Things to know up front:

You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Click the back arrow key to return to the post.

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 the year started, I was getting close to getting my bachelor’s degree. Having passed the midpoint with only a handful more credits to go, I had hoped to finish by the end of the year, but would have to continue through the Spring semester of 1982, as I ended up dropping some courses along the way. I continued to work at the grocery store too, and began the year still living with my parents, but that would change soon enough.

Ronald Reagan had just won the presidential election in November, and my friends and I all braced ourselves for the coming onslaught of conservative government policy, which included backing dictatorships once again in Central America and busting unions. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was more popular than ever, and things didn’t look good for the gay community or other minority communities either.

During the Spring semester, I took three sociology classes.  My teachers in these classes were  J.T. Borhek,  Gary Jensen, and Stanley Lieberson, (who would move on to Berkeley, and then Harvard).  The reading assignments, particularly in Borhek’s class, were rather dense, and included The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by  Max Weber, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, and Suicide: A Study in Sociology, by Emile Durkheim.  I did my best to wade through these, but sometimes I had to re-read things again and again to comprehend stuff. I enjoyed reading about ethnic and racial groups much more than the heavier theoretical material.

I was completely immersed in my school work. I loved my classes this particular year, as I had started to move away from psychology to the study of sociology, which became my minor. I was particularly interested in minority groups, politics and social movements. It was easy being more serious about my studies at this point because I found the subject matter so interesting. My grades improved a lot at this time. At one point, I got the highest grade on a test in my class on minority groups, and Dr. Lieberson awarded me with the following book. A couple of my fellow students didn’t like that Dr. Lieberson had done this, but I sure was a happy camper.

I also got an A on a paper I wrote for Dr. Borhek’s class, “Sources of Social Theory”. The paper was titled “The Chicano in America Today: A Sociological Analysis”. (Click on the title to read the paper). I didn’t get a new typewriter until the Fall semester, so I very carefully wrote this one in cursive. It got some water damage, but it’s still readable.

In Central America in 1979, the Sandinistas had taken power away from the previously U.S. backed Somoza regime, and other nations in the region were also clamoring for freedom. El Salvador had been suffering under a brutal dictatorship and had witnessed in the previous year the killings of the ever popular Archbishop Oscar Romero and four Catholic nuns who had started a land reform school. In early January, the civil war started to escalate, and the FMLN, the revolutionary rebel forces, was on the offensive.

By this point in my life, I was starting to refine my political views, and they were definitely left of center. I was quite sad and depressed that Carter had been defeated and that Ronald Reagan had won. I could not stand the man, and have never thought he did our country any good whatsoever. I felt that the freeing of the hostages in Iran had been a publicity stunt that Reagan and others within the Republican party had engineered with others in the Middle East to give him more credibility and make him more popular. There were definitely some shady deals made to make this happen, in my opinion. Jimmy Carter had been a great president, but Reagan’s shenanigans made Carter appear weak and ineffective in the end.

At home, life continued to be a challenge. I decided it was time to leave again, and this time it was for good. Around the third week of January, I found a small studio apartment in back of a professor’s house on 7th street, a block east of Campbell. I had to practically beg the man to let me rent the place, and assured him I was working and in school. It was humiliating, but I loved the location. It was perfect, and the one big room was all I needed. The one thing it didn’t have unfortunately, was a stove, but I managed. My mom and dad’s house was just a mile away and I could always pop over there to eat and do laundry. Mom wasn’t happy, of course that I had left again, but I couldn’t take it living at home. People were in and out of the house all the time. My parents were always bickering and babysitting the grand kids, and two of my brothers were always there just hanging out. My brother Fred and I never got along, and as time went on, our relationship deteriorated further and further.

Reagan, in response to the allegations that Nicaragua was supporting the rebel forces in El Salvador, quickly stopped providing aid to the leftist Nicaraguan government and started aiding the “contrarevolucionarios”, or counterrevolutionaries, instead. These forces consisted of former members of Somoza’s military, who, from their home base along the Honduran border, began to fight to regain control of the country. In the ensuing months, Reagan would secretly authorize more and more funding to this clandestine force, popularly known as the Contras.

