Snow Days

Thinking of snow in Placerville brings back memories of that rare joy when you wake up on a school morning, open the window and see the yard covered in snow.  You know right there and then that you won’t be going to school.  After breakfast it’s on with the powder pants, moon boots and mittens and out to the hill to start sledding, throwing snowballs, making snow people.  This didn’t happen all that often as the snow line was just a bit higher than Placerville, so it was a real treat.  The part that wasn’t a treat was the lingering snow that made it difficult to drive to the grocery store and get things done or the usual occurrence of losing the electricity.  It still doesn’t take much to lose the electricity in Placerville.

We didn’t have to wait for that week or two in February or March when the snow might drop low enough to keep us home from school, for just up the road about 30 minutes was the wonderful world of Camp Sacramento and Strawberry Lodge.  These two places were our key destinations when the family of my father’s high school and college chum, Fred Towers, came to visit from Santa Rosa.  Fred and Rose Towers had a pair of kids, Lisa and Brent, who were just about the ages of me and my brother Mark.  So, up the hill we drove, bundled up and ready for the thrills of the really good sledding hills of Strawberry Lodge or Camp Sacramento.

Strawberry Lodge, an historic Pony Express stop, was started by a New Yorker who crossed over Echo Summit about 1858 and stopped in a place we now call Kyburz to build a crude stage coach stop and settle the land.  His name was Irad Berry and his little stage stop turned out to be a much needed facility for all the traffic that would shortly be going up and down the trail from Placerville to Nevada City where a silver strike lured the miners just the way James Marshall’s gold discovery lured the world to California in the first place in 1849.

About the time of the Nevada silver strike, Powell Crosley built a hotel that made the stop a major destination, but the hotel burned down in 1867, just two years after a former stage coach driver, Charlie Watson, took over.  Strawberry Lodge was rebuilt as a functional hotel, but business quickly fell off with the introduction of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 and from that point on the lodge had more downs than ups in an ever lasting struggle to survive, but survive it has.  Watson’s daughter kept the place going until 1919 when Norma Scherrer leased the property and updated it for modern travelers going to Lake Tahoe.  A pool was added, along with a dancing hall and an auto garage and extra cabins.  However, with the onset of the Great Depression, the place went bankrupt.

Gold Dredger Fred Baumhoff took over the lodge in 1939 and built the lodge you see today.  Baumhoff didn’t stick with the lodge long, selling it to Otto Schaefer in 1942 when golf and skiing were added.  The dead ski hill was always a fascination to me because it had an old ski lift on it, but the run had long been out of service by the time we were climbing it to woosh down the hill on huge tractor tire inner tubes.  In the 1970s, snow sledding was the main function of that abandoned ski run and it was busy when the snow was good.

Schaefer tired of the lodge in 1960 and a series of owners followed during the era when my family was visiting the property most frequently.  The Hicks-Hills family became the current owners in 2003 and have been promoting the lodge as an historic destination with easy access to the natural wonders of the El Dorado National Forest and Lake Tahoe.  They also offer a festive Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner and from all reports, have turned the place into a very warm and wonderful getaway.

When you had to go a bit higher to find snow, Camp Sacramento was an excellent option with a real monster of a hill, which had a chunk of river at the bottom.  The trick was to put on the breaks before sliding into the river.  It was probably smart that we started using a rubber river raft to slide down the hill, but the real reason we used it was because you could pile a bunch of kids in it all at once and go really fast.  On the tractor tires you would tend to bounce out on the way down and it was a real challenge to hang on.  I remember Brent and I bouncing down the hill and at one point he really caught air, but I grabbed him by a limb and pulled him back onto the tire.  It was nice to know I could react instantly during treacherous moments.

Camp Sacramento is located in what is known as the Sayless Flat area of the El Dorado National Forest.  The camp is fourteen acres owned by the U.S. Forest Service leased by the City of Sacramento.  We never used it for more than snow sledding, but the camp has sixty-one cabins built in the 1930s, a dining hall, lodge, store, nursing office, softball diamond, basket ball and valley ball courts and campfire pits.

