HeyDenver flyer for RAoF book giveaway

 RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE   is a team of Denver gay superheroes.  They were created back in 1994, when the author, Gregory Earl Sanchez, who volunteers here at HeyDenver, became angered by the passage of Amendment Two in the 1992 election.  This team of heroes has evolved over the years to include more than the original team of six, formed by the fourth volume in the series:  Greg, Paul, Marina, Joan, William and Joseph.

For those of you who visit HeyDenver to get tested on a regular basis, every three months or so, you'll have a chance to collect each of the eight paperback books in the series, beginning with AUTUMN SAGA, the second volume, from mid May until mid August this year.  From that point on, every three months, when you visit HeyDenver at 1720 Pearl Street in Denver, you can pick up the next volumes in the series, also for free: 

RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE:  AUTUMN SAGA (mid-May to mid-August 2012)

RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE:  SOULS WITHIN STONE (mid-August to mid November 2012)

RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE:  WORLDS BENEATH US (mid-August to mid-November 2012)

RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE:  SLIGHT OF MIND (mid-Nov. 2012 to mid-Feb. 2013)

RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE:  HARMONY OF SPHERES (mid-Nov. 2012 to mid-Feb. 2013)

RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE:  WHO HAS DOMINION? (mid-Feb. to mid-May 2013)

RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE:  A HOUSE DIVIDED  (mid-Feb. to mid-May 2013)

For those who have collected volumes 2-8, you will get a free copy of the first volume in the series:  RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE:  A MILE-HIGH SAGA, now a collector's item, as long as supplies last.  (Volumes Ten, SHATTERED DAWN, and Eleven, OLIVE BRANCH, are only available as amazon Kindle editions.)

To learn more about the author and the series, visit:  rainbowarcoffire.blogspot.com

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Photos of the cemetery VI

We were having problems with my camera.  Ann fixed the problem by removing the memory card.  She took this picture of me in the front seat of Aunt Jean's car to see if it worked again.

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Photos of the cemetery V

From the front gate to well beyond the Visitor's Center, offices, and restrooms, they installed more flags than before.  Here are just a few.

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Photos of the cemetery IV

A woman sitting at the overlook with her mother offered to take our picture, but she hit the video instead.  When she finally figured out what to hit, this is the picture we got.

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Photos of the cemetary III

Ann and Aunt Jean from the overlook.

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Photos of the cemetery II

The main offices and restrooms and parking spaces are directly below.  The large white canvas cover was for spectators.  The smaller one, just a bit farther, was to protect participants from the hot sun.  The day was not nearly as warm as usual.

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Photos of the cemetery

The cemetery has a high overlook with a large American flag at the top, where my Aunt Jean stands in her floppy hat. 

My Uncle Lloyd is buried below in the upper grassy area at the top of the photograph, near the funeral shed where services are held.  My Cousin Doug is buried in the large section, near the point of the triangle, just this side of the rock drive and the large rock parking space at the upper portion of the photograph.

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Memorial Day 2012 program

For the past five years, my sister and I have driven my Aunt Jean to the veteran's cemetery in the San Joaquin Valley where her husband and son are buried and where she will be buried when she passes.  This year they were honoring the USAF during the ceremonies with the above program and the appearance of an Air Force honor guard and the Air Force Golden West Brass Quintet that played musical numbers throughout the ceremonies.  

We leave her house by 8:00 AM and arrive at the cemetery usually well before the ceremonies begin, typically at 11:00 AM, though they were delayed again this year because of traffic.  We stop at the same rest stop along the way, and after we have placed flowers and flags at the various graves, we usually have a late lunch at Andersen's Split Pea restaurant by the freeway exit and entrance. 

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Enlarged photo of 737-200 wing at sunset

This is an enlarged photograph of the 737-200 wing at sunset.  It looks clearer than the earlier one I used.