From Wikipedia: “On March 30, 1981, United States President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded by John Hinckley Jr. in Washington, D.C. as he was returning to his limousine after a speaking engagement at the Washington Hilton Hotel. Hinckley believed the attack would impress actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had become obsessed. Reagan was seriously wounded by a .22 Long Rifle bullet that ricocheted off the side of the presidential limousine and hit him in the left underarm, breaking a rib, puncturing a lung, and causing serious internal bleeding. He was close to death upon arrival at George Washington University Hospital but was stabilized in the emergency room, then underwent emergency exploratory surgery.^[4] He recovered and was released from the hospital on April 1.”

I was at home in my apartment when I heard the news about Reagan getting shot. Thinking back on it now, I wouldn’t wish that kind of thing on anyone, but Reagan was such a slimy politician, at one point I was hopeful that we’d get someone else to run the country. My fears about the kind of damage Reagan would do to our country came true soon enough. I discussed the shooting with my friend Tim, who had dropped over that day. I couldn’t help telling him what I thought. He and I spent a lot of time together around this time. He would bring his guitar over to my apartment and we’d discuss the class we were in together and the papers we wrote. I never felt attracted to him. He was completely straight, and had his share of girlfriends. He certainly was handsome enough to have lots of them, but he was quite skinny. Not my type, really. He was just a friend.

I made some other new friends around this time in my life, and they included Jim and Gary, a couple who had been together for many, many years. Jim was an artist who grew up before World War II in Southern California, and he met Gary in the bay area when Gary was very young. They lived there for many years. At some point, Jim also spent time in Europe studying art. After they moved to Tucson, they owned an art gallery in town, but then sold it so that Jim could devote more of his time to his art. I met Jim at a bar called the Graduate one day while I was playing pool. He noticed that my hands were big and had prominent veins, and he asked me if I would be willing to model for him while he worked on a sculpture. I agreed to do it. I went to his house way out on the far west side and sat still with my hand relaxed, but stretched out, while Jim did his sculpting. We hit it off and became friends. His partner Gary was also nice.

Jim had been an actor in Hollywood at one point and was very handsome, even as an older guy. He and Gary had a big record collection and they were crazy about Judy Garland. I remember having conversations with the two of them about wanting to “change the world.” They chuckled at my youthful idealism, and encouraged me to do it, but I knew they thought I was “very young”.

I spent a lot more time with my old friend Richard this particular year too. He had also made some new friends who lived near his new apartment, which was on 9^th St. near 4^th Ave. Their names were Mike, Denise, Jimmy and Merricat. Denise and Mike were both artists, as was Merricat. She made beaded jewelry,  and either lived next door to Denise or was her roommate at one point.

We all partied together frequently, and while there was always beer and marijuana around, at times we did other heavier things, such as hallucinogenics. Richard had become a big fan of the Grateful Dead, and such people are known as Dead Heads and acid freaks. I enjoyed the music, but never considered myself that big of a fan, although I did try the drugs once or twice.

Doing acid and other psychedelics was sure an interesting experience! One could easily have a bad trip if the setting for the “party” wasn’t mellow enough. I went through this myself once or twice, and afterwards realized that I shouldn’t indulge so much in the heavy stuff. While I was in much better shape psychologically than I had been when I was 18, I still had issues at 22, and the drugs sometimes brought those issues out into the open in a very creepy way, and I would find myself in a downward spiral. If it weren’t for a friend of mine who saw that I was sinking one evening at one of these parties, I’m not sure where I would have ended up. She calmed me down and made me relax on the couch and told me, “remember this is just temporary. It will wear off”. Wow. That sure helped.

As far as dating was concerned, there wasn’t anyone steady. I continued to go out to the bars to meet other guys. I had a lot of fun, and still liked to dance, but was really tired of the bar scene after a while. It all revolved around the pretty people, and around drugs and alcohol. I was young, and indulged myself, but I wanted more. I’m glad I had some stability. Working half time and going to school were my two big priorities, and I never let the partying get out of control. My mother’s favorite saying to all of us was that “you have to learn how to paddle your own canoe,” and that lesson was embedded deep in my psyche.

Word was slow to get out that gay men in big cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles were starting to die from combination of pneumonia and a rare strain of cancer called Kaposi’s Sarcoma, but by early June, the Centers for Disease Control had published the first official report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, and by July there were over 40 reported deaths. As time went on and word spread about the disease, gay men became further targets for discrimination and violence, and they began dying at an alarming rate, particularly on the east and west coasts. The world would never be the same. By the middle of the decade, at least two of my friends, Dennis and Leonard, had contracted the disease, and both eventually died. A lot more friends would die through the 90’s as well.

Around this time, Frank Weill, my old religion teacher from Salpointe, and I bumped into each other at a bar one night, and we started spending time together. He had left the church by then, but still did spiritual counseling for a lot of people. He would become a very close friend in the next few years, and I learned a great deal from him.

Summer dragged on. I was working constantly, feeling unsure of myself and unhappy about my sexuality, but still going out and messing around and partying a lot. I felt lost and alone, especially after my buddy Tim took off and went back east for the summer. I couldn’t wait for school to begin.

Before school started, in mid-August, I took a little vacation, and booked a flight, one of the very first I’d ever taken, to Seattle, to go see my sister Becky, who lived in Lacey, a little town just east of Olympia. She and Paco had moved across the country the year before, where he was able to find work with relatives. Becky and Paco were having lots of problems at this point, but I didn’t care. I wanted to see her and I needed to get away for a little while. They would soon split up and by early 1982, she was back home with the family.

I had a great time this semester. My classes were interesting and I learned a great deal in them. I particularly loved my class, Collective Behavior and Social Movements. The professor, Dr. Diane Bush, was a wonderful teacher. My History of Women in America class was also very good. I was the only guy in the class! I’m still friend with my professor, Dr. Karen Anderson. The class on Mexican American Culture was taught by Dr. James Officer. He was another wonderful teacher and was the author of the book, “Hispanic Arizona”.

When the film Zootsuit came out, I decided that I would take my mom and dad to see it when it was playing at the theater in El Con. Mom and Dad were a young married couple in the mid-40s and the music and the fashions of the era were well familiar to them. They enjoyed the film a lot. I did too.

By the end of the semester, I had written a series of papers on the Gay Liberation Movement for my Sociology 313 class titled Collective Behavior and Social Movements. They were called “take home exams, but were really very long essays. Here’s the entire set of them.

“The Gay Liberation Movement Part I (Take Home Exam #1). Sociology 313: Collective Behavior and Social Movement. Dr. Diane Bush. September 15, 1981.

“The Gay Liberation Movement Part II (Take Home Exam #2). Sociology 313: Collective Behavior and Social Movements. Dr. Diane Bush. October 29, 1981.

“The Gay Liberation Movement Part III (Take Home Exam #3). Sociology 313: Collective Behavior and Social Movements. Dr. Diane Bush. November 30, 1981.

“The Gay Liberation Movement Part IV (Final Exam). Sociology 313: Collective Behavior and Social Movements. Dr. Diane Bush. December 14, 1981.

As the year came to a close, I had made more new friends. I became friends with Scott, a guy I met at Fry’s. I developed a very heavy crush on him and we spent a lot of time together for the next couple of years. I started dating women again too. I had hooked up with my friend Merricat sometime in the Fall, for example. She and I fooled around some, and I even took her to a Christmas party some friends from Fry’s were having. Merricat came to the party dressed like a modern day hippie, with a beaded headdress and a long flowing skirt, and my friends from Fry’s got all freaked out and even asked me, where did you find her? She was such a nice person, but we didn’t last. I was gay, and that’s all there was to it. While I fought my attraction to guys, it overpowered my desire to be with women. It took a few more years and a few more awkward sexual experiences with women to finally let go of any notion that I was attracted to them or could sustain a relationship with one. But in the meantime, I kept trying.

Things to know up front:

You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Click the back arrow key to return to the post.

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!

I started the year by continuing to work at Fry’s as a cashier/stocker and going to school full time. I was busy as ever. John was busy too, and we continued our lives together, living in our guest house on S. Warren. My classes included two sociology courses for the first time, and I ended up loving them.

 When my birthday rolled around, John threw me a party and invited both my new friends and some of my old friends to the gathering at our home. Unfortunately, that was like mixing oil and water. I was hurt and disappointed at my old friends, as they clearly didn’t want to mingle with my new friends. I suppose they felt threatened or something by the fact that one or two of my friends were just a bit too effeminate. It must have made them quite uncomfortable, as they stayed in another part of the house the entire time they were there.  Homophobia was rampant back then, and it took many years for some people to come around and accept other gay people as they were. It hurt to know that my own friends didn’t really accept my chosen path.

One of our “very gay” friends, Leonard, hailed from the upper Midwest and before moving to Tucson trained horses on a farm in Michigan. He moved to Tucson to get away from his old life and he became a hairdresser, and lived his life as an openly gay man. He and his partner Virgil, who had gone to junior high and high school with my brother Fred, were a lot of fun. Leonard gave me a “perm” at some point, but I let my hair grow out after the first one. Perms were something John liked getting. My hair was curly enough on its own, but they were a big thing at the time. Everyone was getting perms. My sister-in-law has a photo of me with my perm all grown out, but I don’t have a copy of it. She took the photo just before she cut my hair.

Sometime at this point, I got very ill with the flu. It was the worst case of the flu I’ve ever had in my whole life.  I was delirious with fever and weak as could be, and was sick for days. At one point, I even wanted John to take me home to my parent’s house, so that they could take care of me. I wanted my mommy! Somehow I managed to survive it, but the flu that winter killed a lot of people. I truly did feel like I was going to die.

As a 21 year old, I continued to identify primarily as a Chicano and as a bohemian/hippie type, but as I began to experience life as a gay man, my perspective broadened. I was becoming immersed in “gay” culture, hanging out with other gay people, either at the bars or in other social settings where my partner and I found ourselves. I continued to learn as much as possible about the history of the gay community, about “camp”, drag and gay sensibility. I also learned a lot about gay icons like Judy Garland and Joan Crawford. I learned about gay subcultures too. There were different groups of gay men for example, such as those into the leather scene, men who identified as “bears” or “clones”, and women who were separatists, and about “butch” and “femme” roles. Overall, I learned that there is a great deal of diversity within the “gay” community, but I didn’t identify with any specific group, as my radical political leanings, my ethnicity and my anti-materialistic outlook, kept me from feeling like I fit under any specific “label” or belonged to any specific group, so to speak. A lot of the other young, gay Latinos I encountered were into the disco scene and harder drugs like pills and cocaine. I found them superficial and cliquish, and didn’t relate at all to what they were into.

Critics panned this movie, but who cares. Richard Gere appears in the nude! That’s all it took for us to want to see it. It was one of the very first films to show frontal male nudity, and while that particular scene lasted just a few seconds, it was, shall we say, quite revealing! Richard Gere was gorgeous.

While I do not like violence in films, this movie was much more than that for me. It was authentic in so many ways. The New York leather scene came to life in this movie, and while the plot of the movie was creepy, the scenery, the music and the men in it made it quite fascinating. I’m glad I got to see the film, although I could understand why various gay organizations were boycotting it. There was nothing else about gay culture out there at the time in popular culture, and this movie was unveiling a segment of gay culture that was quite hardcore.

Here’s a live version of Mad Love, the title cut.

My love for Linda Ronstadt all these years has been unwavering, and I made sure to buy each new disc that came out, especially in the 70’s and 80’s. I didn’t care much for the Gilbert and Sullivan stuff or the opera material she covered later, but I loved everything else. My hip friends thought I was too “corny” and bland in my tastes at times, especially because I loved Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Rita Coolidge, James Taylor and Joan Baez, artists one could easily characterize as “middle of the road”. They just weren’t “cool” enough. I shied away from hard rock, disco, metal, funk etc. I liked what I liked, and I was beginning to develop in-depth knowledge of American soul music, jazz, and urban folk music. It would take a few years before I immersed myself in Mexican rancheras, mariachi music, and other forms of Musica Latina, but once I did, there was no turning back.

I had been listening to country music for a while when this came out. I never cared much for Loretta Lynn at all, but the movie was just great because Sissy Spacek was so incredible. I loved listening to country music, especially the local group, The Dusty Chaps, The Byrds when Gram Parsons played with them, Freddie Fender, Willie Nelson, Pure Prairie League, and of course Emmylou and Dolly. There’s a line I draw, however, in my own head, regarding this genre of music. It can get very corny and too “all-American” and too Southern and redneck-like all too easily. I’m definitely very picky when it comes to this stuff, but still, some of my friends just don’t understand how I can even tolerate it at all. For me, it goes back to when I was a child. My uncle Nato would take me with him at times to his local watering holes like the Cactus Room or the Wooden Nickel, and there on the jukebox would be a mix of Mexican music and country music. It was always there in the background and I listened intently.

You really get to know someone when you travel with them. This trip was a real challenge at times. John and I argued a lot, but we made it through without killing each other. Something wasn’t clicking after a while with us, however. Perhaps I was too immature for him. I have always been a big “baby”, and there were episodes on this trip where I whined a bit too much and got him really frustrated.

At one point while we were living on S. Warren, our little house was broken into, and the thieves took a bunch of stuff, like my lawn mower and a battery that was in the porch. They also took jewelry and other stuff from inside the house. I was completely traumatized by this when I found out, and I called in sick at work. The boss reluctantly let me stay home. Working at Fry’s was not always a piece of cake. One had to be on time at all times and if you called in sick, you needed a doctor’s excuse. It’s a good thing we had a union. It did what it could to help protect our rights.

John had a very liberal attitude towards sex, and didn’t believe in monogamy. I preferred it, however, but reluctantly went along with how he wanted things. One day after school, I noticed that he had a pile of record albums stacked against the couch, including the one above by Judy Collins, that had just been released. I asked why they were there, and he said he’d gone to our friend Kidd’s house to listen to music with him. However, I knew that he would never play any of his records on Kidd’s stereo because Kidd had a crappy record player needle, and John was a big audiophile who took good care of his albums. I told him that didn’t make any sense, and after I continued to question him, he finally revealed that he had been seeing someone else, closer to his own age and that he really liked the guy. He said he loved both of us and that he still wanted to be with me and to also see the other guy. I was shocked and heartbroken. I went outside, got on my bike, and rode it for what seemed like hours, trying to gather the strength not to cry and thinking about what I was going to do.

Our relationship was over. I could not continue with John knowing that he was falling in love with someone else. I called my sister Becky and told her what had happened. I was crying and upset, and she got mad, and told me I needed to get a grip. I was so surprised. I thought she’d be supportive, but she was not going to coddle me this time around. She made me face reality and told me that “the show must go on”, and while it was hard to hear at that point, in the end, she was right, and it helped. I spent 8 months of my life with this guy, and just like that, it all went down the drain.

I moved back to my parent’s house sometime in April. My mother, who had been trying her best to lay off the alcohol, saw that I was a mess, and likely realized that I was indeed gay. That was all it took to get her started on the alcohol again. She likely blamed herself for me having turned out gay, as she spoiled me a lot when I was a kid. My sister would even yell at her at times, saying “no le chipilees tanto. Va a salir joto!” (Don’t spoil him so much. He’s going to turn out queer!). I felt so bad, and blamed myself for the fact that she was drinking again. My poor mom loved me to the moon and back and couldn’t stand seeing me hurt, but she was happy I was home again. I stayed with my parents until the end of the year.

I spent the following months at home, working and going to school. I also started going out again, hitting the bars and meeting other guys. I was footloose and fancy free and partied a lot. I also worked out a lot, and began jogging. I was in pretty good shape overall. It’s a good thing I stayed active, because I could’ve gained a lot of weight drinking all that beer!

I bought a camera around this time and started taking pictures. The photos below are ones I took over the summer months in our back yard at home.

A few years back, my friend Rose turned me on to Joan Armatrading, a British musician who wrote her own music. I wore this album out and ended up buying most of her other material too. Me, Myself, I was released in May, 1980.

Here’s the title cut, Roses in the Snow.

I was very happy to see that Aretha Franklin had a cameo appearance in the Blues Brothers movie. For me, her performance was one of the best parts of the whole film. This was the beginning of what was to be her great “comeback”. She was done with Atlantic Records, and in 1980 signed a contract with the Arista Records label, which was run by Clive Davis. He was a legend in the music industry, and would later go on to strike it super rich by signing Whitney Houston to the label. It would take Aretha another five years and five more albums before she struck gold again with Who’s Zoomin’ Who and the smash hit, “Freeway of Love”. She was definitely on her way!

At this point, I was transitioning from a focus on psychology to one on sociology. I particularly enjoyed my jogging class and the Philosophy in Literature class. I dropped the Spanish class early on, as I didn’t care for Dr. Leo Barrow, the instructor. He would later be censured by the University for giving marijuana, in various forms, to his students. Had I stayed in his class, I would have been treated to marijuana-laced cookies. Oh boy!

I clearly remember receiving this album in the mail at my parents’ house when I was living with them after my breakup with John. It was sold by the Book-Of-The-Month Club, and I was a member at the time (1980). Holiday first recorded “A Fine Romance” back in the 1930’s but the version below is from the above album, “Music for Torching,” which was released in October, 1955.

My philosophy in literature class included discussions of Jean Paul Sartre’s works. This book contained the essay, “Existentialism is a Humanism” by Sartre. The essay itself wasn’t required reading, but it was what I was reading on my own at the time. I considered myself an “existentialist” by this point, and was far removed from my former religious beliefs. Over the years, I’ve flip flopped from being a believer to being an outright atheist to being agnostic. These days I find comfort in having faith in a higher power, and saying my prayers each night helps me sleep without getting nightmares.

I remember where I was when I first heard the news about Lennon’s death. He was a real hero to so many people. His new album was doing well, and everyone was happy to hear his voice again on the radio. What a tragic day and such a tragic loss. I loved his early solo albums, and, of course, his Beatles songs. So much for there ever being a Beatles reunion now.

I ended the semester having made a new friend. Tim M. was a student from New Jersey, and we met in one of our sociology classes. He had very long brown hair and played the guitar. He loved Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen, and we’d try our hand at singing duets like Two Of Us by the Beatles. We’d hang out together a lot in the next couple of years, and I was later a member of his wedding party. After college, he became a cop and then an FBI agent. We eventually lost touch.

I stayed with my parents until the end of the year. The past 12 months had been a roller coaster ride. My relationship with John ended, and then I started going out a lot again, meeting different guys here and there, but not really connecting with anyone in particular. All that, combined with work and school kept me on my toes. While things were as crazy as ever at home, I at least felt safe there and was able to assist my parents by helping them with their bills and keeping the yard clean. I didn’t have much privacy, however, as my brother Fred was always breaking into my bedroom and taking my clothes or rifling through my personal belongings. My parents didn’t like that I’d sometimes not come home at night either, and they became very suspicious about my activities. I could never, at this point, bring myself to tell my mother or father directly that I was gay. I just figured they knew, and we never talked about it.

Stay tuned for “My Life in Pictures: 1981”.

Things to know up front:

You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Click the back arrow key to return to the post.

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!

1979 would be another remarkable year. I started the year out deciding that I needed a break from school. When I quit Salpointe in 1976, I did so on the condition that I would finish college, so I knew this was temporary, as I did not want to break my promise to my parents. I had already completed 54 units of courses and had a solid “B” average by the end of the year, and was nearly halfway done. While I was becoming wary of pursuing a profession in psychology, it remained my chosen major. I took the semester off, in part, to think about what I really wanted to do as I continued my education, and to earn more money.

Life went on. I continued working as a stocker/cashier at Fry’s and living in my little one-room efficiency apartment. I pulled back some from the partying and bar hopping, but didn’t stop completely. I had been “out” almost a whole year, since March, and while I met a few guys here and there who I thought I really liked, I hadn’t yet met anyone who I dated on a steady basis. That would change as the year progressed.

During the last couple of years of her life, my grandmother Josefa became ill with Alzheimer’s disease, and my aunt Mary took care of her. Her husband Fernando decided that he was moving the family to Los Angeles where he had found work after he had been laid off from his job here in Tucson, so aunt Mary put our grandmother in a nursing facility. My grandmother begged my mother not to leave her alone there, so my mom decided that she would take care of her at home. It was a huge burden on my mom and dad, but mom could not stand seeing my grandmother suffering in a cold hospital room all by herself. She took care of her for nearly a year.

