I’ve been struggling to read. I should read more books and do less doom scrolling. Stories about ICE ripping apart young married couples and kids from their parents isn’t helping my mindset either. But this is about one specific book that started nagging at me again for some reason I can’t pin down. It’s still pushing my buttons after all these years.

I should go ahead and buy another copy of it, second hand, and put it in my collection of homophobia, because it’s really about that author’s disgust of his gay kid, and his need to punish him for it. You have to dig into the homophobia that runs through everything he ever wrote to really see it, but then you can’t unsee it. It’s like how Wagner’s anti semitism runs through all his operas, or Rowling’s cheapshit prejudices her stories and it surprised people when you point it out because they like listening to or reading that crap. It has a different impact when it’s about people you.

76 bucks to fill my tank from a tad under half just now. And that’s diesel. Diesel used to be dirt cheap. Ah but then so was gasoline.

I’m having to spend nearly four grand on maintenance for the Mercedes this quarter, first for a brake job, and then the passenger rear wheel bearing is going bad. After having a lot of expensive work done my usual thing is to go take a road trip, but with fuel prices what they are that isn’t happening.

Good thing I can walk to nearly everything I need on a day to day basis here in Charm City. But I’m going to feel suffocated not being able to drive for hours on end just enjoying the open road.

It’s like watching those old Republic serials that start out with something like 12 men in a boardroom or on an expedition and over the course of 12 episodes they get knocked off one by one by a mysterious villain in a skull mask or black hood or something, operating out of a secret cave with a lot of flashing lights and Jacob’s Ladders, and he has two henchmen that wear dark suits and fedora hats, and then you get to the final episode and you find out which one of the 12 was under the mask all that time because the others are all dead by then.

This timeline would be a lot more fun if it was a Republic Serial. 

I had to give in this afternoon and turn the central AC on, after the temperature in the house rose to nearly 80 degrees with the windows open and all the ceiling fans on. Oh well. It’s a new (as of ’24) high efficiency unit and my cooling bills are lower.

When I have the AC on I have to keep all the second floor doors closed because I have this little narrow Baltimore rowhouse and cool air sinks. But it’s old enough it has return vents in every major room so air still circulates. But it’s the time of year in Maryland when the weather bounces all over the thermostat so, for now, I won’t have to have the AC on all the time. That happens starting in July.

I took down that short story I posted here a few days ago. If it weren’t for AI bots my little corner of the internet tubes would hardly get any notice anyway and that story was a pretty gruesome one about a pretty ugly crime spree that I wanted to bring a measure of justice too, if only in a fictional way. I’m not sure I want people seeing that side of me creatively. My Skywatcher stories sure, and the blog posts I put up here. At some point I want to start serializing this “ghost” story I’ve been working on for nearly two decades. But the real crime stories I’m uncertain about. I think they’re good, but that’s a side of me I’m not completely comfortable with artistically. I reckon horror story writers don’t really care what anyone sees inside of them or they just think it’s fun, but I do. I might put that one and some others in that series in their own fiction page on my website later.

These past few days another one such story has come to mind that I’m been refining…in my daydreams not on paper…but it’s one I could not possibly show to anyone while I’m still alive. It’s not even about a real crime, but a fictional one that I read many years ago, and which is to this day the only book I’ve ever thrown across the room and torn to bits after I finished it. I have this powerful reflex against damaging books that got put into me when I saw footage of the fascist book burnings in grade school, and for that particular book to overrule that still gives me the creeps to remember.

That particular author is popular in some circles, and his magnum opus has been made into multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbusters. But even his diehard fans can’t figure out how to bring That particular book to the screen without getting the stench of it all over them too. Last I heard some filmmakers were trying to find a convincing way to rewrite the ending. Hahahahaha…

I had occasion to remember it again recently and a better way of ending that story came to mind. But there is too much about My version of that story that is politically incorrect so I won’t be able to share it while I’m still alive and breathing. Maybe I’ll stick in in one of those literary archives, Not To Be Opened for a certain term, like Arthur C. Clarke did a bunch of his stories and essays apparently. Boy I’d love to read whatever Those were, but I’d have to live to 105 and I don’t think that’s in the cards.