One year the Towers came up for their annual visit and there was no snow.  We didn’t even bother to go up the hill and visit Strawberry Lodge or Camp Sacramento.  While the parents spent time catching up, we kids headed over to the Placerville Cinema 4 (that name was chosen in a contest and had to be the most uncreative choice in the list––I was always a bit irked by the banality of the name).  I remember the film was Quicksilver with Kevin Bacon and the theatre had only a smattering of patrons in attendance.  I must have been a senior in high school, because that film was released in 1986.  That marked the end of the snow days of my youth and it went out with a whimper.  From there it was off to college and other towns, but it is nice to know that Strawberry Lodge and Camp Sacramento are still there.  I’ve driven by on the way to Lake Tahoe a few times over the past twenty years, but never stopped.  I glance at that hill where the ski run used to be and will always see the ghosts of kids sliding down, bouncing about on tractor tire inner tubes, nearly killing themselves, but somehow surviving to warm up before the great fireplace of the Strawberry Lodge.

Me in the snow in 1975

School Days in Placerville

After preschool in the log cabin located in the City Park and shared with the Boy Scouts and the Parks and Recreation Department, it is on to kindergarten at Schnell School.  Having opened in 1964, Schnell School was barely a decade old when I started kindergarten and continued on at that school through the third grade.  The school was named after a long time Placerville teacher, who was also Principal at Sierra School for a time, named Louisiana Schnell.  She died in 1985.  The campus has pod buildings that house four classrooms each, surrounding a large central common room.  Here, all the students of the grade in question can gather for singing time or the flag salute.  There are two other smaller rooms in those pod buildings that might house storage, special meeting rooms or libraries.  At the time I was going to Schnell in the mid 1970s, there wasn’t a gym and all physical activity was accomplished on the expansive playground areas.  We ate lunch outside on picnic tables, but if it rained we ate in the classroom and spread out into the common central areas of the pod to play board games.  It is strange that we didn’t have a proper cafeteria or multipurpose gym in which to have lunch.  After all, this was Placerville in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains and it was cold in the winter.  Still, the school was inviting, spacious and pretty on little hills with paved paths winding about green lawns.

Every morning I’d arrive on the bus and we would be dropped off on the big lower playground with a huge area of painted dodge ball and hopscotch courts.  Swings and monkey bars were in “the gravel area.”  When it was time to start class the recess monitor would blow a whistle and we would all line up and march up the hill, branching off to our various pods for the first, second or third grades.

Visits to Sierra School across town on another hill for their annual Halloween carnival made that school alluring.  Built in 1953, Sierra School seemed more cosmopolitan due to its mid-century modern architectural influence, but really, Schnell was the true modern campus––allowing teachers to team teach by opening up the accordion walls so that two classes could share as one.  However, Sierra had a multipurpose gym and the kinds of classrooms that looked like the ones kids on TV always attended.  To me, finally attending Sierra seemed like true advancement.  Since I attended fourth through sixth grades there, it was literal advancement.

I usually ate the hot lunches available.  There was a monthly menu calendar that we took home to post on the refrigerator to guide us as to whether or not we wanted to buy hot lunch, but I very rarely took lunch to school.  The routine was that you’d swing by the multi-purpose room to sign up and pay your dollar for lunch.  There was a regular lady who took our orders––her name escapes me now, but she reminded me of Carol Burnet.  She had little pet names for the lunches in standard rotation.  If it was spaghetti she would say we were having “sketties” that day.  The lunches were made at Edwin Markham School and shipped to Schnell and Sierra schools in big green insulated cases with hot items in a tin tray and cold items in a plastic tray.  When it was lunch time you’d line up, have your name checked on a list and pick up your tin and plastic trays.  This routine and the particular recipes were a way of life from first through eighth grade.  I never thought the food was the greatest, but it was good enough I suppose, because I always ate it.

Besides the Halloween carnival we also had a sixth grade square dance night where after learning to square dance during school hours, the parents all came out to an evening dance where we kids showed them how it was done.  It was in the Sierra School library where I found the book Make Your Own Animated Movies and my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Bratt, taught a unit on making Super 8 animated movies that started me off on a hobby that lasted through high school (See post “Making Movies”).  Sierra also had an annual talent show and Christmas program and an extracurricular band program to prepare musicians to participate in Edwin Markham Intermediate School’s more formal band program.

