From the SMU Jones Film & Video Collection, a report by KERA, the local PBS station, on some lesbians and gay men living more or less openly in the Dallas area in 1984, and the antigay officials at Southern Methodist University who had a problem with that. It may be hard for youngsters to realize how very different the world was back then, but just the fact of seeing real, live homos on TV was still shocking to many straight people.
(Just so you know, SMU is a very prestigious school, often considered part of the unofficial Southern Ivy League. It's located in the top-drawer Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas, and is home to the George W. Bush Presidential Library.)
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Disussion Question: A commenter on this video says, "You’ve gone from, 'We’re just two people that love each other and want to be accepted' to indoctrinating kids in school with drag queen story hour."
Frankly, I see a great big difference between responsible adults and impressionable little children. I'm not on board with the drag queen story hour idea. I say there's something very insidious about that. But I'm an old man with no power to control anybody, not even M.P. -- oh, certainly not M.P!
Beach forecast: sunny, warm, and studly. Kenneth Carson, Galveston, May 14, 1938 -- one of Walter's many friends.
Something different this week: a poignant series of photographs of handsome young men at the beach and elsewhere, taken between 1937 and 1941. The photographer, who appears in some of the photos, was one Walter R. Ferguson, who apparently had a job that enabled him to roam the South as "your TAFT representative," whatever that means. He stayed in very nice hotels, too.
The photos record his travels, first to seaside towns, starting with Jacksonville, Fla., and westward along the Gulf Coast to Beaumont, Texas. Next he shows up in St. Petersburg, Fla., and Miami, then travels up the East Coast all the way to Norfolk, Virginia. The following year, he visits Charlotte, Birmingham, Jackson, and Dallas, then goes up to Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville in Tennessee. And meets studly guys everywhere. And they gladly let him take their pictures!
It's obvious that Walter was good at striking up friendships wherever he went; he must have had a charming personality. The smiling young men he photographed seem to be enjoying his company, too. Apparently, nothing more is known of Walter and his friends, but the photos seem to tell a story. What do you think that story was?
Fascinating artifacts from the the Smithsonian Institution trace the stories of gay Americans, famous and obscure, from the 1800s till today in this 2024 documentary. It's fairly good, though as is so often the case with such broad summaries, it sometimes glamorizes and dramatizes a bit more than is necessary - but worth watching anyway.
We've come a long way, baby; I just hope I don't live to see the pendulum swing back the other way. But it can and does sometimes, as history has shown many times in many places.
It bugs me when people talk about being on "the right side of history" - that's a misnomer. What they really mean is the right side of the future; but the future is unknown and unknowable. It hasn't happened yet. And there are no guarantees in this universe.
All we can ever know for sure is this little stepping-stone of time we live in - the present. So make the best of it.
Is it okay to be gay and over 30? A 2008 documentary explores gay attitudes to aging, featuring several notable gay writers and activists. I may add my own thoughts later.
I hadn't planned to run a series of gay documentaries on the Blue Truck, but I guess YouTube finally figured out that I am gay and is now pushing a lot of these in front of me. This one is an HBO documentary, first aired in May 1984: a very different time for gay people. Video quality is not great, but it's watchable, and still relevant to our experience in many ways.
By the way, the gay man in the screen shot below, identified only as Tom in this video, was Dr. Tom Waddell, founder of the Gay Games.
For the record: In 1984, President Reagan was starting his fourth year in office, the word condom had never been said on television, and the AIDS crisis was a growing menace, still largely occurring in the big, far-away cities. What we had heard about it down here was damn scary, but what caused it and what to do about it were still uncertain. There were no antiviral treatments, so the diagnosis was a death sentence. The term safe sex was not yet in common parlance. Rock Hudson's diagnosis was not made public until a year later, a few months before he died.
If you want to revisit the plague era, here's a compilation of gay-related clips from the NBC news archives spanning the whole decade. In some ways, it was a very different era; in others, not so much, maybe. We still have to deal with the haters and the homophobes, who nowadays are constantly inflamed by social media and fanatical "news" channels - but at least for now, the law is on our side. I sure hope it stays that way.
