Rick and I continued our relationship from the ending months of 1967 into the spring of 1968.  We left “my” apartment on Maxwell Street and moved to an apartment far off-campus–”our” place.  It was the first time either of us had tried to create one life out of two, and of course, being children, and at very different places in our lives, we discovered the road was rocky.  In 1968, Rick still had two more years to enjoy the womb of university life, while I was staring at my impending “birth.”  I was scared.  There was talk of winding down the war in Viet Nam, but the draft was still hungry and I knew I would be immediate cannon fodder without my student deferment. Only 19, Rick thought he was ready to settle into a permanent relationship.  He was an artist whose mental atmospherics were starkly different from my own, neither knowing nor caring very much about the world of politics and war.  On top of that, he had chronic asthma, so he knew compulsory  military service would always be out of the question for him, his future was his alone to plan and pursue.  As time passed, my attention to our relationship diminished as my fear of impending personal doom increased; the differences in our immediate expectations of life became too great to sustain the relationship, and we parted, very badly, I fear.  (It was only many years later, when we found each other after a long silence, that we were able to understand those differences and forgive each other for them.  We were literally at cross-purposes and too young and stupid to realize it at the time.  It was healing for us both to learn that.)

In the meantime, Jim Knowles’s riveting descriptions of his life and work in Morocco convinced me that the Peace Corps, an idea I’d found intriguing since its introduction when I was 15, was worth a serious pursuit.  It would fulfill two purposes which I thought complemented each other:  Peace Corps service would allow me to serve the country in a positive and honorable way at a time when America needed friends badly, and it would be another draft deferment.  I knew it was highly selective–it could afford to be, since the draft was chasing many other young men besides me towards deferrable alternative service.  Getting into the Peace Corps, then, became two things for me:  a matter possibly of life and death, but also the achievement I would view as the pinnacle of my life thus far.  I called the Peace Corps 800 number (it’s still the same) and asked for an application.  (Recruiter?  Never saw one.)

Since I had lolled away the minutes so effectively as a college student, giving myself plenty of time to explore my precious personhood by carrying only 12 hours per semester–the minimum to retain official student status–but skating along mostly on French conversation classes and choirs academically, (that’s one way to make the Dean’s List!)  I found myself several credit hours short of graduation when that time, June, 1968, rolled around.  The classes I needed were not offered during the summer session, so I would have to return to Kentucky for one more semester in order to complete my hours, thus graduating in December of 1968.  After Rick and I broke up, I stayed in the apartment we had shared and contemplated the prospect of free-agenthood for the remainder of the year.  Jim Knowles was back in Atlanta, having completed his Peace Corps service, and I saw the opportunity to deepen that relationship with actual face-to-face conversation instead of letters, for the first time since we had met.  It was something we both  looked forward to.   The mutual admiration society we had formed years earlier was intact and I anticipated long hours of non-stop, fascinating talk.

And that was all I anticipated.  For all of the intensity we had shared in our long correspondence, the idea of a relationship with Jim Knowles that was anything but cerebral never entered my mind and he had given me no reason to believe that he felt differently.  When I finally took the plane  to Atlanta, things started out just as I had expected.  We had a great dinner and then went to the theater–comedy–the hilarious review “Beyond the Fringe.”

And then things got more complicated. We went back to Jim’s apartment and he poured a couple of nightcaps.  The conversation was as fluent as ever, until he stopped me short and said he had something important to tell me.  In an uncharacteristically halting, tentative manner, he got it out that his feelings for me went past the merely cerebral.  On top of that, he was 27 years old and I was the first man about whom he had ever felt this way.  Are you surprised?  I was, and immediately of two minds about this sudden turn in the relationship. I was immensely flattered, yes, but I had never felt what Jim and I had between us needed physical expression.  There was no way, though, that I could dismiss this otherwise articulate man’s stammering, tender admission.  This was a huge step for him, and it required honoring.  So I let it happen.  If this was what Jim needed from me, it was the least I could give, after all I had received from him.  To him it was a logical extension of our closeness and I was able to see it that way, if never very passionately.  At the same time, we both sensed that our lives would never lead us to the same geographical places for very long, so the idea of setting up house together on some permanent basis was out of the question.  We would always be free to pursue other relationships, so while this was a surprising and complicating development, the implications were limited and therefore comfortable.  Jim Knowles and I were now–what?–long-distance lovers?  Whatever you want to call it, we remained intensely involved in each others’ lives for many years to come, especially where the Peace Corps was concerned.

