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.