I have had this dream before but not since I have lived in California.
Of course, Dick Tuttle did not own a glass house. He owned a townhouse, within a complex of a dozen or more townhouses, half facing the street, the other half facing the long, rectangular courtyard within that contained a small pool that no one ever seemed to use. There are two such townhouse complexes on Pennsylvania Avenue in Denver, one on either side of the street in the block between 9th and 10th Streets.
In the top photo above, Dick Tuttle, 42, leans against the kitchen counter top. In the top and bottom photos, former cadet Dan Stratford, 21, sits beside the dining room table.
I believe I took these photos one weekend when I was staying with them in Denver. When I returned to Colorado Springs, the following day another officer and I drove to the Academy, I was speaking with a few other English Department instructors when Col. Shuttleworth entered the cubicle, asked me to accompany him, and I would meet the OSI, which effectively was going to end my career.
Dan and Dick had already formed the first gay relationship I had ever been aware of. That morning when I took the photo, I was in awe of that relationship, hoping some day to find a similar love of my life.
Dan's story at the Academy is told in the late Randy Shilts's book, CONDUCT UNBECOMING, Chapter 14, pages 326-7. (My situation was briefly mentioned in that chapter but I was unnamed.)
Dan and Dick's love affair began when Dan was in his junior year at the Air Force Academy. He was a guest of an invitee to a party Dick was having in his brand new townhouse in Denver. They met, sparks apparently flew, and Dick took him to an unsold townhouse in the complex and they made love on the carpeted floor.
Dick once told me another story about the time, also in Dan's junior year when cadets could not own a car, that he opened the front door on a Saturday morning only to find a freezing Dan, standing there in his Academy uniform. He had hitchhiked all the way from the Academy to Denver on a very cold and snowy and windy day, just to spend the weekend with Dick.
Their surreptitious affair continued for months but blossomed when Dan, like so many other senior cadets, picked up his brand new Chevy Corvette at the factory. He now had a car to drive himself back and forth from the Academy to Dick's townhouse. Unfortunately, Dan did have outside affairs. He was attracted to older men, and many older me over the years found this hunky, compact blond very attractive.
He had, in high school, once seduced his father's business partner in Scranton, PA, before he got to the Academy. Somewhere along the way, he'd had a brief affair with a Canadian attache. That affair resulted in a revealing letter to Dan from the attache, a letter Dan fatefully kept in a private drawer in his Academy room (a room he shared with a suspicious, homophobic and ultra-religious cadet).
Somewhere along the way, during Christmas and Spring breaks, Dan had traveled to New York and later to Dallas, among other cities, enjoying the bars and gay life there. I even heard that Dan, in his Corvette, got picked up by a trucker on the highway to Dallas and had a hookup in the cab of that trucker's semi.
So Dan was not always fully faithful to Dick. And Dick did not expect him to be. Dick told me on at least one occasion that had he demanded total faithfulness, he would likely lose Dan for good.
Soon after Christmas, 1978, Dan Stratford came under investigation by the OSI (Office of Special Investigations) because of that attache letter and because his suspicious roommate thought that it had to be very gay to visit such cities as New York and Dallas on one's school breaks.
Dick Tuttle was even approached by the OSI at work about his relationship with Dan. He indignantly refused to cooperate and ordered them out of his place of work, Stearns-Rogers Engineering.
Dan was still deeply in love with Dick, so they had to devise intricate ways to continue to spend weekends together in Denver. Dan would drive his Corvette to the house of a friend in Denver, park the car in a garage. Get into that man's Cadillac, scrunch down on the floor in the front seat, and be driven to Dick's garage. Once the garage door was down, Dan would exit the Cadillac, go up the interior stairs to the townhouse above, and they would be reunited.
With the investigation in full force, and Dan's friends Bill Ryder and George Gordy also being question by the OSI, Dick got Dan a civilian (and gay) attorney, Richard Boomes (whom I would also use in my defense later that year).
The only thing that the OSI could pin on Dan was associating with a known homosexual, the Canadian attache, based upon the incriminating letter. But that was enough. Dan agreed to resign his commission upon graduation. He would be able to get his diploma but that resignation would end his Air Force career.
When his fellow cadets were graduating, and I was in attendance at the Academy football stadium, Dan was moving in with Dick. I would visit them on several occasions over the years, including wonderfully catered parties they would give in their townhouse. Dan would take his annual Christmas vacations in Hawaii, without Dick, and he would have his brief affairs there; but he would always return to Dick and their townhouse. (My mom and I actually stayed with Dan for a couple of nights in one of the condos he rented when he was on vacation because we could not find a hotel room and Dan was generous to allow us to stay with him--and he was island hoping for a couple of those nights anyway.)