And so, thanks to Lou, began my grand adventure into Life.  On a very tiny scale, I had become what we call now a rock star.  Total strangers greeted me on campus and in the streets.  Lou’s eclectic group of friends, still more  beautiful losers into whose welcoming embrace I fell as naturally as breathing, were attracted first to the singer and then, lo and behold, to me!  Several of them, both male and female, were making themselves clearly “available” to me.  Lou saw my lack of response to any of these overtures and gently asked me, in effect, what was up with this celibacy in an otherwise red-blooded 21-year-old.  She gave voice to my homo-emotional yearnings and made me acknowledge them, if only deeply, to myself.  At the same time, while I was emotionally tugged towards my own gender, for public consumption I seriously tried dating a few girls.  Those experiments ended quickly, as they should have, before too much emotional damage was done.  The girls were fun, but there was no romantic spark.  I saw I wanted intimacy, but not with them.  I had to admit to myself that what I needed was a boy.  Once I crossed that threshold, things happened fast.

Les was one of Lou’s friends.  Black Irish, pale white skin, black hair, heavy beard shadow, piercing blue eyes, stunning.  Nineteen-going-on-35.  He sat across from me at one of Lou’s sloe-gin parties, completely self-possessed, unselfconsciously staring at me.  It was clear he had designs.  I dropped all pretense and decided he’d be the one.  On some pretext we went to my old rooming house down the street–the landlady had let me keep the key to the room Dave Knowles and I had shared–and the deed was done.  That room finally served the purpose it could have but never did when Dave and I were in it.  I was “brought out.”  The lights came on in my life.  My long, self-imposed oppression vanished and I felt a ton lighter.  I joined the human race.  In the simple act of letting go, of submitting to who I was, I discovered indescribable joy.  I was 21, and it was a springtime as sweet as they come only in Kentucky.  Somewhere a national gay liberation movement was being born, but I was unware of anything on so grand a scale.  My own liberation was enough, and as far as I was concerned, I invented it.

My on-again, off-again relationship with music and entertaining began an “off” phase, and it set a pattern that has followed me through my life.   At times when I was alone, between relationships, I turned to music.  When I was with someone, music took a back seat.  It’s ironic, because in most cases it was the music and that entertainer persona that attracted people to me.   When they got me, though, usually they didn’t get much of the music.  In this particular case, simultaneously coming out and ending the Nexus gigs with Lou were a logical complement to each other.  Lou was determined to launch herself as a professional entertainer that summer of 1967, and begged me to quit school and go with her.  Newly ecstatic and smitten with life as I was, I still had enough sense to know that my student draft deferment was making all this joy possible, and that if I quit school, it wouldn’t be to sing in some lounge in Ohio, but to carry a gun in the rice paddies.  So after that short, glorious burst of music and local fame, Lou and I went our separate ways.  She got an agent and followed her star.  I wallowed in my newfound completeness and looked for a boyfriend.  (Les turned out to be merely the means to an end.  I was a but a notch on his already very marked belt, but at the same time he gave me the key to life.  Despite our short time together, he remains of paramount importance in my life’s pantheon.)

The best pickings were among my friends in the university music department, and it was there, at a party, that I found Rick, the boy who would be my first serious relationship.  We were good for each other in ways that inform our lives to this day–we are still good friends forty years later.  Among many other things, I had my first truly cross-cultural experiences with him and his family when I visited them in their home.  They lived  deep in a holler in the hills of Appalachia, in eastern Kentucky.  In religion they were holy rollers, and in life they were surrounded by both the glorious scenery and the grinding poverty which up to then I had seen only in black-and-white television documentaries.  Rick was a piano major and a public performer nearly from birth; he had first played in church and had spent his younger years traveling the Church of God circuit in a family gospel quartet.  His folks owned the grocery store in town, so they had some money.  Rick’s concert Steinway grand had a place of honor there in the house in those hills.  Among the myriad things Rick gave me, I have always seen a connection between the learning I did through him in eastern Kentucky and the same kind of learning I did in the Peace Corps.

Through all these changes, my intense correspondence with Jim Knowles continued.  At the time, he was still serving with the Peace Corps in Morocco.  At some point I screwed up the courage to tell him of the enormous adventure upon which I had embarked, and he was oddly non-committal about it.  Not judgmental in any way, to be sure, just “understanding.”  He made it clear that he’d already known a lot of gay people via his theater experience, and the fact that I was one of them would never threaten our friendship.  I was relieved, and the matter wasn’t revisited.  At least for a while.

