David, who was Jewish and from a richer town than I, matched my bombast word for word, allusion for allusion, ridiculous alliteration for ridiculous alliteration. If you were going to throw me in the mud and steal my bike - and, sadly, this was the kind of thing that happened to me on a regular basis between the years 19 - I’d be damned you’d do it without me calling you a cretinous troglodyte as you rode away.īut that summer I went to a special program for gifted public-high-school kids and met David, the first straight male soul mate I ever had. Consequently, I’d built up a thick, defensive wall of big words around me. I’d grown up in a middle-class Massachusetts town, which was largely Irish and Italian, and, frankly, prior to that summer, I’d not known much in the way of tenderness or warmth from straight men. By this time I knew deep down I was gay, though it would be another five years before I’d come out. The turning point in my life with straight men came in 1986, the summer before my senior year in high school. Rock Hudson and Robert Lansing in A Gathering of Eagles.