Toward the end of the decade, however, Dan was being courted by an older man in San Francisco, where Dan had always wanted to live. I remember Dick telling me that this man had brazenly called the townhouse once when he himself answered and Dick angrily told the man to stop calling Dan there.
(Dick, of course, had at least one notable affair that I knew of. It was at one party where I saw the hot Air Force enlisted man whom Dick was infatuated with. They sat on the couch with the two of them hugging and kissing noticeably as the party proceeded around them. Dan was standing not far away but with his back to the comingling. That affair eventually ended but not after several months.)
It was late in the decade when Dick began to get sick. He told me, as he did everyone else, that he had liver cancer. Even in 1989, he did not want to admit that he had AIDS. Dan had the choice to leave for San Francisco or stay. He stayed. On a couple of occasions, I drove to Denver to remain with Dick on a Sunday afternoon while Dan went with friends to Denver Bronco football games at the original Mile High Stadium.
On those occasions, Dick and I would reminisce about the past. Dick indignantly told me how he was going to write an angry letter to the Reagan Library, a regular donation he had been making, to say that he would no longer support that effort if Reagan did not increase funding for AIDS research.
I reminded him of the morning at the Governor's Park restaurant, on the patio out front in 1980, that he ought to be wary of voting for Reagan for President that year. He opined that Carter had not been good for the economy and Reagan would do wonders. Dick was going with his pocketbook not his political bent. (When I told him that I believed the branches of the military would eventually allow gays to serve openly--I was wildly premature when I said 5-10 years would be the timetable--he was skeptical that it would ever happen in his lifetime. He was right, of course.)
(BTW, it was during this time that Dick and other homeowners on the block decided to purchase the empty corner lot across the street and turn it into a beautiful mini park.)
I visited Dick at Porter Hospital one weekend. That was the last time I saw him alive. He didn't look nearly as bad as some men I would see in those terrible years. But he told me he'd advised his sister that he was prepared to go. The next time I stopped by the hospital to see him, his room was empty and I was told that he'd gone home to be visited by friends and family before he died. He died in 1989, the same year Dan's cadet friend George Gordy died. Dick, being a veteran, is buried at the Fort Logan Veterans Cemetery, in Fort Logan, CO. I have never visited his grave, and I did not attend the funeral.
I did visit Dan at the townhouse where he was packing up everything for his move to San Francisco. He had sold his investment condo in a high rise not far from the townhouse, and Dick had willed the townhouse to Dan, which Dan also sold. Dan also got the beautiful Jaguar sedan Dick had recently bought.
I remember asking if there was something of Dick's that Dan would not mind parting with so I could remember him. Dick looked around and found a small ceramic owl and gave it to me. Someone had given it to Dick a few years before because Dick loved owls. He'd even found a dead snow-white owl on a fence and had it stuffed.
At some point when my first two books were out, I had a reading and signing in San Francisco at A Different Light. That weekend, my friend Wilfred Benitez and I had brunch with the man whom Dan had moved to the city to be with. Dan had died in 1995, just before the cocktails became available. His ashes were scattered on a favorite mountain pass in Colorado, a name I no longer remember.
Willie Benitez, a classmate of Dan's at the Academy, paid to have a memorial to Dan at the Air Force Academy; but he later told me it was a great deal of trouble and, last I heard, the memorial did not yet exist. Willie at some point remade his life and jettisoned many of us friends, including his partner, from his life, so I cannot confirm other details of which Willie would have been aware. I doubt if the older man, who was in his late 60's when I met him in the late 1990's, is still alive.
The character of Eleanor of Aquitaine in THE LION IN WINTER says, "There are no written records or survivors."
The Captain in THE SAND PEBBLES says of the attempted mutiny, "It is not written down. It is not history if it is not written down."
Of the two photos above, I think of Emily in OUR TOWN who says, "Just for a moment we're together. Just for a moment we're happy."
No relationships are perfect. No relationships are without their bumps and bruises. But Dan and Dick's relationship was the first of its kind I had ever encountered in life. They were there for one another when it mattered, for over a decade of time from 40 years ago. It had lasted until Dick's death a decade after I had met them both.
I always have wondered, though, whatever happened to the framed Academy sword that Dan had given to Dick before graduation, whose inscription had read, "Dick, Thanks for Everything, Dan."
