When We Rise Read online

  The antiwar and civil rights protests grew larger and louder. Millions of students marched, shut down campuses, and, in some cases, rioted. My mother and I passed out leaflets supporting Senator Eugene McCarthy, the peace candidate challenging President Johnson. My father started a peace group with other faculty and graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh.

  On April 4, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis. My father and mother wept, but in my classroom some of the children cheered. Violent riots broke out in major cities across the country, including Pittsburgh. From the windows of Mellon Junior High we watched the tanks and troops heading downtown to quell the unrest. Homewood and the Hill District burned, sending aloft thick plumes of black smoke clearly visible from the white suburbs. President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act one week later.

  In June, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. The Republicans nominated Richard Nixon for president in Miami the first week of August, and the month ended with the Democrats nominating Hubert Humphrey after a week of bloody rioting in the streets of Chicago. From Peru to Ireland to Greece to Czechoslovakia, the world appeared to be on the brink of revolution, and the white middle-class families of Mount Lebanon were uncertain of the future—and anxious.

  There were other, even closer, sources of fear for the children of Seneca Drive. G——was a tall redheaded kid with bad skin who lived across the street from us. M——was an athletic, dark-haired boy who lived one block down from us. Both were about five years older than my friends and me. It started, I think, when we were all in second grade. Every day, walking home from Markham Elementary School, we would try to avoid them.

  In 1966 we had moved to a larger house on Inglewood Drive, just a few blocks from Seneca Drive. It wasn’t nearly far enough.

  With G——, it was mostly fumbling sexual stuff. It was confusing and creepy but rarely painful. With M——, it was less sexual but hurt more. Most of their victims were girls. I and one other boy, also slight of build, attracted their attentions. It continued throughout elementary school and the first year of junior high school. I was too ashamed and terrorized to tell my parents.

  During the first week of eighth grade, a kid named C——beat me up in front of most of the student body. From then on, I experienced constant verbal abuse, as well as intermittent physical and sometimes sexual violence at the hands of older boys and classmates until we left Pennsylvania for Arizona in August 1968, eight weeks short of my 14th birthday.

  My father had traveled out to Phoenix for his job interview and brought us back photographs and postcards. I was intrigued by the alien look of the palm trees and giant saguaro cacti. But mostly I just wanted to go. Anywhere. Anywhere I might have a chance to start over and not be the weak, frightened, and ashamed kid that I was in Mount Lebanon.

  We pulled out of our driveway on Inglewood Drive in the family car, Mom and Dad in the front, my sister Elizabeth and me in the back with our cats, the car crammed with things deemed too valuable for the movers to handle, including an avocado tree grown by my father from seed, which we were ultimately forced to relinquish to guards at the agricultural checkpoint on the Arizona border. We drove across the United States on Route 66 to Winslow, Arizona, then down the state road to Phoenix and the “Valley of the Sun,” Maricopa County.

  Our new house was nice. Thirty large orange trees crowded our oversized lot. Tall palm trees towered over the house, and from the back yard we looked up to Camelback Mountain. Just a few blocks away was open desert, not yet covered with the appalling sprawl of development. The night sky was clear and crowded with stars, and the wind carried the scent of mesquite.

  The first day of school, I waited for the school bus at the corner of Camelback Road and Jokake Street. I got to the bus stop early and watched hopefully as the other students from the neighborhood arrived. I was nervous but also hoping desperately that I could start over and be a new person.

  An athletic blond guy, taller than the others, walked up, took one look at me, and said, “You look like a faggot.”

  New place. New people. The same old me, and the same old shit. The beatings in the locker room, taking punches at the bus stop. The names. It started up again immediately. For the next two and a half years, until that issue of Life magazine arrived at the school library, I had almost no hope.