If you missed it, sorry to vaguebook about it. But we’re all disengaging from social media anyway so what does it matter? Anyway…I took the story down.

Well it seems like you’re not on Facebook anymore, not even just to be on messenger, or I’d have wished you a happy birthday. But anyway…Happy Birthday! I hope things are still going well for you and your significant other, and that life is wonderful. I’m old and tired and coming to the end of my road, but I will always remember you fondly, and that strange amazing time. Good things happened in spite of all the static circling everything. Progress was made. And smiles. Lots of smiles.

US Supreme Court strikes down Colorado law banning conversion therapy for gay, transgender minors

The case started with a religious therapist in Colorado Springs providing talk therapy for people who said they didn’t want to be gay, transgender

I see neutrality in Colorado isn’t just for baking cakes anymore.

So Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only one of nine who had the slightest shred of human decency on this matter. Six of them you can see exactly where they are coming from, especially Gorsuch. But Sotomayor’s insistence that this was a simple free speech issue and government must remain viewpoint neutral is as pernicious as it is disgusting. What seems to have escaped her notice is that this “therapy” is not only worthless if measured by its stated goal of change, it is overwhelmingly proven to be harmful. Like…drives some of its patients to suicide, when it isn’t fucking their lives up harmful. But I reckon when it comes to the lives of gay people medicine cannot take sides between healing and poison.

First do no harm…unless it’s to homosexuals. And surprise, surprise, the “therapist” in question is religiously motivated. Jesus died for her sins, but a few dead gays might also help out with that.

The “therapist” in question claims to only treat people who voluntarily come to her for help changing their sexual orientation. During the Love In Action protests I met quite a few of these who had checked themselves in voluntarily and were still struggling to heal from what was done to them, and to their relationships with their parents and families. I have photos of a wall covered with written expressions of pain and anguish at the ex-gay survivors conference I was allowed to document. It was in the quiet room where they could go when remembering became too much for them. So Jack McIntyre checked himself into to Love In Action when it was the first of its kind and located in San Francisco in the 1970s. When he saw that the “therapy” wasn’t working, Because It Could Not Work To Begin With, he fixed the problem by killing himself. Had ex-gay therapy been banned and some actual therapist been able to bring him into a state of peace with his sexual orientation and his religion, he might still be alive today. But that wouldn’t have been neutral.

Calling this a “Free Speech” issue neatly erases the question of harm. Because harm is not a consideration when it’s homosexuals we’re talking about. It’s not a bug as they say, it’s a feature. Gorsuch is on board with that…he’s all in for it. Sotomayor insists on being neutral because she is either stunningly ignorant, or just doesn’t care one way or the other about the fate of gay people. She cares about not taking sides.

Dante despised the neutrals the most, putting them completely outside the circles, saying Heaven refuses them and Hell does not want them. I reckon you have to see for yourself the damage they do to understand how appropriate that was.

Via Facebook Reels I see, Every Gay Man Remembers At Least One Of These. I dunno…maybe I just had such an oddball path growing up, or I’m just getting old and forgetful (a Real possibility) but the only one of these I still remember much of is my first Pride Day in downtown Washington DC, in the gayborhood around DuPont Circle. It was Anita Bryant’s win in Florida that pushed me into going.

1)   The First Time You Realized You Might Be Different…

Somehow I always knew I was different in some way that I couldn’t explain, even when I was small. My family situation, not having a dad in the household, the unspoken tension regarding my dad, my being an only child, the constant, overpowering yankee baptist religious atmosphere in the household, my constant need to create art, my constant chattering curious always asking questions thing that really irritated my elementary school teachers, getting bullied all the time and not just by the other kids for reasons I could not back then understand. When you live in these situations they always seem normal to you because it’s all you know. But I could see how the other kids in my neighborhood and at school lived and I knew my life wasn’t like that.

2) The First Gay Character You Saw On TV…

I do not remember the first gay character I saw on TV. For most of my childhood and adolescence in the 50s/60s/70s you just didn’t see those. You saw comic sissies, sexual predators and dangerous psychopaths but those were seldom openly identified as gay back then, probably because of TV censorship. So I read, the first openly gay character on TV was a toss off foil for Archie Bunker in 1971. I must have missed that episode because I don’t remember it. Post 1972 I was out to myself (see A Coming Out Story) and began actively looking for the gay characters, but you still mostly had to read them between the lines, and just as often as not when you found any they were still largely based on the most ignorant and prejudicial stereotypes. It wasn’t until VIto Russo wrote The Celluloid Closet in 1981 that I began to understand why.

