I came out to myself one December evening in 1971, and for the next couple years had no clue whatsoever as to how to find others like me, and maybe get a date, and maybe even find someone who was special enough to settle down with, and build us a life together.   Until that moment everything I knew about homosexuals and homosexuality I had learned from heterosexuals, and the opinions there ranged from tactful pity to venomous hostility. In 1971 every state but one had sodomy laws on the books.   In 1971 you could be fired, you could lose your professional license, you could loose your home, you could lose your freedom, just for being discovered. Forget about a career anywhere you might need a background check or a security clearance.   And the message you got from every direction was you were human filth, a danger to children, a threat to your community, a pathetic faggot at best…

Mad #145, Sept ’71, from “Greeting Cards For The Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”

…a dangerous sexual psychopath at worst…

“The thought of turning…of turning involuntarily into one of them frightened me…and made me sick with anger.”

You were a symptom of social decay.   You were what caused the fall of Rome.   You were an abomination in the eyes of God.   Certainly you were a thing best left unspoken of in decent company. This was the world I came out into.   The only place I knew of where other people like me could be found was a seedy bar downtown that everyone in school joked about.   When I searched for books about gay people, fiction that spoke to me about life as a gay man, all I found were trashy sex novels where the gay protagonist was there only to remind everyone what a sad, pathetic life we were all condemned to.   To be sure, 60s sexual liberation, at least in theory, extended even to gay people.   In the Broadway musical Hair they sang “Sodomy Fellatio Cunnilingus Pederasty. Father, why do these words sound so nasty?   Masturbation can be fun. Join the holy orgy Kama Sutra Everyone!” But this was, as always, gay lib as purely sexual in nature…a side show to heterosexual liberation at best.   More often, sexual freedom did not include treating gays as anything other than pathetic faggots.   Even in the sexually no-holds-barred underground comix world, gay people were stereotypical faggots…

Jake shows the kids how to deal with a limp wrist faggot in Larry Weltz’ “Gearjammer”, Bakersfield Kountry Komics, 1973

If not symptoms of capitalist decadence and oppression…

Guy Colwell reminds us in Inner City Romances #3 (1977), that homosexuality in prison is but a mirror image of capitalist oppression of the strong over the weak…

I had nothing that spoke to me…nothing that spoke to that wonderful, magical experience of first love, and what it taught me was truth; that the love between same-sex couples could be every bit as vital and life affirming as that experienced by opposite-sex couples.   Then late in 1972, I stumbled across Mary Renault’s novel, The Persian Boy, and in her works finally, Finally, found what I was looking for…

“Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning-bolt.” —Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

But my community seemed still so far out of reach.   I knew it was out there…somewhere…but I could find no access to it. By the winter of 1972 I was working at a camera store that catered to the professional clientele. I did stock boy duties and one day, while unpacking a shipment of cameras from a distributor in San Francisco, I found a complete issue of The Advocate, placed neatly on top of all the balled up newspaper that was packing the contents of the box.   By then I had heard of The Advocate, knew it was a newspaper produced by and for gay people, but I’d had no idea where to find a copy.   And now suddenly, there in front of me, was a complete copy, placed there like a message in a bottle by someone in the shipping department at the other end. To whom it may concern…you are not alone… I glanced quickly around…my stockroom manager was elsewhere, I was alone.   I took the newspaper and placed it inside my backpack and closed the zipper.   When I finally got it home I devoured it like a starving man. I still have it…a carefully saved bit of personal history…

Eventually I found my way to a seedy “adult” bookstore where I could find copies of The Advocate, as well as the local gay paper, The Washington Blade, and several glossy gay magazines that weren’t entirely pornographic, such as Mandate, In Touch and Christopher Street (a gay version of the New Yorker that had hilarious New Yorker style cartoons).   That lasted until I discovered the Lambda Rising bookstore downtown at which point it seemed like, finally, the world had opened up to me.   But that first copy of Advocate felt at the time like a lifeline, tossed to me by some friendly stranger on the other side of the country.   I wish I could thank them.