STONEWALL WAS - AND IS - IMPORTANT

Growing up in Denver Colorado in the 50s, the subject of “homosexuality” mostly never came up, other than an admonishment from a parent to “never let those people near you.” I well remember a Saturday night in 1961 when - for some strange reason - three other members of the South High swimming team who were among the majority who couldn’t understand why some “non-jock” like me was on the team (I swam faster than they did), invited me to go out “cruising” with them. I hesitated a moment when I started to get in the car and realized one of the guys whose existence made me question why I wanted to be on the team was in back. But then I told myself What The Hell? and got in.

It was soon clear we weren’t going to go cruise Colorado Boulevard and end up at the A&W Drive-In, at least not right off. They were hunting “queers.” I was an unwilling guest on what I later learned to call a “gay bashing.” What was I going to do if we found one?

Fortunately, I didn’t have to answer the problem. We didn’t find any that night. After a frustrated hour, we ended up at the A&W. I never went out with any of them ever again. In retrospect, I think I was asked along because this was what they were going to do and they wanted to involve me in it.

The Navy was a great place to learn homophobia. That got pushed in my face in the spring of 1965, just before my sentence was up, when the guy who was my best friend on the Admiral’s Staff announced he was “a homosexual,” which resulted in his immediate removal and the “fag chasers” (as we knew them) of NCIS came to root out “the others.” Despite the fact I was as surprised as everyone else by his announcement, I was one of those “closely investigated,” since it was obvious - as one inspector said - that I was “on the team.” Fortunately, the fact I would be gone in 30 days, permanently, led them to decide that “we’re going to let you go, since you won’t be a problem.” (How little he knew what the next seven years would bring.)

When I got to Treasure Island for separation, my friend was there. He spotted me in the mess hall one morning and came over. I asked him how he was. He told me he’d be gone by the end of the month, and told me he was sorry that he’d put me through that. My question to him was “Why couldn’t you just keep quiet? You’d have been out next year, with an Honorable Discharge. Now you’ve screwed up your life forever.” I’ve never forgotten his response: “Now I can live with myself.”

This is why I have so much respect for Admiral Zumwalt, whose revolutionary personnel changes to The Plantation created the Navy of today, where life is 180 degrees different from the Navy I knew back then.

In the summer of 1969, Linda and I were back from Texas and newly-established in matrimony, and our financial position was such that I took what turned out to be a six month employment at a state government agency I was less suited for than any other. I decided to let them know I wasn’t one of them, by “dressing hip.” There were two other guys in the unit who dressed similarly, though with much better taste than I. Dan and Jim were the first guys I ever met who made no secret of who they were. Our conversations at coffee break convinced them I was someone they could be honest with. The result was I learned a lot more about the gay community; one of the reasons I was let go at six months was because “We can get rid of you. Civil service rules say we can’t get rid of them without bringing it all out in public.”

The most important conversation we ever had was the day after “the Stonewall Riots” began. They were overjoyed it was happening, and I now knew enough to understand why. It was a great day. I even learned who the “closeted guys” in the unit were when they couldn’t stop themselves from coming over to Dan and Jim with a smile on their faces. I kept their secrets.

Forty years in Hollywood rid me of any residual “Denver crap.”

In 2002, I got to learn that, way back in Denver in 1961, I had known a gay person. Well. In fact, I’d known him since kindergarten, when he congratulated me on the dinosaur I made and laughed when I told the teacher I didn’t care if they were making flowers - I wanted to make dinosaurs, the beginning of my continuing educational rebellion. That was when David Faris - one of the “top kids” in the class back then - arrived at the 40th anniversary class reunion with his partner Fred. I wasn’t there, but his email was listed in the class book and I sent him an email congratulating for his courage in showing up in front of that crowd, of which many were still the same idiots they were the last time I saw them at the 1962 graduation (I left three days later and never really went back, though I did occasionally visit).

And so we finally became the friends my mother had always chided me for not being with him back then. He learned about my life back then and I about his - hiding in plain sight by achievements big enough people don’t question you is one ploy I’d never heard of before - and we used to joke about my mother (“Hey, Ma - do you REALLY want me to be friends with Dave?”) He apologized for not having the courage back then to be my friend, because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself by being my friend. He also told me that Stonewall had been the occasion when he first confronted himself about the false life he was living then; it took another 10 years to fix that.

In 2012, David and Fred came out to Los Angeles for a week, and we all hung out together. He and I had a great day together in the Impressionists Hall at the Getty, where it turned out we were both pretty expert on what was there. I wish I could have gone on a vacation with him and Fred to his beloved Provence, where he visited every year until he became sick the final time and had to be brought home by medical transportation.

David on his last visit to Provence

David Faris was the bravest guy I ever knew. Not because of Becoming Himself in public, but because of his courage in facing death. He had many operations to deal with various cancers, and dealt with the aftereffects, until November 2019, when he had a recurrence and decided he was no longer going to fight it merely to exist, and refused treatment. I wan’t able to go back for the funeral because of my responsibilities to Jurate, but the ten people (eight of them women) who I had liked back then and who were also David’s long-time friends gathered, and Roz (my oldest friend from when our mothers had to hold us up to get a photo I still have since we couldn’t do that on our own - she’s someone else I will be writing long and sadly about some time in the foreseeable future) read the memorial I wrote about David and me.

So yes, Stonewall is a very important day to many people. It’s an important day to me because I can look in the bathroom mirror and know I was always one of the “good guys,” even when I didn’t know what that meant.

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