A moving, enlightening documentary by Emmy Award winner Kate Kunath, released in 2019. From the YouTube description:
The battle for LGBTQ rights hasn't only been fought on the streets of coastal cities; it has also taken place on the dirt roads, campuses, and in the homes of rural America. In this new short documentary‚ released 50 years after the Stonewall riots, which brought LGBTQ rights into the national consciousness‚ gay men living in central Tennessee, and their families, share stories of struggle and self-acceptance. We meet the retiree who spent his entire professional life in the closet, his devoted partner of 20 years, a pastor determined to overcome his own prejudices, and the pastor's gay son, newly in love and just starting to come into his own.
The location is Centerville, Tennessee, about 60 miles southwest of Nashville; Nashville is the home of Vanderbilt University, a large, prestigious private college.
The journal Foreign Policy reported on February 18, 2022, that U. S. intelligence has said that Russia has drawn up detailed target lists of Ukrainians to be arrested or killed, including journalists, religious and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQI+ people.
Dr. Fauci has made a name for himself with a new generation in the fight against Covid-19. But gay men of my generation have always remembered him as a hero of the fight against HIV/AIDS from the start of the plague, when damn few people in public life had the compassion or the guts to stand up for us, and we owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
News of the plague didn’t reach me and my friends in the Deep South until November of 1981 – forty years ago. I could tell the story of how we dealt with it in my neck of the woods, but as I spent much of the 1980s sequestered for work reasons in a remote small town, living like a monk (mostly), my story is not particularly interesting or eventful. As with most other things in modern life, the plague as a distinct reality arrived down here several years later than it did on the coasts.
It was a long time before we really knew what we were up against, and in the meantime there was fear of the unknown to live with. Eventually, having gotten a job in a city, I volunteered to work at a phone bank as an HIV/AIDS counselor for four years, so although I wasn’t on the front lines in a big city, as the era is often portrayed in movies and documentaries, I felt good about doing my small but useful bit in the fight against the plague.
And of course, as in every war, there were the casualties. Among others, I lost my best friend to the plague; I paid someone to make a quilt with his name on it, which I sent to the National AIDS Quilt and got to see it displayed on the Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1992. That was an overwhelming experience – all those quilts, all those names, all those deaths. Around 1995, I think, the drug cocktail that effectively suppressed HIV was finally found – too late for some, but a miraculous lifesaver for others.
Another thing not always mentioned by reporters is the great support given by many lesbians to gay men who were afflicted – another collective debt of gratitude we owe. Tragic and devastating though it was, the plague in a large way unified the gay and lesbian community across the nation in a fight against a common enemy. And the just-let-them-die attitude of the Reagan Administration certainly raised the political awareness of many:
I guess all I want to say is that I lived through the plague years, I mourned my dead, I did my bit, and now it's History, a remote era, something schoolkids skim over in dusty books - a story already told. Except that there still is no vaccine for HIV, let alone a cure, and I really don't understand why that is. But the answer is probably over my head anyway.
You still pays your money and you takes your chances - that's life, isn't it? Hope for the best, plan for the worst, and enjoy every happy moment as if it were your last, because it may never come again. There are no guarantees. That's all I can say.
It's June 26, a very gay day indeed: the anniversary of the Lawrence, Windsor, and Obergefell decisions.
Steve Hayes reviews the groundbreaking film version of the 1968 play, which portrays gay life as it was fifty years ago (OMG has it really been that long?): before Stonewall happened, when the closet doors were still shut tight, "gay pride" hadn't been thought of, AIDS was nonexistent, and gay marriage was an entirely whimsical thought, as unreal and implausible as time travel.
As it happens, a summer revival of the play, with an all-gay cast, is running on Broadway now. I have no desire to go to New York, but I hope somebody films that production - it would be fascinating to see what the current generation does with it.
I was in high school and had only recently put the words homosexual and me together when I first heard of this film. I think it played a single week in the city where I lived, but I would have sooner jumped off a cliff than go see it back then: both for the fear of being seen and identified as "one of them" as well as the fear of actually meeting "a homosexual" - homo, homo, homo - I actually used to pray that God would never, ever let me meet one of those awful, horrible, depraved people, who would surely tempt me to sin, and ruin my salvation (already in tatters due to my constant, ever-failing battles with - oh woe is me! - the deep, dark, godless sin of masturbation).
Sounds so silly now, of course: but at the time, it was a deadly serious thing for a young, isolated gay boy who knew what he was and hated it with every breath. That kind of fear and self-hatred is something straight people never go through - and I have yet to meet one who really "got it." It does bad things to you inside. Really bad. Some guys didn't make it. That could have been me, too. Or you, perhaps. But as my truckbuddy Frank remarked to me the other day, we managed to live thought all that, we are survivors - and that is surely something to be glad of.