Music inched its way into my life during the rooming house period with Dave Knowles.   He became very good at picking out improvisations on the guitar, and we worked up a couple of duets, with me on voice and rhythm guitar and Dave embellishing the product beautifully with high-flying harmonies.  We did an open mike session at the campus coffee house, called Nexus, and were invited back for a real gig, but we never worked up any more songs, so never took up the offer.  I also did a little bit of solo work here and there, but again, never really worked up a repertoire to take anywhere.  The reason for this hesitation was the Viet Nam War and its faithful supplier of  fresh meat, the draft.  If there had been no military draft, no need for me to stay in school with a student deferment and thereby avoid becoming cannon fodder, things may have been different, even that early.  But self-preservation took precedence over all, so music remained peripheral.

But that was about to change.

Even though I was still deeply fond of Dave, I had no trouble accepting the loss of his daily presence in my life when he moved to the fraternity house.  I was grateful, in fact, to be released from the responsibility of looking out for him and even from the obsession that my feelings for him had become.  I saw a chance to branch out on my own, and followed my musical instincts to the Kentucky Choristers, the premier singing group on campus.  Membership was by audition, and if you got in, the twice-weekly rehearsals were considered classes for credit, an automatic “A” on your transcript.  The group was peopled almost exclusively music majors of every stripe, but my good voice got me in.

(An aside about my academic career is in order here, for my university years were really not about academics at all, and a mere parenthetical passage will will get them out of the way.   I switched from major to major literally every semester until my junior year, when–this being before the day of the undeclared major–I had to choose something and stick with it in order to graduate.  I never once tried music because I thought it was “impractical.”  This is hilarious considering the impracticality of my entire “academic” pursuit.  I ended up with a French major because French was the line of least resistance–I was so good at it virtually no work was required on my part–and besides, my French conversation teachers were cool.  They made a living sitting in front of small classes directing scintillating conversations.  What role models!  Who wouldn’t want to do that?  In the end, French did two things for me.  It was my ticket into the Peace Corps, and because of it I am intimately familiar with the entire repertoire of the great French singer, and eternal gift to humanity, Edith Piaf.  For those two never-ending benefactions alone I am grateful to the French language.  But it never earned me a penny.)

It’s fair to say that my present life began in the Kentucky Choristers.  For a while I stuck with my old pattern of shyness, always afraid of something, this time of the men in the choir who were eyeing me with undisguised delectation.  There is no question I was a gay boy in the making, but at that point I still had no social reference points in that arena and my natural inclination was to gravitate to boys who were physically attractive in some way, and smart, but quiet outlyers like me.  I was probably hoping deep down that some guy would make a move to consummate our “friendship,” but of course they were as shy and as cautious as I was–that, after all, was what made them so “safe”–so the chance of that happenening was zero.  I latched onto a guy in the Choristers, Will, another non-music major, to replace Dave Knowles as my “special friend.”  Will was from West Virginia, the son of a Baptist preacher who in retrospect I can see was probably a genuine closet case.  We were both much too afraid, however, of our own basic natures to act on what our bodies and minds wanted.  So we became close platonic friends and eventually roommates.

A highlight of my entire university life was a train trip the Choristers made to New York City in January, 1967, to perform the American premier of Wilfred Joseph’s Requiem at Carnegie Hall.  Will and I at this point were joined-at-the-hip “buddies,” so obviously exclusive to each other that we were, no doubt, the talk of the choir.  It was fear, of course, that kept us so exclusive, but by adopting attitudes of  haughty disdain for the silliness in which everyone else was indulging, we protected each other from the inevitable temptations on the train and in New York.  We also missed out on a lot of fun, but that was the price we had to pay.  We had each other, and that was safe.  But on the train ride back, something happened.

It turned out a girl named Lou Spencer had had her eye on me ever since I joined the Choristers.  I had noticed her–she was attractive and seemed funny–but otherwise had made no note.  She was spending the long hours on the train ride home singing folk songs with her friends and invited me to join them with my guitar.  We clicked immediately.  Lou didn’t have her eye on me as a potential boyfriend, but as a singing partner.  She was ready to quit school (this was the second semester of our junior year) and try her hand at a professional singing career, and needed someone to do it with.  When we got back to Kentucky, we were together every spare minute working up songs, developing a repertoire, and deciding on song placement for shows.  I found myself back at Nexus auditioning with Lou, and we were an instant, huge success.  We quickly developed a following for what became bi-weekly appearances.  This all happened in the blink of an eye, the matter of six weeks at most after returning from New York.  In this much time I had gone from being a shy nebbish to the object of admiration and sexual speculation on the part of all genders.  It was a thunderous revelation.  Long before Sally Field uttered the words, I lived it: “You like me.  You really LIKE me!!”  A ham was born.  And, thanks entirely to Lou’s gentle counsel, so was a gay man.

And Jim Knowles was a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco.