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Original photograph of Pat

They obviously reversed the image and cropped it before utilizing it in the campus magazine.  We only published one edition.  It didn't sell particularly well, but I was happy to have a few of my poems in print.  The guys I worked with on the magazine were very different than I.  A couple of them had been in the service.  All of them wore their hair long while mine was definitely short.  In our first meeting on campus in one of the empty classrooms in the old campus building that had been built as an apartment complex and would be used that way when the main buildings on the main campus across the street were completed, the others closed the door, took out a joint, lit it, and began to smoke.  I was offered a puff but politely refused.

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Two more poems with Point Loma cemetery in the background

All of those photographs I took at Point Loma came in handy when we used this one as a backdrop to two of my poems, inspired by that military cemetery.  Below are the two poems since at least a couple of lines are obscured either by the shadows of one of the headstones or the trees.

Post of the Corps, point loma Marines

If I had known you before,
I would have shared my shield with you.
Only now my aura thins
(weakening from within).
And now strange plants decorate your cover.
White, cold, hardened crops camoflage your positions.
No probes would dare disrupt your base,
or halt the growing green.



Point Loma, on the slopes

No one seems to tremble.
No fear for what once was
when all ceased to be soldiers.
I am terrified,
yet even the graves assure me--
we are veterans,
we survived.

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Pat Byrne behind sandbags in Vietnam

This was an example of the end product.  My poem in the foreground; Pat's photograph backing it.  Note that he has a bayonet in his teeth and a grenade in his extended hand.

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Pat Byrne skinny dipping in Vietnam

Did I mention he was also one of the cutest guys I have ever met?  Great body, wonderful personality. 

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Pat Byrne in the Marines

Pat Byrne was one of the nicest guys I have ever met.  He was also in the Marines, like Daylin.  But I believe he was infantry rather than support.  I met Pat through Sue, a classmate at California State College (now University) at Dominguez Hills.  He was dating a girl, April, who lived across the street from Sue.  Pat and I must have met sometime in the Spring of 1970, after I had transferred from East LA JC in the fall of 1969.

Unfortunately, like Daylin, Pat was not gay.  But that did not stop us from becoming friends.  I even told him once, after getting up sufficient courage, that I was attracted to him.  That didn't bother him, so he was certainly helpful toward my becoming comfortable with being gay.

I got a few photographs from him when I was one of the editors of the creative publication at Cal State Dominguez Hills.  I was putting in some of my poems and needed photographs to emphasize those pages.  He supplied several from his time in the Marines in Vietnam.

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DADT Final Repeal September 20, 2011

Sixty more days left.

My 62nd birthday takes place on September 23rd. DADT's final repeal is on September 20th.

On my 30th birthday, in 1979, I was informed by my Air Force attorney that my (forced) resignation had been approved. I had taught the first female-inclusive class at the Air Force Academy the previous academic year, but I had to resign simply because I was gay. In two months, no longer will someone be forced to resign as I was simply because he is gay.

How many men and women have been forced to resign over the years that not just DADT was in effect but all of the other excluding policies were in official policy? How many of those men and women are no longer with us, to experience the quiet satisfaction that I am feeling now with this impending repeal?

Whenever I began to doubt that this despicable policy would never be overturned in my lifetime, I thought of the lyrics by the late Sam Cooke: "It's been a long, long time coming; but a change gonna come. Oh yes, it will."

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Daylin, Ann and Darryl, Thanksgiving 1969

Since I took all the pictures, there are none of me.  However, this is the only picture of which I am aware that I have of my 1966 Ford Mustang GT convertible.  (Not counting the color slide that Dave Moore once had of my Mustang where you could see the fog lamps and bumper.)

We are in front of Aunt Jean and Uncle Lloyd's house in San Leandro before our return drive back to South Gate.  While we arrived taking I-5 through the San Joaquin valley and through San Jose, we decided to drive back along the coast highway (the one Ann and I kept getting sick on when we were infants in the early 1950's). 

We dropped Ann off at the University of Santa Barbara where she met up with a guy she was briefly dating, in addition to Daylin.

Daylin eventually met a girl at USC and they moved in together in an apartment near the campus.  I continued to work out in their garage, having become friends with Darryl for the next several years when he attended the University of California at Riverside.  I don't have any pictures of those years when I would head out there to spend some time with him, or when he would be back at their parents' house in South Gate. 