I finally came out a decade later in college, and yes of course I had already shed all that fundamentalist crap - but between all that and the bullying in school, and the constant fear of being "found out" I was badly injured - as I know so many of my truckbuddies were too. A stupid, awful, inhuman thing to put people though - for no good reason whatsoever. I was about to rejoice that all that is history - but is it really? We only had to deal with bullies in person back then - now there are cyberbullies and all sorts of public invective on the airwaves that wasn't possible in those days.
And the scars still hurt. They will always hurt. Like the pain of losing a loved one. But life goes on, regardless of all your hurts, and in time you just learn to make the best of things. Nobody gets through life unscathed, though some work really hard at hiding the fact.
One more note: when I finally got to see the video, say around 1985, and also found a copy of the play in a used book store, I was struck with how true to life it was, and still is - kudos to playwright Mart Crowley, a fellow Southerner, now 82 - a microcosm of the gay world that still rings true to me. I don't mean the clothes and the music and the slang, which are ever-changing, but the way gay people talk and act among themselves, when there's no need to "butch it up" or mind your manners or pretend to be straight - which for the men of my generation and before was, and still is down here in the provinces, our automatic default mode in public.
I saw the video again a few years ago, and while this time I didn't see the ending as being quite so bleak and depressing as I had the first time, I still thought the dialogue, the essential gayness of the characters was spot on. Because human nature in general does not change, and by corollary, the sub-category of gay nature does not change, either - that's my view of things. (If human nature were not a constant, we would have changed into some other kind of critters long ago. But human nature is the same from age to age - just as is dog nature, cat nature, monkey nature, etc. - all capable of infinite outward variations, yet inwardly still the same.) But another thing that straight people don't get, unless they are very wise indeed, is that gayness is not only about who you sleep with - there's a nature, a character, a spirit, a whatever-you-call-it that comes with being gay, that is part of the package.
No, I don't mean effeminacy, necessarily - oh stop it, Mary - I have known (in both senses of the word) bricklayers, truck drivers, doctors, lawyers, football players, and Marines, none of whom had a touch of nelly queen about them, though they probably thought I had more than a touch, sometime or other. But there's a certain beingness, for want of a better word, that I recognize in other gay men, butch or femme, or somewhere in between. I mean a certain ambiance, if you will, a certain way of encountering the world and looking at it. A certain attitude and rhythm of being that is neither straight-guy nor straight-girl but something else again - a third mode of being that partakes of both the others, but is itself, by itself, complete, and not merely an imitation of the other two: something else again. Something that is neither good nor bad but just IS - and is no strange thing, but simply belongs here in this world, like any other part of nature, human or otherwise. We just are. No explanation or justification needed.
At least that's how it seems to me, but I'm afraid I have neither the vocabulary nor the patience to write out a full exegesis of gaiety at this time. Instead, why don't you fellas just go watch the video again, and I dare you to come back and tell me you don't see yourself in at least one of the characters, or several, or maybe all! At least, you'll be reminded of one important thing - it's so so so important in this preachy, self-righteous, broomstick-up-the-ass modern world to be able to laugh at ourselves. That too is an essential part of the human condition, and one we disown at our peril.
PS - I don't presume to speak for all the other letters of LGBTQIXYZ and whatever - they can certainly speak for themselves if they please. I can only speak of what pertains to my existence and experience on this planet. And of course my existence, my beingness, does not in any way preclude theirs. I really, really don't want to run anybody else's life; I simply want everybody else to leave me the hell alone and let me get on with mine, on my own terms, and not those of some puritans of the left or the right.
For several months now, your Head Trucker has been reading and re-reading a wonderful book, and struggling to find the words to describe it. The reasons for the struggle are various: for one thing, since late summer life here has been full of sundry and boring domestic, financial, digital, and physical crises that have kept me alternately upset or immobilized. And then there was the election, for chrissake. Sometimes life is just one damn thing after another, you know what I mean, fellas?
For another thing, despite the book's lovely, impeccable writing, it so often moves me to tears or makes my heart double-clutch with recognition that I have been able to read only a few pages at a time before having to close it up and set it down again. It's that good: them old Greek boys you may have heard something about in lit class between daydreams and snoozes held that art should be the mirror of life; and this book is a mirror indeed, polished to a high sheen and often casting a glaring, dangerous light into shaded nooks and crannies of the author's soul, and even into my own, it seems.
The book is Did You Ever See a Horse Go By? by my longtime truckbuddy Frank De Francesco, and though it is his first and only book to date, it is well worth the cover price: a little gem of a memoir that I recommend wholeheartedly to all my other truckbuddies and readers. Frank says, "While I'm not sure the world really needs another coming-out story, I feel deeply the need to tell it."
I think the world does need this particular story. In her well-known essay "On Keeping a Notebook," author Joan Didion wrote that the reason for recording her memories was to "Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point." Because, she said, "We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were." And of course we know what happens to those who forget the past.
Frank's book recounts in exquisite detail the fears and feelings and fantasies, the loves and lovers, the guilt and shame, the confessions and repressions, the one night stands and the long-term commitments, the lost and the found, the hopes and the terrors of coming out at age 36, after many years of sheltering in a devoutly Catholic closet in New England. How odd, then, that his memories, feelings, regrets, and joys should so well parallel all that I went through in my fundamentalist Protestant closet down in the Deep South. And yet not so odd after all -- what Frank is really writing about here is not merely his coming out, his life, his memories, but the human experience of being gay and alone and afraid of so many things: censure, rejection, failure, despair, the acid drip of loneliness. All men and women since the world began have endured, or at least feared, these things, for such is the nature of sublunary life: it is not good for the man to be alone. But certain exquisite pains and torments are reserved for the gays, or were.
And he writes about it all very clearly and concretely, with smooth, careful cadences that lead the reader through some fearsomely honest revelations, which normally one might confide only in one's closest friends. But that's what this book is like: a comfortable conversation with an old and trusted friend, patiently explaining the real reasons why he did whatever it was he did, trusting that you in turn will listen and understand, not laugh or turn away.
Frank is a very brave writer; I could never be so brave. It's not that I have forgotten anything, but that it's all still too close, too vivid in my memory. After all these years, the scars of battle on my soul and on my heart are still too tender to bear much touching. I admire Frank for the courage and the toughness of his writing, which I am sure was not easy. But somehow he was able to bare his soul to the reader, as all great writers must do sooner or later.
We who were born in the first decade or two after the last world war have been privileged to witness a remarkable period in human history, when homosexuality went from being "the love that dare not speak its name" to being publicly affirmed, even celebrated, by the President, the United Nations, and just about every major city and (who would have thought?) major-league sports team across the country, while same-sex marriage went from being a laughable fantasy to being enshrined in constitutional law by the Supreme Court: truly a breathtaking phenomenon when you stop to think about it, and all within the span of one ordinary lifetime. Sometimes I can hardly believe it myself.
Frank says of his motivation for writing the book:
For me, the value in telling my story here, beyond the healing, is to preserve a tiny slice of collective history--to document what it was to be gay and to come out in a particular time and place. I want to remember all the others who were there along with me, creating our lives together and defining our sexuality as we went along. My hope is that others find some value in that as well.
I'm quite sure that everyone who reads the book will find that value. It's a fine book, beautifully written and deeply moving, which I hope will find its way into the hands of many readers.
P.S. I forgot to mention all the candid sex scenes, guys. Those are good too, yessir: real Adults Only stuff. No, I'm not putting you on; go buy the book and see for yourself.
M.P. and I just discovered this Netflix series by accident last night, and OMG we laughed and howled until it hurt. The cast is stellar - Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen, and Sam Waterston - and the writing excellent. Do check it out, fellas - you'll be glad you did.
BTW, your Head Trucker remembers the first time he ever saw a gay character in a movie was in 1972's That Certain Summer, starring the late Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen as lovers. The movie portrayed them in a sympathetic light, which was shockingly radical at the time. Quite interesting to see the thoroughly heterosexual Sheen return to a gay role at this late date - which he performs brilliantly, I think, as do all the lead actors.
A fascinating compilation of news clips from the 1970's about those strange and scary social deviants who were popping up everywhere it seemed - the dreaded homosexuals. Really brings home to my mind how far we have come just in my lifetime.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
CAUTION: For mature gay men only beyond this point. Some posts and links may not be suitable for children or the unco guid. You have been warned.
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My Story
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
Note, 9/15/26: For the past week, Blogger has not updated most of the posts in this sidebar. I don't know what to do about it. You can still access the websites below by clicking on the titles of each one.