3) The First Time You Told Someone…

I don’t remember this exact moment either. I remember a bunch of times I had to dig in my heels about it. I think the first time I voluntarily said so was to crush #2, but not even sure about that. It might have been one or more classmates in the little group I fell into after high school. I never told either mom or dad. Pretty sure my brother knew from scanning my website and reading my blog.

4) The First Pride You Followed Even From Distance…

First Pride was the block party in front of Deacon Maccubbin’s Earthworks store. I think Lambda Rising had already moved around the block. It was an amazing experience, more so than even walking into my first gay bar which I don’t remember now. I sat on the porch in front of Earthworks with a go-go dancer from one of the clubs who would periodically hop up onto one of the stone walls and dance for the crowd, and a cute guy from the suburbs who invited me back to his apartment. That was when learned something important about myself, and letting myself get picked up by cute guys I had no actual romantic interest in.

5) The First Time You Felt Like Yourself…

I have always felt like myself. To quote Stephen Fry, not a noun, but a verb. And it has always felt weird. I think even before I came out to myself I’d accepted that.

This came across my news feeds just now…

NEWS: New reporting from POLITICO reveals Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons has been hospitalized multiple times for stress while carrying out Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda.

According to officials, Lyons faced intense pressure from the White House to ramp up deportations, amid reports of heated calls and internal chaos. It is also said that Stephen Miller frequently yells at him on calls. In one incident, he was rushed to the hospital overnight. In another, officials feared he may need emergency intervention on the spot.

I went and looked him up only to find he was born in 1981, almost a decade after I graduated from high school. Is this even the same planet I lived in when I was a young man, let alone a teenage boy. I don’t generally feel old, but for a moment there I really felt the years I’ve lived. I guess sometime soon there won’t be anyone left who remembers the America that was, before Reagan promised us that shining city on the hill.

I know stress. I’ve felt its clutches on me. It’s driven me to tobacco and alcohol and I know it’s shaved years off my life. If what this reporting is saying about you is true Mr. Lyons, Get Out Of There. It isn’t worth it. Whatever it is you think you’re accomplishing in there it’s rotting your soul and killing your body. These aren’t patriotic conservative men, they are the bottom of the human sewer, and if you don’t want to spend your last hour in there with them and be remembered along with them then get out. Go find the better man you can still be, while you still have some hours left.

I’m up in my den idling away the precious minutes of my life sitting at my computer desk when I hear a knock at my front door. I get up from my chair and look out the window behind the monitor. Down at street level I see some dressed men walking past my house. This looks familiar. Clue one.

Early mornings I leave my front door open and the screen door locked to allow some morning sunlight into the living room. As I walk down the stairs I observe a well dressed man standing outside wearing the sort of pasted on smile I have seen many times before. I note that he is holding some brochures in one hand. Clue two. Pretty sure I know what’s coming. No…you’re not a salesman…exactly…

Yes?

Good morning sir. Are you ready to experience Jesus’ promise for eternal life?

I’m not a believer. This conversation is over.

Proselytizer walks off, no further trying, facial expression totally unchanged. I begin to wonder if I’ve just spoken with some new kind of ambulatory bot. Maybe it was the pride flag hanging off my porch. Or my long hair and the tie dye t-shirt I was wearing. Or my face just then. I have often wondered what my resting face looks like after hours staring into a computer monitor.

First proselytizers of the season…start of spring was a few days ago wasn’t it…

I go back upstairs. As I walk back into my den I begin regretting that I didn’t thank the man for getting me away from the darn computer, even if it was just momentarily. I still have to do my taxes.

Scrolling through some old blog posts here I came across this one, did some double checking and…yeah…it’s just four months after this other one. It just really crashed everything I was up to creatively then. And then I spent another decade living in a wonderful dream only to crash and burn even worse.