  I did make a few friends. A sweet and funny girl who lived across the street, Harriet, was kind to me from my first day in Phoenix. We’d smoke pot, and I’d go with her to help groom her horse and watch as she rode. She played piano. We went to concerts and hung out with a small group that didn’t fit in the with the jock and cowboy crowd at Scottsdale High School. After school, she’d make us chopped olive sandwiches and we’d watch Dark Shadows on the TV in her parent’s family room. Her parents were very kind to me as well, although I could tell they thought my parents were a bit odd.

  There were a handful of long-haired kids at Scottsdale High as well, and we’d hang out during lunch break. Sheila Thomson and Heidi Fulcher, quintessential hippie girls, and a lanky boy named T. O. were my friends and companions.

  There was a boy at the Quaker Meeting, one year younger than me, with curly dark brown hair that always smelled of patchouli oil. I lusted after him fervently, and one afternoon after an interminable amount of thrashing around we finally got naked together in bed. I began to dream of the day when we would leave Phoenix together; we’d hitchhike up to British Columbia, burn our draft cards, and live in a commune on the Frazier River, probably in a yurt we would order through the Whole Earth Catalogue.

  In 1969 my little bunch of friends and I learned from underground newspapers and FM radio stations of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and the Vietnam Moratorium days being organized by new peace activists, including David Mixner. We organized a march in Scottsdale on October 15 that was attended by hundreds of high school students, but my parents were alarmed and locked me in the house to keep me from attending. I was humiliated.

  The streets of Phoenix were sterile and sun-blasted. We spent a lot of time in the car, where I would turn the radio dial to KDKB-FM to listen to the music from Detroit, California, and London as we drove past the strip malls and uniform suburban neighborhoods. I loved the Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin (I saw her concert in Tempe in October of 1969), James Brown, the Mamas and the Papas, the Who, the Moody Blues, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Cream, Bob Dylan, Blind Faith, Leonard Cohen. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust came out in 1972; I knew every song by heart within a week. I also loved Judy Collins, and replayed “Colors of the Day” endlessly.

  On weekends I often snuck into Tempe to the Valley Art Theatre to see films by Andy Warhol and Nicolas Roeg. I thought Mick Jagger was hot in Performance and wanted badly for Malcolm McDowell to fuck me after seeing If and A Clockwork Orange.

  I had first encountered drugs back in Mount Lebanon about a year before we moved to Arizona, probably in the 7th grade. My little group of friends were all eager to be hippies and try drugs. Try as we might, marijuana was not to be found. But our parents all had medicine cabinets, and many of them were full of tranquilizers, pain medications, or sleeping pills. We pilfered them and shared in the woods behind our houses after school.

  In Phoenix, in the public schools in the late 1960s and early ’70s, drugs were everywhere. At Scottsdale High School the security guard, Mr. Landers, was afraid to venture into the boys’ restroom, where a brisk business in cigarettes, alcohol, weed, pills, and psychedelics was conducted by some of the older and tougher kids.

  Every now and then some new drug would arrive and the effects would often be immediately and dramatically visible. Our campus was divided in half by a large parking lot, and I remember sitting in a VW bug one afternoon, smoking a joint with a friend and watching my classmates stumbling by, stoned out of their minds on a new batch of Seconal, some collapsing on the hot asphalt.

  Almost every kid I knew was using one drug or another, and everyone was drinking
. And I am pretty sure that I was not the only one with the super-secret stash hidden away for that big, just-in-case, final-exit scenario.

  I tried peyote and its derivative, mescaline, after reading Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, which I suspected was total bullshit but loved reading anyway. Peyote tasted horrible and made me vomit, but mescaline was easier and the experience was amazing, magic mushrooms and LSD even more so. We didn’t take them lightly or recklessly. We used them with great awareness of their power to do harm as well as to enlighten. We didn’t think of them as we thought of pot or alcohol. There was a certain reverence to it all. We’d set the date, find the perfect beautiful natural setting with the requisite privacy and the right small group of friends. And then we’d trip.

  Inexplicably, I was a terrible student.

  By the end of my sophomore year at Scottsdale High School my parents were fed up. So they spent a huge amount of their hard-earned money and enrolled me at Phoenix Country Day School, an upscale prep school in a wealthy neighborhood on the boundary of Phoenix and Paradise Valley.