Daylin would eventually marry his girlfriend from school, but it didn't last for too many years.  I did find him on the Internet a few years ago, and we exchanged one email reply from him to two from me to him.  I guess he's been single for all the decades since his divorce. 

For the years that we were friends, he'd had a reel-to-reel tape recorder that he used to tape most of the records in my growing collection.  In the divorce, he gave his wife the reel-to-reel but he kept all the spools of tapes.  He did tell me in his email reply that he was still single and had no children.  Darryl, on the other hand, had four kids.  Both were professors at colleges.

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Daylin Butler in San Francisco, Thanksgiving 1969

Explains my attraction to blonds and guys wearing glasses.  I even got Daylin a temporary job at A.U. Morse and Company, but only briefly. 

Note the aircraft carrier sailing into San Francisco bay in the background.  Probably returning from a tour of Vietnam.

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Hiking around SF, Thanksgiving 1969

While we drove over to SF in my Mustang, we spent time hiking up and down the hills, too.  I believe it was Ann who drove us down Lombard Avenue. 

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Darryl, Daylin and Ann in San Francisco, Thanksgiving weekend 1969

Daylin Butler was in one of my English classes at East LA JC.  We also had the same philosophy course at the same time, though we were not in the same class.  Mike mentioned that he might be the brother of one of our classmates at South Gate High, Darryl Butler, which he was.

I became friends with him.  And, yes, I was very attracted to him.  Too much so, actually.  Because he wasn't even possibly gay like Jim Mulaney.  This would be one of my stupid personal mistakes, one that gay men make over the years.  ("Terminally straight" was the phrase Harvey Fierstein used in TORCH SONG TRILOGY.)  Which is to say that my "gaydar" was not very good for years.

What was even more pathetic was that Daylin and my sister dated briefly, hence the trip we all took in the fall of 1969 to San Francisco.  As with Dave Moore and his sister and Ann and I, we four stayed at Aunt Jean and Uncle Lloyd's house in San Leandro during our stay.

Daylin was later able to get a scholarship to USC and he eventually would earn a PHd in History, but that was long after we kept in touch.  I would transfer to Cal State Dominguez Hills because I could never earn a scholarship nor afford to attend USC, even then. 

I did, however, begin to work out in their garage in South Gate with his set of free weights.  Daylin had moved back home to renew his college career after bombing out just after high school and then getting drafted, by the Marines.  He was actually in the first group who did get drafted by the Marine Corps  when, prior to that, only the army drafted troops for Vietnam.  And he spent his tour of duty in Vietnam, though he was not in combat.  Like Jim, Daylin was older than I by three years.  He was also cute and muscular, having built himself up by using free weights.

I did become a big sports fan based upon hanging out with Daylin.  I eventually would buy a pair of tickets to all the Rams home games in the LA Coliseum when the former UCLA coach Tommy Prothro took over for two seasons before giving way to Chuck Knox, who really made waves with the team in the 1970's.  My fall Sunday afternoons were spent in my seat in the western end of the Coliseum (I only had one season ticket.)  My first tickets were $5.50 a piece.  My season tickets the next year were $6.00 a piece.  Eventually, when the team would leave the Coliseum for Anaheim, the price rose to $10.00 per tickets and so I allowed my season ticket to expire.  I did get tickets to three Super Bowls, being a season ticket holder for LA. 

But that was all before the Super Bowl became this insane and horrendously expensive extravaganza that it has now become.  Well beyond the means of ordinary people like myself with regular incomes.

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Rows of stretch DC-8's, August, 1969

This photograph was also dated August 1969.  However, I simply do not recall where this was taken.  Rows of stretch DC-8's like this might have been at the Long Beach Airport, but there would not have been foothills that close behind--or that much open space to park the planes.  I can only speculate that this is Ontario Airport, and these Douglas aircraft are lined up for final test flights before delivery to the various airlines, mostly United.  I might have taken this photograph from the window of our Air California 737-200 flight after we landed from OC.

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