Edwin Markham (now referred to as a “middle school”) gave we Sierra kids some promotional enticement as their drama and band kids would visit to put on shows twice a year.  At the time I was participating in the Parks and Recreation Department’s Children’s Theatre program, so I was getting a good helping of performing arts, but the visiting players from Edwin Markham represented the main reason I was looking forward to junior high school.  Those productions seemed like a kind of advancement from what I was doing.

Perhaps the first live theatre I ever saw was thanks to the visiting Discovery Players, a program of the local branch of American River College.  The group toured the schools of El Dorado County with original adaptations of children’s stories.  They used the same unit set for years––repainted for each new show.  The actors were recognizable as they seemed to hang on for several productions before changing over.  As a kid I always thought the actors were good, the costumes seemed elaborate and it was interesting to see how that same unit set was manipulated to work for each new story.  The visit from the Discovery Players was always a big deal and those productions were part of the fabric of going to school in Placerville, for there was a new show every year from kindergarten through the eighth grade.

Edwin Markham Middle School was named for a poet and teacher who was born in Oregon, but moved to California as a boy and grew up and went to several colleges throughout the north part of the state.  He lived in Lagoon Valley, San Jose, Oakland, Santa Rosa, Vacaville, and Placerville where he belonged to the Masonic Lodge and taught literature in the 1880s.  He became a very important man of letters thanks to two poems in particular:  “The Man with the Hoe” and “Lincoln, The Man of the People,” which was selected to be read by the author at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial.  And so, Placerville claimed him and named a school after him in 1959 (though he died in his long time home of Staten Island in 1940).  Other towns claimed him as well, resulting in Edwin Markham schools in Vacaville, San Jose, South Central Los Angeles, Pasco, Mt. Lebanon, Portland and Staten Island.  I wonder why no one thought to name a school after James Marshall in Placerville?  After all, without him there wouldn’t have been a Placerville as we know it (though there are schools named for him in other California cities).

At the time I was going to Markham it was a true junior high with just the seventh and eighth grades.  I took to the school dances right off and there were many of them.  I toured in the drama productions, which were generally half hour parodies of TV shows and fairy tales under the direction of the pun-loving George Sabato.  Mr. Sabato started a year insisting that we learn to juggle, which I didn’t master as well as others.  However, the other units of improvisational games, pantomime, puppets and touring plays were all a great time and Mr. Sabato’s class made going to school worthwhile to me.  In those days, I felt that all the rest of school was a chore.

Surviving all these years since Ronald Reagan first became President is a video tape of a project called “The Michael Jackson Show.”  For some reason, Mr. Sabato decided I would be host of a variety show.  All the other kids put together skits and I introduced them doing celebrity impressions.  I did this because at the time there was a show hosted by celebrity impressionist Rich Little and I watched it just to hear his impressions.  I can’t even remember the Rich Little show now, but IMDB tells me it must have been “The New You Asked For It.”  You could make the case that my own impressions were actually impressions of Rich Little’s impressions (a strange side note is that I worked with Rich Little in 1991 at the Sacramento Music Circus on a production of Little Me where he was allowed to do all his impressions during the course of the show).  Schoolmate Michelle Vien acquired a copy of this tape only recently and posted it on Youtube.  The most astonishing thing about it, save for the delight that we are actually all rather creative, is hearing my preteen voice.  I feel so removed from that time now that hearing my kid voice is almost a shock.

After Edwin Markham there is nowhere to go but onward to El Dorado High.  Schnell, Sierra and Markham are still the order of a Placerville child’s school days.  There was an eighth grade graduation ceremony where everyone dressed up.  All the boys were in ties, looking like little adults for the first time.  It was so hot that June evening that we all had sweat stains under our armpits.  The choir sang “Over the Rainbow” and the seventh grade members of the band played “Pomp and Circumstance.”  There was a big dance afterwards––made more festive than the others––or so it seemed.  You really did feel like you’d accomplished something, that you were big stuff, that you’d finally been released from the prison of school days.  Never mind that high school was around the corner––after graduation from Markham I felt as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.  Of course, you then feel as small as can be on your first day of high school when, suddenly, absolutely everyone in the upper classes seems years older and more sophisticated than you, but on that day of eighth grade graduation we were lulled into a temporary and joyous feeling that we ruled the world.