  It was a little better for me there, less violent certainly. But most of the kids were rich, and while I was not often physically harassed, I was not popular. The only guy at PCDS that I ever spent time with was a sort of crazy cowboy kid named Ted. We’d drive to the end of the runway at Sky Harbor airport, smoke weed, drink beer, and lie on our backs as the planes landed and took off just yards above our heads. Once we drove all the way to Los Angeles, dropped acid on the beach, and then drove home the next day.

  The students at that school were mostly into money. Many of their parents were building the tacky mansions that were beginning to sprout up on the flanks of Camelback Mountain, restricting public access and destroying desert habitat. They were overwhelmingly Republican. One of the popular girls, Bobbi Jo, slapped me—hard—across the face when I announced in class that I thought Richard Nixon was a liar. I think it was the day we learned of the secret war in Cambodia. Or maybe it was after the National Guard opened fire on protesting students at Kent State, killing four. Or was it Jackson State? I can’t recall.

  Then, in the middle of my junior year, I found that issue of Life magazine. I allowed myself only a few seconds to scan the article, terrified that I would be discovered. The librarian left the room to take a call and I slipped the magazine between my notebooks, then took it home, where I hid it under my mattress as if it were pornography. On bad days, when I hadn’t been fast enough to get away from the bullies, I’d pull it out and read and dream.

  There were other signs of hope, found unexpectedly in the book section of our local pharmacies and dime stores and in our parents’ own libraries. In those days there were lots and lots of bookstores, and almost every large pharmacy, even some grocery stores, would have book sections where classics mingled with pulp fiction, westerns, crime, espionage, and science fiction. Among the authors one could frequently find was Mary Renault, whose novels about ancient Greece and Alexander the Great included stories of bold and loyal and muscle-bound warrior lovers that kept me awake at night, squirming into my mattress.

  Our parents loved literature, and their house was filled with all sorts of books and magazines. I loved to read history, biographies, and fiction. I read their collection of back issues of Partisan Review and, every week, the New Yorker. I found the fiction of James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, John Cheever, Kurt Vonnegut, and Doris Lessing. I read Jean Genet and Sartre and Gertrude Stein and T. H. Lawrence, Christopher Isherwood, Simone de Beauvoir, and Lawrence Durrell. The more I read, the more hints and clues I discovered about gay people; it wasn’t the only reason I read, but sort of a bonus to the pure pleasure of losing myself to words printed on paper.

  I read, and read about, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and the Bloomsbury Group. I read Allen Ginsberg and got goose bumps when I read aloud, sitting on the floor in my bedroom in my parents’ house on Calle del Norte, the words from his great poem “America,” written in 1956 when I was two years old: “I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel, America!”

  I remember at one point thinking to myself that clearly there existed enough people like me to require a name for us. People like me had probably always existed, described no doubt by many different names over time in many different places and circumstances.

  I discovered that, in fact, I was not alone. There were other people like me. And I also came to understand that there was a place for people like me, and that place had a name. It was called San Francisco.

  I took the pills I had been hoarding from their hiding place and flushed them down the toilet.

  CHAPTER 2

  Gay Liberation Arizona Desert

  BY THE FALL OF 1972 I HAD SURVIVED HIGH SCHOOL AND GLIMPSED the promised land of San Francisco for two all-too-brief weeks before returning to Phoenix and my first semester at Arizona State University. In the pages of the increasingly tattered Life magazine hidden beneath my mattress, I kept returning to the photo captioned “members of Gay Liberation Arizona Desert on their commune in Mesa, Arizona.” Mesa was a largely Mormon community just east of Scottsdale and Tempe. I wanted to find the activists but had no idea how to do it.

