Things to know up front:

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Every chapter in My Life Story includes information about me, my work, my family and my friends. It also includes information about events that took place locally and nationally, etc. that I thought important enough to include. You’ll also find that I’ve included films, musicians and recordings/videos, in addition to books that were released in a given year.

While I have included many personal photos, most of the graphic content included below is borrowed from the Internet. I do not claim to own this material. I am just adding it for educational purposes. If the owners of any of the content in the “My Life Story” series want their stuff removed, I am happy to oblige. My email address is jrdiaz@arizona.edu. Thanks!

As soon as I turned 19, I was given a promotion at Fry’s. I went from carryout to cashier/stocker, and the pay was much better. These were my work tools. I can’t tell you how many boxes I opened and cans I priced while working for this company or how many groceries I checked out. I was pretty fast too! I lasted 10 years with the company, and got vested, so now I receive a small pension check every month. Thanks to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union!

This was the text for my class titled “Normal Personality”. It was really a course on transactional analysis, a humanistic form of psychology that was in some ways a takeoff on Freudian psychology. Instead of the id, the ego and the superego, T.A. talked about the “parent, the adult and the child” being the driving forces in people’s psyches. The teacher was good, but not pro-gay, unfortunately. Still, I loved the class.

I was living in the dorm at this time, and was so depressed, I seriously thought about ending my life. Pushed to the edge, I finally decided that I wanted to live, and that I was going to at least explore what being gay meant. What I really wanted was to find a friend, someone I could get to know and have a relationship with. I also wanted to have fun. I knew that Jeckyll’s was a gay bar, but I had never been in one before. It was located at the intersection of Drachman and Oracle Rd., and I drove around it several times, but then went back home. I drove back and forth again a couple of times before I finally decided to enter the place. I had no idea what to expect. On this particular night, the bar was showing a movie. I got myself a beer, and I met a nice looking guy who was sitting at the bar having a drink. We started talking and we hit it off. His name was Bill and he was visiting from Yuma. We then went to sit down to watch the movie, and soon began to make out in front of a lot of other people. I really didn’t care at that point. I was completely swept away by the guy and the desire I felt. We later went to his hotel room at the MacArthur Hotel, a real dump of a place, and messed around. It had been the first time I’d ever done anything sexual since I was 15. I absolutely loved it. Later at work, someone, a “straight” guy who was in the audience at the movie with his girlfriend that night saw me making out with the guy I was with, and I found out a while later that he told everyone at Fry’s that I was queer. Wow, what luck, and on my first night out! That really messed me up. I even had a falling out with my best friend for a while because he continued being friends with the guy who outed me. I felt betrayed, and it took a long time to let the grudge I had developed go. Being outed didn’t stop me, however, from continuing to go out and meeting other people. I felt liberated and free, and felt like I was finally starting to really live.

Shortly after I decided to start going out, I visited Jane, my teacher and friend from Salpointe, and I came out to her as bisexual. I guess I wasn’t quite yet ready to admit that I was gay. It took several years to embrace that fully. I wrote the following in my journal. The guy Bill was my psychology teacher at the time.

Although I would not always remain so positive and upbeat, during the first month of my life as a gay man I was incredibly happy. I celebrated my new freedom in the following journal entry.

While I was in the Fisherman’s Wharf area, I decided to eat a sandwich and buy some sourdough bread for my aunt and uncle. As I was eating my lunch, two nice looking, well dressed guys in their twenties came up to me and struck up a conversation. They asked if I was by myself and if I had a place to stay. I told them I was just visiting from out of town and enjoying the sites. We engaged in small talk for a few minutes, and then suddenly, they invited me to have dinner with them, and they gave me a postcard with a sketch of their house on it that included the address. I wondered if they were gay, and I took the postcard but didn’t commit to anything. When I went back to my aunt’s house, I mentioned to my cousin that I had met these guys and that they were very nice and had invited me to dinner. She shook her head at me and suggested that I not go, because “there were all kinds of kooks in the city”. I ended up not going, and boy, I’m sure glad I didn’t. A month or so later, I was flipping through People magazine and I noticed a copy of the postcard these guys had given me. It was included in an article some guy had written about his undercover experience with a cult called the Moonies. Then it dawned on me. Those guys were trying to recruit me to become a Moonie! Man, that sure was a close call. Since I’ve been putting my life story in pictures together, I thought about that postcard and wished that I had kept it. After searching for it on the internet without any luck, I finally found a citation to the article, and was able to buy a copy of People Magazine that included the photo of the postcard. Here it is, the infamous Moonie House.

By this point, I had met several guys, and after while I figured out that just because you sleep with someone and fall for them, it doesn’t mean they love you in return. I realized that there was more to life than just sex. I wanted someone I could relate to, someone I could spend time with and connect with. I had also met a couple of women and had sex with them too by this point. One minute I was happy being gay, the next I was forcing myself to try going in the other direction. This pattern would continue up through my mid-20s. Deep down, I never “wanted” to be gay and while I accepted it to a degree, I continued to fight it, again and again. It was just crazy. Being gay in 1978 was not what being gay is like today. It was a huge deal, and very controversial. I couldn’t be completely “out”. No way. I hid my sexuality from my family and my friends, with very few exceptions. I was living a secret life, and it got me down a lot of the time.

I really did want to be less closeted, and even joined a new gay group on campus, but the fear of being outed, beaten up or even killed was all too real for many of the students. At one point, I expressed the opinion that we should be more visible, and a fellow student stated, “what, you want us to go out there and hold hands in public or something? Are you crazy?” One of the activities this group sponsored was movie viewings. We all sat in the living room of someone’s house one night and saw the documentary, “Word Is Out”. It was very inspiring, but it didn’t change things for us locally. Just two years earlier, a guy named Richard Heakin, was visiting from the Midwest and was murdered by some teenage guys outside the Stonewall bar on N. 1st, a gay bar that later became one of my watering holes, The Joshua Tree/Back Pocket. The memory of that murder was likely still on a lot of people’s minds. Heakin’s murderers were let off easily, but the City of Tucson soon thereafter passed the first civil rights, anti-discrimination ordinance in the country, which provided a number of protections for members of the local gay community.

My sister Becky came home for Christmas, and it was  joyous occasion. We had a number of family get-togethers. The photos included here bring back wonderful memories of her visit with us.  She promised that she’d soon come back home permanently, but it took another two years before that happened.

Wow, what a year! I managed to complete another year of school while working part time. My wages this year ($7,000+) increased significantly when I started cashiering and stocking. I came out to myself in March, became sexually active, starting dating men (and a few women), and going out a lot; I went to San Francisco, saw Bob Dylan for the very first time and saw Joan Baez again, fell in and out of love a few times, and lived on my own in my own space for half the year. As the new year approached, my hope was to find a steady boyfriend (or girlfriend) and to take a little break from school. I was beginning to sour on psychology as a future profession, and needed to think about what I really wanted to study, so I decided to just work as much as possible at the grocery store the following semester and take some time to think about the direction I wanted my education to take.