The "Michael Jackson Show" from Edwin Markham

The Last Straw

One of the great long running shops along Main Street Placerville from 1978 to 2001 was Val Sullivan’s “The Last Straw.”  Tom and Val Sullivan and their daughters, Kim and Kristin, were my neighbors, living on the steep Big Canyon Creek Road.  About the time I was seven, Val decided that simply being a stay at home mom wasn’t going to satisfy her enterprising nature and she tested the waters of opening a business with a small craft display positioned in the colony of artisans that made up the autumn craft fair of the El Dorado Orchards in Apple Hill.  My mother became Val’s partner in crime and they invented a name for the venture: The Last Straw.  This name was painted on a sign that adorned the folding screen setup of barn wood and hay bales and it was this name that forever defined Val’s businesses from then on.

The Apple Hill version of The Last Straw sold a variety of oddities, including a very popular hand puppet handmade by my mother.  The puppet was made of a plain muslin with bright yarn hair and sold with a box of crayons.  The idea was that you used the crayons to draw on your own face and wardrobe.  My mother sold a number of her paintings from her art school days and Val created dried flower arrangements.  The shop was only in operation on weekends and so in-between my mother would have to sew more puppets to keep up with the demand.  They tried the stand at a few different apple barns to see if business changed, but returned to El Dorado Orchards in the end.  At that time, El Dorado Orchards was the real pioneer in Apple Hill craft fairs.  As Val and my mother sat around waiting to sell something, Val began spinning her dreams of opening an actual store.

And so it was that Val took over the old Kay’s clothing store at 448 Main Street in 1978 and stuffed it with baskets, cards, nicknacks, dolls, dried flowers and a myriad of home decorative items of a country theme.  The blue tiles that defined Kay’s clothing store were covered up with wood from an old barn to further transform the shop into a warm and wonderful environment full of endless goodies.  There was nothing else like it on Main Street at the time.  My mother wasn’t a partner in the Main Street store, though she designed the logo used for the street sign, business cards and advertising.  For many years my mother designed all the shop’s newspaper advertising in calligraphy by her own hand.

The natural thing to do for the holidays was to fill up the shop with Christmas decorations and a forest of trees on which to display them all.  My mother became the chief tree decorator and took on the initial decoration duties at the Placerville shop and an additional seasonal shop at the Arden Fair Mall in Sacramento for years.  Once I was in Sacramento for college I worked many a season at the Arden Fair Shop as well as occasionally at the Placerville shop.  Val drove up and down the hill between the two stores, keeping a personal eye on everything.  She told me once that the Christmas business brought in as much money as the entire rest of the year and so it was natural that the emphasis on selling Christmas would grow into additional shops.

The Placerville shop kept growing like the Winchester Mystery House.  Val kept opening up sections of the large back room to make space for furniture pieces and a kitchen shop.  There was still an upstairs storage room that was maintained as such, but otherwise every corner was filled with floor to ceiling merchandise.  The Last Straw became quite a useful gift shop, whether it was for those unique kitchen gadgets, fine home decor, birthday cards or stocking stuffers.  And then there were the months of the Christmas wonderland kicked off by a special after hours party to start the season with good cheer and good commerce, featuring a forest of some fifty decorated trees.  The place always had a wonderful atmosphere to it––smelling of pine, cranberry and cinnamon.

In 2001 Val decided that the Placerville shop was no longer worth the effort and decided to establish versions of The Last Straw in other Sacramento area Malls such as the Galleria in Roseville, Arden Fair Mall and Downtown Plaza.  She was forever conniving to open other shops down into Fairfield and Concord.  More Christmas shops for the holiday season seemed like a good idea, but Val was personally overseeing all of these stores to the point of exhaustion.  It was an ordinary day of no particular significance that Val called my mother from her home to say that she was suddenly feeling strange and should be driven to the hospital to be checked out.  The doctors previously thought she had an ear infection, but she was losing her balance and knew something serious was going on.  My parents drove over to pick up Val and found her in a manic state––her hair standing on end as if she was electrified.  Val told my mother to hunt through her van to get some business papers to take with her to the hospital because she was getting ready to sign a deal to open a new store in Concord.  My Mom crawled around in the back of the van and found the documents.  Val’s daughter Kristin was called and would meet them at the hospital.  Val Sullivan never walked back out of the hospital.