  One day while waiting for class I picked up the student newspaper and was astounded to read of gay activists picketing The Village, a popular local pizza parlor that had dancing on weekend nights. The activists had entered the establishment paired in opposite-sex couples but then switched off on the dance floor to boy/boy and girl/girl couples. They called it a “zap.” Then the police came and they all were arrested. The story was exciting and amusing, but more important was the contact number listed for Gay Liberation Arizona Desert, which I copied with trembling hand.

  Weeks passed before I found the courage to make the call. A man who said his name was Victor answered the phone. He sounded kind and suggested that I attend one of their meetings. I told him I was living with my parents and had no car. He offered to come and get me. I asked when, and he replied, “What about now?”

  I waited on the sidewalk outside my parents’ home on Calle del Norte. When the battered old VW bug turned the corner I knew it would be Victor. It wasn’t as frightening as pushing the door open to the meeting of gay Quakers, but I was quaking nonetheless. He was very nice, a thin, hippie-looking guy with a mustache and he took me to what had been described in Life magazine as the gay commune. Well, it wasn’t much of a commune at all, more like a cluster of small cottages that shared a laundry room and a parking lot. There was a sort of dismal vegetable patch. A straight woman named Cleo ran the cottages. Her mother owned the property.

  Cleo was cheery and round-faced and enthusiastic in her love and admiration for gay men. But she made me nervous when she described the treatment in the Philippines that she was seeking out to treat her mother’s cancer and talked about astrology. I didn’t want to tell her she was going to get ripped off.

  Victor lived in one cottage with his lover, Robert. I found Robert very handsome and fantasized about cuddling up with him, which would happen eventually. There was a small circle of guys who made the place their base. Richard was a bit older and very into the radical hippie scene. There was Eugene, a heavyset and socially awkward younger guy who I suspected was probably smarter than the rest of us. Steve had very long brown hair and worked as a printer. He came from Yuma and was in love with a supposedly straight guy named Rich who was shy and cute as could be. Another friend of Steve’s from Yuma was a handsome Latino man named Bob. I wanted Rich the moment I saw him and it wasn’t long before we became lovers.

  Encouraged by the group, I told my parents on my 18th birthday that I was gay. I waited until I was 18 because I’d read more than enough in my father’s library to fear that his reaction might include psychotherapy, electro-convulsive shock treatment, or aversion therapy.

  Victor predicted a positive response. “After all, your mother is a dancer and choreographer,” he said. “Surely they know gay people. Don’
t you think they already know about you?”

  Dad bought me a new bicycle that afternoon, and as we drove beneath the palm trees into our driveway on Calle del Norte I took a deep breath and broke the news.

  He was silent, staring straight ahead over the steering wheel for a long moment, then turned to face me. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because it’s important, Dad. You need to know. I’ve joined the gay liberation movement and I’m not going to live in secret anymore.”

  His face got red and he snarled back, “Great. Tell me all about it. What do you like best, getting fucked in the ass or sucking cock?”

  I was still taking classes at ASU and got a part-time job working as a clerk in the Admissions Office, since Mom and Dad weren’t paying the bills anymore. Rich and I rented a cottage from Cleo in Mesa and shared meals, pot, and boys with the others. On Wednesdays we ran a coffeehouse at a campus center owned by a liberal church group. It was usually pretty low-key, but as the months went by, more and more young men and some women began attending the dances. And every now and then someone outside would start screaming, “Fuck you, faggots,” and hurl a brick through our window.

  One of the leaders of the group was Doug Norde, a psychology major. He was impressed, slightly, that my father was now chairman of the psych department. He was more impressed when I told him I had met Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon at Yearly Meeting the summer before. Another active member of the group was Jim Briggs, a short, balding, rotund little man who lived in a trailer park nearby. His place was so filthy with cats and food debris that it made me uncomfortable, but Jim regularly entertained impossibly good-looking guys, so I got over my discomfort and hung out often. Jim taught me how to speak like a queen. He loved gay jargon, was the first person to call me Mary, and demonstrated that the word “please” has at least two syllables. Late at night, in his trashy Siamese cat-filled trailer in Mesa, Arizona, we memorized lines from The Boys in the Band: