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Coming Out
at the
1964 World's Fair

This Spring marks the 50th anniversary of the 1964 World's Fair in the Borough of Queens in New York City.  The news media is currently nostalgia-hyping it as having been a generational marker for the Baby Boomer Generation, those of us old farts in our late sixties who were just coming of age back in 64.  For me, it was the time and place when and where I first came Out.  I was 15 and part of a goofy gang of gangly suburban teenagers who spent Summer Saturday afternoons at the stock-car races and laughing our asses off whenever one of us farted or thought of something stupid to do with straw in a cup of Coke.  We were just normal brainless good kids without the slightest idea that four years later some of us would be in boot camp training for Vietnam, or slinking across the Northern boarder into Canada to avoid serving.

The first time we went to the fair, Deik's dad drove the whole bunch of us there in his Volkswagen minivan.  He was a very indulgent patient man who could calmly endure a van full of shrieking silly stinky teenaged boys.  Two decades earlier, as  Jew during the Holocaust, he'd been in hiding in Amsterdam where making the slightest noise could result in being caught by the Gestapo and sent to one's death in an extermination camp in Eastern Europe.  Hearing us boys shouting and laughing in total freedom was music to his ears.

The New York World's Fair was a wonderland of rococo space ships, exotic foreign pavilions, science fiction ultra modern video phones, music, and a pavilion where you could drink as much free 7 Up as you wanted.  To this day, a half century later, I can't drink another drop of the stuff.  Anyway, we boys got hooked on the Fair and quickly found a hole in the fence, literally, where we could sneak in all Summer long, which is what we did nearly every week and sometimes daily.  We took the train in and spent our Summer days roaming the grounds, riding the rides, and imagining a future of flying cars and modern living that the exhibits foretold.  And being good perpetually hungry boys, we always left in the late afternoon to take the train back to suburbia to be able to be home in time for dinner.  This was long before cell phones, the internet, and texting; we could be gone all day, but our mom's knew that no matter what, we'd each be home in time for meatloaf and mashed potatoes bathed in gravy.

Late one balmy August afternoon, when it was time to go catch the 4:05 train back to the land of the suburban ticky tacky look alike boxes that we lived in, Charlie and I announced that we were going to stay and enjoy the fair in evening and watch the fireworks.  Deik and the others looked at us in horror, at the sacrilege of missing dinner, told us we were nuts, and left. 

Charlie, a Lutheran lad with a Midwest background, began a long monologue about himself as we strolled through the dusk at the fair in the evening breeze blowing off Jamaica Bay, arm in arm, perhaps as John Philip Sousa and Camille Saint Saëns had at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.  An hour later I began to get an idea of what he was leading up to and it terrified me.  He was coming out to me, and I had barely begun to come out to myself at that time.  Finally he told me that he was gay, and my throat went dry with anxiety.  After a very long pause, as the fireworks went off overhead, I told him, "Charlie, you're not the only one."  It was the first time I'd ever admitted, even to myself, who I was.

Just four years later in the Spring of 1968, the innocent bloom of our youth long gone, I was in boot camp becoming a man; and Deik was beginning a new life in Ottawa as a fugitive draft dodger.  At the height of the anti-war protests raging on college campuses across the country, I'd decided that it was time to pay my country back for my family's freedom and volunteered to serve my country.  Like Diek's, my parents were Holocaust refugees to America; its why we'd become friends.  But, we chose very different paths through life.  I was gay, he was straight.  I began a ten year military career and left the service honorably and proudly as a Sergeant First Class.  Deik, a retired streetcar driver, remains a proud Canadian citizen.

Oh, not to worry, Charlie and I had both dropped dimes into pay phones, that Summer Afternoon in 1964, to call our moms and let them know that we would miss dinner because we were going to see the World's Fair fireworks.  From that day on, Charlie and I remained close friends for decades, until the day he died of AIDS in 1990.

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