Val’s illness turned out to be Creutzfelt-Jakob’s Disease.  The condition is a deterioration caused by the spontaneous mutation of protein in the brain.  The cause is unknown and the rare disease moves quickly and is fatal.  In the hospital, Val seemed hyper positive that the doctors would figure out how to get her through the illness.  My mother showed up several times a week to help Val with mind exercises to help refocus the direction of her brain power.  Val couldn’t answer easy questions like, “What color is the sky?” but she kept trying and told the nurses that if anyone could get her back on track it was my mother, because she had been a teacher.  She sat up in bed planning to give away her sale table items form the store as gifts to the doctors and nurses and seemed to have plenty of energy, but one day my mother showed up to find Val curled up in bed: “She suddenly looked one hundred years old.”   From the time my mother received that fateful phone call to Val’s death on September 12th, 2004, it had only been four weeks.

I was home that August for my Birthday and a short getaway from my home in New York.  While visiting Sacramento friends I decided to walk down K Street to have a look at all the changes.  I came to the Downtown Plaza, which I hadn’t seen in years and came across a surprisingly familiar sight––my mother’s logo for The Last Straw on a little shop.  There was a lady inside minding the shop, which was filled with glass items that had nothing much to do with the merchandise that typified the original shop in Placerville, but there it was: a Val Sullivan shop.  I wondered if that employee was aware of Val’s condition.  At that very moment I knew that Val wasn’t going to ever walk into that store again and that employee would soon be out of a job for that shop would have to close.  It was eery to sort of know the future while observing someone who had no idea how their world was about to change.

Today the Placerville shop has shed the barn facade to reveal the old Kay’s clothing store blue tile and now houses Placerville Antiques.  When I walk into that space now, I see the still recognizable features of the rooms and feel a certain ghostly impression of my childhood, for I was in that store so often and was on intimate terms with its growth, offshoots and people––all of which was as much a part of my growing up as anything fundamental you could name.  I can stand in the middle of the shop and feel for a moment a sense of all that went on there, but then glance around and see it as a most unfamiliar place.   Now with antique shops dominating Main Street, it would be welcome to have The Last Straw back for the sake of variety, but you’d have to have a Val Sullivan to really make it work.  She had an eye for finding intriguing and attractive things to sell and to pull it all together in a display that was rich and delicious.  The last time I saw Val she was visiting New York and we had a good meal together.  She wanted to know the best place to walk and see a lot of the good retail shop windows.  I sent her to Madison Avenue between 60th and 80th Streets.  She said, “I just want to see what they’re doing with their windows.”  I thought to myself that Val always knew what to do with her windows and Madison Avenue really didn’t have anything to teach her.

Val Sullivan and Joan Jackson at The Last Straw Christmas party.

Gay Teens in Hangtown

I graduated from El Dorado High School in Placerville, CA in 1986.  Gay history before 1969 and the beginning of the gay liberation movement was a dark and silent time.  During the 1970s the growing visibility of gay people may have been evident in the big cities, but everywhere else gay people were invisible.  Right at a time when a little more progress was starting to be made in the gay rights movement that dreaded disease, AIDS, showed up and spawned an insufferable decade of confusion for everyone surrounding health, sexuality, and civil rights.  President Reagan and our government were particularly horrible about handling the epidemic: information about the disease was unavailable or inconsistent and slathered in prejudice based on myths and misinformation.  Under these conditions I entered high school as a teenager who was rather sure he was homosexual by the age of 13.  A thin hope that it might be a phase got me to the age of 16 when I realized the condition wasn’t really going away.  From my point of view in small town Placerville, I was isolated by my “problem.”  I knew absolutely no one who was also gay, though I was smart enough to realize that I wasn’t the only one in the world and most likely not the only one in my high school, but there seemed to be no safe way of connecting with other gay teens to at least discuss our shared isolation.

