Fifty years ago, three months shy of my 23 birthday, I stood with my family at Logan Airport in Boston prepared to board my flight to California where, after finishing my college course work a semester early by taking summer and evening classes as well as my daytime ones, I had a permanent substitute teaching position in Richmond, across the Bay from San Francisco, that I had arranged in lieu of the final semester student teaching assignment as I would not have that semester.

I had gone through a Catholic elementary school with the old style nuns, went on to a junior seminary, novitiate, and two years of Philosophate (major seminary with an attached accredited college where Philosophy was the major) all of which were heavy on judgment, and, knowing that student teaching involved constant and minute judgments, I chose the permanent sub route where judgment may be constant, but you are left on your own unless you really screwed up. I opted for the less overt judgment. 

The school was a private Catholic school run by an order of priests and brothers with whom I was very familiar having attempted to join the order but found it was not for me.

Richmond is across the Bay from San Francisco, but in those days I had yet to connect the dots and San Francisco was a place of tourism and wonderment, not a place for the life I could have gotten involved with. Being there when I had just recently rejoined the world after the seminary and, although having a vibrant social life during the period between leaving the seminary and this point, my time was taken up with college, a job in a liquor store, trying to learn what life was like on the outside, and learning who I was beyond all previous expectations of mine and others that had brought me to this point while experiencing teaching in a classroom for the first time.

Although I assumed I would follow the norm, i.e. job, marriage, house, kids, etc, and assumed my thoughts regarding sex were the same as any other male, I was unconsciously dealing with the acceptance of my true self and realizing that some of what comprised my assumptions that my thoughts were the same for all males that would have me find the right woman, were actually the unrecognized signs this was not meant to be as those thoughts were not universal but were indicative of something else..

For me, the City by the Bay was tourist attractions on Saturday. I saw them all and then some as my location made me not a tourist.  

I was a working tourist and saw much of the Northern part of the state as well as the Southern.

During the Dust Bowl, many Oklahomans who went west ended up in Richmond, so my first classes of my career included a number of descendants of those people who still harbored the assumption that they would eventually go back. Many of my students were the children of the little “Okies” that had come to the Bay Area with their parents. They only knew the stories.

Thirty-eight years later my Teaching career came to a close in Oklahoma, ironically after that initial need for self discovery living on my own a continent away from family and friends that began with Okies at the beginning of my career and me not knowing who I was yet learning and me leaving the profession sure as hell who I was,.

Book-ending by coincidence as what happened between was often a matter of rolling with the punches, especially those self-administered by conscious and unconscious decisions.

I have to admit, in all honesty, I committed every mistake a first year teacher makes that semester, and in retrospect after years of teaching, as I recognized then, I had made them all and got them out of the way for the most part.

That position led to positions in New York, Massachusetts, a second and better California experience in Los Angeles, and the final act in Oklahoma.

Eventually I connected all the dots and retained a degree of residual resentment that I had to figure the dots all out for myself as my environments never included people who could help connect them, so, although coming out to family did not have the horrendous response of rejection and exile, it became very obvious that my idea of being Gay was too influenced by the traditions and upbringing of my heterosexual world, so I made plenty of mistakes even after I came to accept myself.

It should have been easier.

For most of the people I knew the suddenly becoming Gay out of nowhere thing was confusing and a bit hard to accept at first, the ‘It’s probably just a phase” reaction for the most part, but it was not sudden. It was a little painful as I realized I had not gone through my early adolescent years as a Gay person the way Heterosexual peers simply went with the flow.

I had established myself as an effective union officer, and it became my “mission” to use what tools I had developed to make this connecting of dots less difficult for those like me. 

In subsequent years, I instituted educational programs for my students, advocated for my students and fellow teachers as a union officer in each town, city,  and state in which I taught, advocated for the ignored and demeaned Gay students, became the official cartoonist of the Los Angeles teacher’s union, and educated a train load of kids.

It was not always easy as the nature of school board elections introduced the possibility of educational abuse begun by those who, while not in the classroom, saw themselves as experts in what happens in one. 

When allowed, most often after a battle with the adherents of the educational status quo, I got to start a sheltered workshop as part of my Special Education classes in one town, began using video with my Special Education students in Los Angeles that became a city-wide program, and successfully advocated for all the letters of the Rainbow Alphabet in another, the one where Okies saw and had to deal with the finished product of who I was.

I got to be the official cartoonist of the Los Angeles Teachers union, UTLA, and helped lead a strike with my cartoons.

In the career started 50 years ago, I got to be an Assistant Band Director marching in two St Patrick Day Parades in NYC, was the Illustrator of college text on American diplomacy, the creator of a Special Education Sheltered Workshop, the first Emcee on Quiz Kids Boston Public School Cable TV, helped begin the Video in the Classroom Program for the L.A. Unified School District, along with my students was the subject of a Case Study presented to California legislature concerning use of video for Educational purposes an original staff member and founding faculty member of College Academy, Framingham State College, Instituted the videotaped morning announcements at Taft Middle School in Oklahoma City, Assisted in designing an environmental curriculum for OK Dept. of Environmental Quality, and successfully advocated for inclusion of every students in the Rainbow Alphabet before retiring.