Swimming in the warm waters of Knowles family approbation was comforting indeed.  As loving and as good providers as my own mother, father, and older sister were and continued to be, we all took each other for granted within our own family, which I suppose is the norm.  When we know each others’ warts and all, it isn’t easy to see past the routine and into what makes each of us special–at least, that wasn’t in the dynamic of our family.  Welcomed into this new family as a virtual member, I developed separate relationships with all three:  Jim, Mrs. Knowles, and Dave.

When Jim got back to Atlanta from the visit during which we met, he began a correspondence with me that continued more or less unabated for the next thirty years.   Jim Knowles prodded my intellectual development, asking me probing questions and telling stories about his man-about-town life in Atlanta with great humor and style.  At the same time, I never felt as though I was being taken under his wing.  He assumed he had found an intellectual soul-mate in me and used me as a sounding board for ideas he’d never shared with anyone else.  I was immensely flattered and rose to the challenge, reacting to his musings with those of my own, discovering attractive alternative ways of thinking about some big life questions that I had never considered.  Jim’s influence on the development of my mind and of my own self-awareness is immeasurable.  He started in me a love of long and probing conversations that has never abated and remain special in my experience because they are so rare.  He also spoiled me forever as a correspondent.  The advent of email has made no difference to me:  to this day, I treat mail that  is sent in an envelope with a postage stamp and email as though they were exactly the same thing.  No matter the form, there is always the promise of rich communication.  If I make a new friend via email there is always the hope that the correspondence will reach the heights it did between Jim Knowles and me.  I’m always disappointed, because others see email as a mere tool of convenience, but my expectations never die.  I have this gold standard which I know must be attainable again.

Mrs. Knowles, for her part, established her own relationship with me, also via letters and the occasional phone call.  She was overjoyed that her younger son had fallen in with the paragon of…well, I don’t know what, exactly, but it was good….she took me for and subtly put me in charge of Dave’s social development.  She wanted to make sure I would look after him and keep him on the right path.  The big question in the Knowles family at the time was whether or not Dave would join a fraternity.  The University of Kentucky, with its southern traditions and the free-flowing liquor that permeated the local culture, had a reputation as a party school.  The family sense was that Dave was walking a fine line between a responsible young adulthood and a debauched one and could fall either way.  I was just the straight arrow to keep him out of harm’s way.

Of course, the irony of all this faith in me and the subsequent responsibility is that this paragon of virtue, this straight arrow, was falling obsessively in love with Dave Knowles.  What I knew about myself and did not share with any of the Knowlses was that I was a churning, needy mess inside.  They assumed my avoidance of the party culture was based on principle; the truth was that I was hopelessly inept in that kind of social atmosphere and had an absolutely atavistic fear of those super-straight, hormone-driven boys; the fear being  that I’d be unmasked as…”not masculine.”  That’s all I called it.  There was definitely a sexual element to my attraction to Dave, but to myself I never categorized my feelings for him, emotional or physical, as anything at all.  I just knew I needed to be with him.  All the time.  We ended up rooming together in an off-campus house for a semester, and for that time we were inseparable.  Dave didn’t date much–he never had much self-confidence along those lines, although he did come home with stories about girls he’ d see around campus who interested him.  I tried to match him because that was the thing to do, and once or twice we double-dated, or I’d go out with a girl, and he would, and we’d come back to our room and compare notes.  I hasten to stipulate that nothing ever “happened,” either with the girls or between Dave and me.  If he’d given me the slightest indication of physical interest I’d have jumped head-first into that stream, but he never did.  And even if  he had,  I know I’d never have given the resulting relationship a name.  I had no notion of “gay,” and the word “queer” and the ugly images it conjured had no resonance with me at all.  As far as I was concerned, Dave and I were just “special friends,” in the great suppressed homoerotic English schoolboy tradition.  To borrow from Talullah Bankhead, I was as pure as the driven slush in my intentions.  I happily took on the job of trying to convince Dave that fraternity life was not for him.  As long as he stayed out of the frat house, he was with me in the rooming house, and that was the extent of my concern.   I hypocritically waved that banner was Mrs. Knowles had put in my hand.  “Straight and narrow.”

But nature must out.  In spite of my high-minded efforts and the dearest hopes of his mother, Dave became a “Greek.”  His move the next semester into the fraternity house spelled the end of our sojourn, and I set off on my own.  I visited him frequently in the house but the closeness we’d had was gone.  I stayed in occasional and loving contact with Mrs. Knowles, and Jim’s and my intense correspondence continued unabated.  In 1966, he told me he was thinking about joining the Peace Corps.  I was 20.