Now as an adult who had a reasonably easy coming out during college some 20 years ago and lives in an era and community where being gay is not only accepted, but an asset, I wonder how I would have lived through the 1980s if I could only have known everything I know now.  And from there, my next wonder is how my experience of being a gay teen in Placerville in the 1980s compared with other gay teens...so I tracked down a few and asked them.  My subjects all graduated between 1984 and 1989.  I would say that overall our hopes, fears and eventual periods of becoming openly gay were similar, even though there is a variety of stark differences in our individual stories.  We all also recognize that although we are seeing gay teens coming out in high school now and generally having an easier time of it, there are still many who suffer greatly due to an unsympathetic family, church or community.  For all the good stories, there are still too many tales of gay teens experiencing horrific bullying and suicides.  Happily, my subjects survived the teen years without trying to kill themselves over it.  Maybe the silence caused by the AIDS epidemic or just small town life in general, actually helped us get through those years without too much trouble, all things considered.  We all got out of Placerville and into college and found our way into accepting ourselves and becoming happy people.

I’ll introduce the group by starting with the age each realized that he must be gay:  James came to the conclusion when he was 16.  Scott was clear about his orientation when he was 12.  Albert looks back and pinpoints the age of 10, though he describes it in fuzzier terms of a growing awareness up through high school and didn’t really accept himself as a gay person until he was 25 years old.  Brian was sure about himself by the time he was 14.  Arron was in college as the only man in his women’s studies class when it dawned on him that he was gay, though everyone in his family said they always knew.  Arron now half jokes that he wished someone would have told him the news a lot sooner.  So, all but Arron walked into freshman year of high school with a specific sense of difference between themselves and other students.  It’s an interesting feeling to deal with and causes you to view the world with a different lens:  there is the accepted and expected way that everyone grows up and starts dating, going to dances and anticipating an assumed path in life and then there are the gay kids going through all this and analyzing how it applies to them.

Keep in mind that “gay” was not in the popular culture very much in the 1980s and so the role models for how to conduct yourself as a gay person or to visualize what your adult life would be like nearly didn’t exist.  I do remember a very few clues that made an impression on me.  There was a movie called Making Love with Kate Jackson and Harry Hamlin that showed Michael Ontkean realizing he was gay after getting married.  Even though Ontkean’s character comes out and apparently finds a happy life and relationship as a gay man, the end of the film was melancholy.  Although the film taught me that there were handsome gay doctors who found healthy relationships in the end, they had to go through a lot of drama to get there and I was not encouraged by this.  I found more of a positive feeling about the prospect of a gay life with the musical La Cage Aux Folles, which depicted a gay couple of 20 years who had raised a son.  The song at the end of Act I., “I Am What I Am,” had the lead character demanding to be accepted for who he was.  I used that song when I was auditioning for college theatre programs.  It allowed me to voice something about who I was without actually coming out.

A few members of our group mentioned the TV sitcom Three’s Company as a small window into gay life.  Jack Tripper, played by John Ritter, was allowed to live in the apartment with two girls because he was pretending to be gay.  He wasn’t actually gay, but both landlords, Mr. Roper and Mr. Furley, accepted him as being gay.  In the 1970s and 1980s Jack Tripper wasn’t getting barred from housing the way real gay people sometimes were––his assumed sexuality was preferred.   Outside of the occasional gay episode of Phil Donahue, which usually showed how awful gay people were treated by society in general thanks to ignorant comments from the studio audience and callers, there were few examples of the gay experience to guide us.

My teenage view on what gay people in the outer world were like were mostly dark images of predatory men picking up others in seedy bars in a bad part of San Francisco or New York.  There was also that image of the effeminate dandy stereotype, which I discarded as a caricature.  James saw gay people as “...hairdressers and decorators, but that wasn't a bad thing.  I always thought that gay guys were just in the business of making things pretty.”

Informed by his religion, Albert had a very negative view of gay people as “Hell bound.”  “I imagined San Francisco as some kind of Hyronimous Bosch-esque Sodom and Gomorah. It repulsed me!  I moved to Europe in 1986, and met actual, nice homosexuals (friends of friends) to whom I could look for a friendly, deeper, and less stigmatized reference.  And although homosexuality was still fairly taboo in my circles, there was an understanding that it existed in all parts of society.  It could be joked about (usually those who actually had gay friends), but not demonized.”

The news in the mid ‘80s was filled with reports about the AIDS crisis and this was particularly unnerving.  First of all there was no treatment and you died from it in what looked to be the most horrible way.  Suddenly on TV, there was Rock Hudson giving a press conference that he had AIDS and he looked old, shriveled and nothing like himself at all.  And there was Doris Day standing beside her friend to help him through this very public and humiliating experience, but somehow it was comforting to see her standing by his side and his going public helped to change the general attitude about the disease.  Still, none of this news was good and it made being gay all the more frightening.

