I'm not sure now how I acquired the fatigue jacket that I wore quite often when the weather was cold. Visiting the cemetery became almost an obsession. And sometime in 1969, I believe the summer of that year, I fell into a terrible depression. Whether it was because of the war, or because of my being gay, or because I seemed to find myself attracted to conflicted guys like James, or straight guys like Daylin or Pat, or a combination of all of those problems, I did not believe I was going to find happiness. And while I was safe in college, young men my age were dying in Vietnam and being shipped home in boxes, to be buried in cemeteries such as Point Loma. The guilt was tremendously oppressive. Just as the guilt would be oppressive more than a decade later when men my age were dying from something just a terrible, just as isolating.
Because of the draft in that era, even if I kept up my college deferment until I graduated in 1971, I was still going to have to make a decision about the war and military service simply because the war seemed to have no end in sight. I never imagined myself actually explaining that I was gay when I did go for my mandatory physical. Besides, I might get a punitive deferment that could prevent me from getting a job. Besides his other problems, Dave Moore even drove up to Canada in early 1969, thinking about leaving the United States so that he would not have to serve in Vietnam.
That summer of 1969, between East LA and Cal State Dominguez Hills, I didn't have much motivation to do much of anything. The world seemed so hopeless, the future bleak. I finally pulled myself out of the morass sometime that fall, but it was a long, hard climb out of it. Mike tried to help. So, too, did Dave Moore when he returned from Canada.
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