In my career I met many people in many parts of the country that I got to meet, not because of design, but by accident and that rolling with the punches thing.

I got to Direct a Church Choir, be emcee of annual community fundraisers, had a turn as President of Stoughton Teachers’ Association and later on the board of the teachers union in Oklahoma City, and in Los Angeles was chair of the union’s subcommittee on Gay and Lesbian Issues when it became a full standing-committee.

I got to be a member of OKC band which performed at Clinton’s 2nd inauguration, was on the committee of Cimarron Alliance Group in Oklahoma that helped get a more liberal governor elected, served time on the OKC GayPride Committee, was founding member Oklahoma Stonewall Democrats, and winner of Irene Tyson Memorial Award for public service OKC, the Cimarron Community Service Award, and the Angie Debo award from the Oklahoma ACLU.

My teaching positions allowed me to be a member of Gay Men’s Chorus in Boston, Los Angeles, and Long Beach CA, the last two being instrumental in my having comfortable, though not deep friendships with political and entertainment celebrities. 

I got to march and rally for multiple causes directly or indirectly connected to education and the rights of workers and students.

And throughout I did my best for my students. 

Nothing that happened during the career or even now in the years between retirement and now that brings the total time span to fifty years, was something that happened because it was planned.

Never got the wife and kids, but did get the house, had one once for a short time and discovered I was a horrible homeowner.

Never met the woman to marry and with whom to have children like most of the peers I thought I was just like. That turned out not to be me and the State would not allow for my getting married as myself.

Met more people than I would have ever imagined meeting and had close associations and friendships with many as opposed the few I would have gotten to meet and know if things had gone according to the general script.

And the career ended with me sliding into base and not taking the walk.

After twelve years of advocacy that included harassment from administration, a wrongful dismissal, and a court case to get reinstated and showing the district’s evaluation system for teachers was routinely abused for administrative advantage which in my case was to kill the messenger and silence the the message that sexual orientation and gender identity count when it comes to students and they should be as protected as the heterosexual students. 

Fifty years after this uninformed future Gay Man left San Francisco, I returned as part of a trip that brought me to Oklahoma City to be at the University of Central Oklahoma where my Oklahoma related artwork and the legal papers dealing with the advocacy, the court case, and the subsequent addition of the words “sexual orientation” and “gender Identity” to Oklahoma City Public Schools’ student policies had mounted a retrospective of my career, my Gay Rights activism, and the legal struggle to get inclusive language into school policies on the day the display opened.

When I arrived in San Francisco, my intention was to go to the school where my career began, but that would turn out to be the least important reason for me being there.

I found my way to the LGBT Community Center on Market Street intending to simply “check In”. It seems to be just the standard procedure when a Gay Activist comes to town, to make initial contact with a Center to find out what is going on in the community to be less of a tourist.

More a part of the collective.

I showed up at the Center a welcomed stranger, not as the person who had been in the city 50 years ago before the Center even existed as even in that City Gay rights were still a work in progress and Harvey Milk was yet to be elected to the City Council, but as the man he had become.

I was standing in the lobby after getting a tour of the facility as a Gay Man, a proven advocate of Gay youth, and a teacher who had made the lives of Gay students that much more positive.

I had done well as my Gay self.

After reciting my curriculum vitae and my accomplishments, especially the reason for my trip, Timothy, the gentleman who had given me the tour of the Center gave me something  extremely meaningful.

I tried twice to explain the whole full-circle thing but was overwhelmed by the emotions that welled up, It took two weepy tries.

He leaned forward and embraced this accomplished Gay man in a warm hug which let the 23 year old naive person that had been me know that I had done well.

It was the acceptance of me totally for who I am and what I have accomplished, and that hug was so powerful and welcoming that the 23 year-old had to go outside with his 73 year old self and break down in unabashed tears that life had come full circle and that hug signified that.

Perhaps it was simply intended to be a nice hug, a friendly hug, but in reality, it was the sign that the naive kid who could not connect the dots had come full circle and was welcomed for that not only by others, but, more importantly, himself.

Everything in the previous 50 years, even the negatives which were turned to positives, had served a purpose.

So thanks to anyone I taught, knew, worked with, lived with, attempted a relationship with, was an activist with, who sat on the bar stool next to me, marched in a parade, sang in a chorus, helped hold a huge banner, and took their lumps along the way with me or like me, from the highest celebrity to the homeless men I discussed philosophy with in Long Beach while sharing their wine, about which I asked no questions, before taking that first step away from there to Oklahoma.

Whatever the motivation for the hug, the meaning takes precedence.

I got that hug.

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