James felt that AIDS was always a lurking death sentence, but the pull of wanting someone to be with over-road the fear.  Scott remembers a cover of Time Magazine all about the AIDS virus being entrenched in the gay community and knew he was “one of those people.”  However, the threat inspired him to be proactive about promoting AIDS education when he went to college.  Albert feels that the fear of the disease kept his sexual activity to a minimum: “It probably got me through the high-testosterone years with a certain degree of my innocence intact: otherwise stated, it prevented me from becoming a ‘pig’... I was extremely careful nearly always.”

Brian, who moved away from home at age 17, started his first gay relationship with an older man who was HIV positive.  They were safe, but Brian was fairly uneducated about the disease at that time.  Arron became angry about the disease and funneled his energy into finding ways to do something about it: “I joined a local AIDS alliance as a peer counselor. I was matched with end-stage patients for day to day conversations. One of my matches, ‘Doug,’ wanted to go to the March on Washington to see the AIDS quilt and to see his partner’s panel.  I was humbled and envious all at the same time.”

My main goal in high school was to protect myself from possible harassment.  I knew that if I told any of my friends that I was gay––even if they swore secrecy––that my secret would not remain a secret for long and being treated badly or possibly being humiliated in public was my greatest fear.  I encountered evidence of this fact when a friend told me about how someone she knew looked at a private file in the doctor’s office where she worked part time and discovered a classmate was gay.  This person then started telling people and to keep the news a  secret.  Well, it wasn’t so secret if I was being told the story.  Clearly, the only way to be safe was to keep silent.

Most of the group said their greatest fear about being gay was not being accepted by family and friends, being marginalized or treated unfairly.  Brian didn’t cary this worry and even came out to a friend who shared the same news in return.  Scott also told a best friend who was supportive, but the rest of the group maintained their silence until college or even later.  For James and Arron, the issue was not part of their focus and didn’t weigh on them.  I would say that for the most part, the issue of my sexual orientation was just put on the back burner and I didn’t allow it to overwhelm me.  James describes a similar attitude to mine that he had plenty of projects and activities keeping him occupied and perhaps this helped to keep worrying at bay.  I was very active in theatre and this kept me both supplied with loyal friends and time consuming rehearsals for large chunks of a year.  From the spring of my junior year through the end of my summer after graduation I was in rehearsal or performance more than not and had very little time to dwell on the problem of being gay.

Scott was the only one of the group who interacted with his parents about the subject:  “I went to a Christian counselor at the request of my parents.  I was young.  They wanted to make sure I really was gay and not just experimenting.  At the time, I was angry, but I now know they just wanted me to be happy with who I was no matter what.”

One of my fears was that my parents might insist that I go to a doctor if they found out I was gay.  I just didn’t want to endure some sort of treatment or attempts to try to “cure” me, which is strange because I always kept this little hope through high school that the homosexuality would wear off if I simply didn’t act on it.  Part of me just thought that college was going to be a safer place to deal with it and quietly waiting was the key.

Like any teenager, the group harbored crushes on certain boys at school as well as celebrity crushes like Ricky Schroder, Jason Bateman and Michael J. Fox.  Actual sexual experiences among the group regarding other boys ranged from zero to being fairly active with both anonymous and acknowledged partners.  For Albert, any kind of sexual encounter was simply not an option though he did have a small outlet for talking about his crushes from a safe distance:  “With the other ‘gay-to-be’ in my class, I sometimes gossiped wishfully about handsome football players who had allegedly dabbled in mutual masturbation when they were drunk.  We were both more attracted to the objects of our gossip than to one another, so nothing was ever possible.”  This gossiping with a friend did not necessarily indicate to Albert that he was gay for his general upbringing had taught him that being gay was out of the question.