Nat King Cole is singing on my iPod and it’s drizzling freezing rain outside and I’m nursing a glass of Kahlua and there is a face and a name that I just can’t get out of my thoughts, and it’s been like that for days now and I’m sorry. I had a couple of cartoons I wanted to get finished before today and I just haven’t been able to put pen to paper for days now. This is why I stopped drawing, stopped painting, stopped working with my cameras, for over a decade…it’s why I’m a software engineer now, and not the graphic artist or photographer everyone from Woodward assumed I’d become someday…this bundle of feeling that I have to deal with every time I walk into that space inside of me where all my creativity comes from. There’s a piece missing from what should have been my life and before I can sit down and do anything in my art room I have to deal with that and sometimes I just can’t. There’s a bit of that loss, that quiet, waiting, life-on-hold emptiness, in Everything I’ve Ever Done since 1975 and by the late 1980s I just got so sick of seeing it staring back at me from my artwork that I just stopped doing anything…I took my easel down, put my oils, my pens and charcoal sticks, my drawing pads away, put my cameras away, and just plinked on a computer (just like I’m doing now) for creative release.

I want that part of me back. I really want it back…

Yeah. But it’s not coming back.

[Update…] I moved forward a few days in the blog posts and came across this ode to Scarborough Fair…

…it’s all just ambiguous enough that you can see in it almost anything you want to.  Maybe this was medieval England’s 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover.  Maybe its a devoted couple having a good laugh together that while they aren’t the perfect lovers of the folk tales and ballads, they’re still happily in love all the same.  Maybe its a couple who’ve let each other down, angrily hurling impossible demands at each other.  Maybe the song is about how love makes us rise above ourselves, brings things out of us that we’d never have known were there, never have known we could do or become, until we met that one person we would do anything for.

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,

Perhaps once upon a time there were two people who might have loved, but time and circumstance just made it impossible.  And now all they can do is wave at each other at a distance, smile a little, laugh a little, and ironically give each other these little absurd tasks to win each other, knowing full well it can never be.

Remember me to one who lives there,
He once was a true love of mine.

What do you do when your heart is breaking? Write a song. Write some poetry. Make art that gets it out of you, before despair makes you want to go jump off a bridge.

Posts on Facebook today celebrating the release of Biloxi Blues with Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken, who is amazing in his role (as usual) as Sergeant Toomey, but I cannot even think of that movie without remembering the scene where they gay soldier (private Hennessy, played by Michael Dolen) is taken out of a troop line by Toomey and some MPs, presumably after they pressured the other private he was involved with to name him, and driven away between them in a jeep. I can still see the look on his face and while I understand he was an actor playing a part it was so very disturbing. Great acting on everyone’s part but I cannot think of that movie without thinking of that scene. That Hennessy was the only one to stand up for the two Jews in the troop against the bigots (the character has a great line when asked by one of the bigots if he’s Jew too) just added to the impact of what was about to happen to him.

But of course, if you didn’t know very much of the history of that time and what happened to homosexuals who were caught in the jaws of the laws back then, you might just think it a sad little subplot in a movie about a young soldier enduring a slightly crazy drill sergeant and having his first time getting laid. If that story really was based on Neil Simon’s recollections of his time in the army then I am wondering if that character and was what happened to him was based on a real person and did they survive.

During World War II, U.S. military personnel suspected of homosexuality faced intensive interrogation, psychiatric evaluation, usually to implicate others in exchange for leniency. If found to have committed acts of sodomy, they were court-martialed, imprisoned in a federal penitentiary with terms of hard labor, and then given a dishonorable discharge. After the nightmare of what prison life was for a homosexual, that dishonorable discharge would keep him from getting any kind of a good job, and the conviction for sodomy attached to it would more than likely mean he’d lose his family, friends, and have to leave wherever he’d grown up for somewhere nobody knew him. It might have even been reported in their local hometown newspaper, and his entire family ostracised.

If he was a real person you wonder what happened to him, with a very dark pit of your stomach feeling that you know damn well what happened to him.

Yay for private Jerome losing his virginity! To a female prostitute, when we wasn’t old enough to drink or vote, which was a rite of passage and certainly no federal offense.

…and leaves the rest of us behind. Too bad we couldn’t have lived in this better world back then…

Munich. Who’d have thought.