…particularly, the girls.

Memories. Something that delights me no end is being able to share my photography with my classmates at reunions and online. Because my camera was a constant companion at school, I have tons of photographs of daily life at Woodward back in ’70-’72. It’s fun to reminisce with my classmates over them. But now and then I’ve had some unpleasant surprises.

I could be a clueless little dweeb at times. Probably most of the time at that age, but even now at age 72. I don’t think I was stupid, but it really keeps surprising me how much of what was going on around me back then kept going right past me or right over my head. Put it down to being a gay boy, plus being raised by a single divorced Baptist woman. Some subjects you just didn’t get anywhere near in that sort of household. Especially sex.

A Coming Out Story – Episode 12, “Dinner Table Danger Zone”

Now we’re all grown up, and I’ll be happily reviewing some of my Woodward photos with a classmate, and they’ll off-handedly tell me what was going on behind the scenes in this or that photo…and it throws me for a loop. Who was dating who. Who had sex with who. What? WhAT??? Laugh if you like, but I just assumed none of us were really having sex at our age, that it was just a lot of talk. I never took it seriously. I was clueless. Also gay. And a Baptist. So if there were signals a straight kid would have picked up on, little gay me was oblivious to them.

And to a lot more.

So…before one past reunion…not the most recent one… I’m arranging some of my photos with a couple of my female classmates here in the art room at Casa del Garrett. We’re selecting photos for a photo CD we want to sell to the classmates to support the costs of the reunion. We were looking at some photography I did of some of the teachers and students in the Activity Clubs for the yearbook, when I start hearing from them about which teachers in my photos were having sex with which of the other girls in my photos.

I was stunned. But it wasn’t just baseless gossip I was hearing then, because later on one of the teachers they were pointing to in my photographs was arrested and jailed for it. I never heard if the other one they kept pointing out in my photography ever did or not.

And even more than the accusations I was hearing, the casual offhanded way they told me about it stunned me even more; like it was some sort of common knowledge, among the girls back then. Because back then, among themselves, the girls talked to each about things they’d never feel comfortable talking to the boys about. I think in that moment they were comfortable talking about it to me because by then I was out to all my classmates. I don’t think they would have said anything to me about it if I was straight.

And I was stunned listening to all that. And even more…at the offhanded way they were telling me, as they looked at my photos of a couple of our teachers, the one who later got arrested and the one that, to my knowledge did not, surrounded by the other kids in one of the Activity Clubs, and they’re pointing and telling me He had sex with that girl…and that one…and that one…

Why am I bringing this up now? Oh…no particular reason…