This brings me to the subject of when the group accepted themselves and began to come out to others, thereby owning their gayness.  Brian and Scott both jumped into gay life without reserve right out of high school.  Being 25 years old before he came out to himself, Albert then spent another five years to ease into a comfort zone in which he could finally come out to his parents by age 30.  The other members of the group all came out at some point in college with most starting by telling a friend and then moving on to a sibling or parent.  Arron’s biggest fear was telling his mom, but her reaction went better than he imagined:  “I told her at lunch at the Magic Dragon next to the Cinema Plaza on Placerville Drive.  Her reaction was priceless.  She looked at me, nodded, and then said, ‘Are you telling me this in person so I don’t make a scene?’  Oy.  Luckily, all was well. My marching orders were to not tell grandma.”

A few things needed to fall into place for me to feel comfortable about coming out.  First I knew that I had to also be prepared to tell my parents as soon as I decided to lift the silence––I didn’t want them to find out from anyone else but me.  I first told my college roommate, who I knew would be supportive and this was also necessary because I had a new boyfriend that I wanted to bring home.  I would have come out to absolutely everyone cold turkey, but the boyfriend was still living with his parents and particularly afraid of a volatile reaction from his father, so he wanted to keep our relationship hush-hush in the beginning.  I insisted that I was going to at least tell my family and started with my brother Mark.  Mark wanted me to wait to tell our parents when he could be there to be supportive.  So, just after New Years in 1990 when we were both home from college we all had the big talk.  My parents had to go through their own adjustment period, but the experience was good.  In fact, most members of the group reported that they wished they would have had the confidence to come out to their parents sooner.  Hind sight is twenty-twenty of course.

The idea of hind sight leads me to the question of how I would have handled being gay if I only knew all that I know now.  I’m not sure that I could have handled myself any better without a greater sense of support around me.  That is to say the assurance of TV shows like Will and Grace, Ellen or Glee, the general discourse being more positive, correct information about the AIDS epidemic and perhaps a gay teen support group either at school or a community center to help give me the confidence to be open about myself.  None of this was in place in the 1980s.  Just ten years after my graduation there was an El Dorado High School boy taking another boy to his senior prom.  He was unique in his day, but it shows definite progress.  Maybe I would have come out in high school too if it were 1996 instead of 1986.

“I was telling a friend how lucky kids are now,” says James,  “The internet has opened up their world...they can find things that interest them...and all of a sudden they can know they are not the only one who thinks/acts/feels/does something.  I look back and know if someone had told me they were gay I would have have felt less alone...if someone had shown interest I would have blossomed sooner...but I arrived at the place I needed to be at my own slow cautious pace.”

Scott doesn’t think teen life would have been much different had he been armed with his life experience:  “Being in a house with both parents as ministers, you always have some baggage, and not just about being gay––just your self image in general is lacking because you have this huge GOD standard around you all the time.”

Albert thinks having his adult knowledge about being gay would have allowed him to handle his teen years much differently.  For one thing, he would know that being gay wasn’t evil: “I know that gay has a place in society––previously derided for the most part, but now frequently revered.  At the end of the day, things have worked out all right, and I am glad to be the person I am today.”

I asked the group what advice they would give if they could have a heart to heart with their teenaged selves:

JAMES: “I would tell him to embrace love...enjoy his body...and to be an even brighter version of himself...he really was a shy scared naive kid.”

SCOTT:  “It's all fine.  Who you are is who you were meant to be." 

ALBERT:  “I’m not sure the  ‘me’ of the early ‘80s would be ready for most of the advice I would have now. He would probably ignore me, denounce me, or––depending on hormone levels––try to seduce me!”

BRIAN:  “I would tell anybody, looking back, the sooner you accept who you are inside, the happier you will be!!!!!!!”

ARRON: “I would say it’s a journey. Love your life.  Trust yourself.”

I would like to have been told to trust that people would love me regardless and that anyone who didn’t want to be my friend simply because I was gay wasn’t worth the energy to worry about.

If you search “My Coming Out Story” on Youtube you will find numerous teenage boys giving weekly reports on their coming out process today.  The world has indeed changed a lot since the 1980s, though these confident boys still have some of the similar fears and worries that we all had as teens.  They may be coming out earlier, but they still face the dilemma of not knowing what the reaction of their friends and families will be.  Fear of the worst always weighs upon them.  A main difference is that they are voicing their feelings very publicly.  They are not experiencing the same isolating silence we faced in the 1980s.  For just a moment, I wanted to go back in time and give a few gay teens from the ‘80s a chance to have a voice.  Even this far removed from those days, it is nice to know that we weren’t really alone.