Book One
A Mile-High Saga was the culmination of many years of writing poetry, journals, an autobiography, and several novels. After I moved to Denver, CO, in March of 1991, from Colorado Springs, I began to consider writing some sort of autobiographical novel based upon my past interests, experiences, and profound disappointments in life. Since I had gotten a job at the IBM site north of Boulder, CO, my drives to work each morning from Denver, over 30 miles each way, each day, gave me plenty of time to reflect upon my life, about the mistakes I had made, the disappointments I had had to overcome, as well as what I had wanted to accomplish in the many years I had left.
Years earlier, in the summer of 1984, I had met an Air Force Academy cadet named Paul on the Pikes Peak Cog Railway. He had been eyeing me repeatedly at the gift shop on top of the mountain and out of doors on the summit itself. After I had noticed his apparent interest in me, my friend Dino and I returned to the train for the descent back down to the Manitou station. We quickly found an unoccupied car and sat down. But here this young, tall, stocky man was, entering the next car, being trailed by a man who was likely his father and a young woman whom I would soon learn was his sister. He glanced up and down the interiors of the connected cars, saw me sitting in the next car, and walked directly toward where Dino and I were. He sat across from me while the young woman sat next to me. Soon, however, as the train began to move, he switched seats with the woman and was now sitting next to me. He then rhetorically asked his sister what SCUBA stood for. Being an old SEA HUNT fan, I sensed that he was not asking her but me--a way of initiating a conversation. When she failed to come up with the answer, I interjected, "Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus." For the rest of the trip, we ignored friend or family alike and talked the entire time only to one another. But soon the station was near and I had no means of conveniently giving this young man my phone number, having given away my last business card the night before to some guy at a bar who would never call. At the station, I could think of no solution to this dilemma. Soon, he was getting into their car with his family and I was getting into my car with Dino. I wasn't even certain that he was interested, though Dino immediately assured me that he must have been. But they drove off and then we drove off, and that was that.
It became one of those profound, and lost, moments in one's life when someone who might have become an important component departs, and you never see him again. All else after that becomes the means for disappointment and regret.
You see, it had been a few years before that, in 1979, when my own Air Force career, teaching at the Academy, was destroyed by another cadet who had outed me to the Air Force's version of the FBI--the OSI--the Office of Special Investigations. Finally, in 1994, a decade after meeting Paul on the Pikes Peak Cog Railway, and a decade and a half after my Air Force career had sadly ended, I finally needed to tell my story in a particularly unusual way.
While writing the novel, I was also struck by the notion that it should not be written in the past tense, as so many novels are (He fell. She laughed.), but rather in the present tense (He feels himself falling. She laughs.). I felt it gave the RAoF novel a greater sense of immediacy, as if events were happening as the reader was reading them. Neither of my two editors, technical writers such as myself, voiced any concerns about this choice. However, after the novel was published, I received some interesting feedback: A few readers expressed the difficulty they'd had in adjusting to the writing style for several chapters before they finally got used to reading present tense and were comfortable with it (or at least tolerated it). Of course, I cannot say how many readers may have started reading the book, became frustrated or upset with the style, and abandoned the effort altogether. I may never know how many potential readers of the entire series I lost before it even got going. Sometimes a writer's instincts can be the wrong ones; sometimes not. But RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE was off and running with A MILE-HIGH SAGA, and I was now a prisoner of its intense pull on me. And that pull would only increase as the next ten years passed and an entire series of ten volumes took shape.
With President Obama's State of the Union speech, gays in the military is still a current topic. Even when the current "Don't Ask; don't tell" policy is overturned by whatever means--and that DADT compromise was not meant to be permanent--GLBT service personnel will still have a long way to go before they achieve full equality. Many may still choose to remain in the closet while they serve. If you fail to get a promotion, was it because your superior was a closet bigot and gave you poor reviews? It's no different from the civilian world in that regard. And, of course, your life can still be in jeopardy even when DADT is overturned. Even if the president is behind your openly serving, even when the senior military leadership is behind your openly serving, even when your friends and family are behind your openly serving, you still have *all* of your peers and their individual and collective reactions to be concerned about. When I served, we had to attend Race Relations and then Human Relations training and sensitivity classes for all of those years. Yet the services were racially integrated in 1949, the year I was born, by President Truman. Full equality does not occur over night, even when official policy changes for the better.
RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE: A MILE-HIGH SAGA:
"...a creative and uplifting tale of a Denver gay superhero...."
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