Merry Christmas everyone!

We went all out this year to decorate the house like crazy for Christmas.  

When we were kids, my sister and I, our dad would often before Christmas, drive us to either another part of town or a neighboring town to Whittier, CA, so we could see streets where the entire block would decorate their houses spectacularly for the holiday season.  Cars would be nearly bumper to bumper, viewing the spectacular light shows back then.  

So it was with pleasure and memories of past Christmases that we decorated the front and back of the house so specially this year.

"How terribly strange to be 70."

From April 1968, one of my all-time favorite albums.  The lyric above is from the song "Old Friends".

Difficult to imagine that as I listened to that album in the Spring of that year, 51 years later I would hear that lyric and realize it now applied to me.

Randy Shilts and his books

I am certain I have mentioned before that I am referred to (though not by name) in the late Randy Shilts's history of gays and lesbians in the military, Conduct Unbecoming, Chapter 34, page 327, in the subsection about Cadet Dan Stratford.  I am the unnamed instructor who was "cashiered".

Back in 1992 or, possibly, very early 1993, I spoke on the phone with Randy, at least twice, while he was researching his study.  Only in the recent biography of Shilts by Andrew Stoner pictured above have I learned that Randy was becoming quite ill with AIDS as the book was nearer to completion in 1993.  He had intended to interview me in person; however, when the time approached, I was told it would be an assistant who was coming to Denver and that I should meet with him.  I offered to drive the assistant to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and we set off.  But for whatever the reason, as I explained my story in more detail, it became clear that the assistant's time was short and, as we arrived at the Academy, he explained that he really had to get back to Denver.  So we never got to put place with incidents at the physical site of Dan's and my humiliations.  I am not certain, but it may have been that my own story was not going to make the cut and the assistant soon realized the fact as we drove South.

Ultimately, I also read in the biography that his editor at St. Martin's Press, Michael Denneny, and the assistants, were forced to help finish the book, even so far as Michael actually writing a few of the last chapters.  So that is why I never was able to meet with Randy in person.  Shilts was also too ill to go on a book tour or to attend in person interviews on most TV shows to promote the book after it was published in May of 1993.  Besides, Dan Stratford's story was likely the more compelling, reading in depth about a 21-year-old cadet's dismissal rather than a 29-year-old instructor more than a decade earlier.  

Because he had edited Randy Shilts's books, it was to Martin Denneny that I sent my own autobiography manuscript in the late 1980's.  While he kept the manuscript for several weeks, it was eventually returned to me, rejected for publication (while smelling heavily still of cigarette smoke).  St. Martin's Press was also where I got my friend at the time, Dino, to later call and get the first volume of Rainbow Arc of Fire: A Mile-High Saga reviewed with an eye to publishing it.  

I was later told by Dino that the editor was impressed with the book, an woman assistant was also impressed, and focus readers also gave high marks to the passages they read, enough to consider submitting it further up the St. Martin's Press chain of command.  However, eventually, we were disappointed to learn that publishing was contracting and that the other divisions of St. Martin's were in competition as to which books would be published and which were rejected.  If a gay novel were published, that would mean a book from another division would not be published.  Even though the editor wanted to publish my novel, it was rejected at a meeting of all of the divisions.  The editor, which I do not believe was Michael Denneny at the time, said not to worry, that my novel would be published by someone, just not by St. Martin's.  

Unfortunately, while gay publications had reached a fevered pitch not much earlier that decade and the 1980's, that, too, was now contracting and I would not find anyone willing to publish the novel.  Time had passed me by.  Had I finished and circulated the novel a year or two earlier, all the difference might have occurred.  Like so much else in our lives, timing can be everything.