My grandmother died at the house on January 13, two days before my 20^th birthday. She was 75 years old. She had always been very kind and sweet to me and was the only grandparent I ever knew. (I am working on a separate blog entry about my grandmother and her family. Stay tuned). This was the second death in my family within the past six months, and this one hit particularly hard. I was grief stricken. My aunt Dora, Uncle Armando and their daughter Tish came back to town for the funeral, as did Aunt Mary and her family. It was a sad time.

A month or two later, my sister Irene’s son Anthony was baptized at St. Ambrose Church. My mom and I were his godparents. After church, we all went to mom’s house and had a little celebration. Carlos and Elaine were there, as were others. In contrast to our previous family gathering for my grandmother’s funeral, this one was a happy occasion.

Sometime in March, I decided that I was going to move back home. I don’t remember exactly why I did this. It might have been to save money. I let one of my  cousins sublet my apartment, and stayed with my parents until later in the summer.

In my journal at this time, I wrote a lot about not really knowing where I was headed with my life. Even though coming out was a major milestone, I was still lonely and longed for a companion. I was tired of the bar scene and all the so called “fun” I was having, and of working all the time. I missed school, too.

I continued to listen to lots of music and to go on shopping sprees for albums and books. Several albums were released in the Spring, including discs by Rickie Lee Jones and Emmylou Harris. Dylan also released a two album set, titled “Bob Dylan at Budokan”, a live recording of concerts he gave in Japan, with the same band that Richard and I saw him perform with at the McKale Memorial Center on the UA campus a few months earlier.

At the end of May, I met a guy named John. He was an Italian-American from New York who moved here after having served in the Air Force. He was 10 years older than me, but we hit it off. We dated regularly during the first month or so of our budding relationship, then at some point in the summer I decided to move in with him. I also re-enrolled in school and took a psychology class during the first summer session, followed by a full load of courses in the Fall. My grade point average was slowly starting to improve.

At some point in the Spring, I was transferred from the store I worked at on 22nd near Alvernon to another store on the south side of town, way out on the Nogales Highway. I wasn’t the only Mexican transferred. The new manager of our store, D.W. Green, was an avowed racist (he had a confederate flag in his office), and he tried to transfer all of the Mexicans out of “his” store. My friend Richard ended up getting transferred to the far southeast side at the same time. I didn’t like the manager at my new store, and when I let him know that that I was planning to take vacation time, he declined my request. I decided then that it was time to quit, so I left Fry’s for a short while. It took just a month or so for me to go back, however. I went to my old store and asked to be re-hired. In the meantime, D.W. Green, who also had a cocaine problem, had been caught stealing money from the store’s safe, and was subsequently fired. I was quickly re-hired and stayed with Fry’s for another 7 years, long enough to be vested in the company’s pension plan.

I listened a lot to Joni Mitchell in this period of my life. She had started out as a “folkie” but then became more daring in her musicianship and by 1979, was recording jazz. I had all of her albums. The album, “Mingus”, was released at this time. My record collection only continued to grow, as did my book collection. I loved reading both novels and non-fiction.

I was also still close to my friend Sylvia, although I could tell that she didn’t approve much of  my “new” lifestyle. She was still very much into wanting to be a nun at the time. My other friends, Jim and Judy moved to Missouri, and Rose and Teri had drifted away several months earlier. It was more my doing than theirs, as I was busy celebrating my new found freedom as a gay man, and I didn’t respond to their letters as consistently as I had before. Ron and Jane were still around, and I remember at one point I worked for Jane at her bookstore, Campana Books. The two of them have always been supportive and reliable friends. I’m forever grateful.

My friend Richard and I, while not as close as we once were, continued hanging out together too. We partied a lot, and listened to music together. Our friends, Ron Burch and Sandy Hernandez, decided to tie the knot, and their wedding was a lot of fun. Richard was Ron’s best man. They had been friends since grade school, and at this time Richard lived with Ron and Sandy in a house just south of Speedway near Alvernon. We had lots of parties there.

John and I lived in an apartment on Elm St just east of Tucson Blvd. for a short while, but we left because some guy walked by our front window one afternoon, glanced over, and saw us kissing on the couch, and it freaked him out. Later that night, he showed up again, sounding very drunk and very angry, yelling at us at the top of his lungs to come outside. He wanted to kill us, or so it felt. John and I were fearful for our lives. The next day the landlords asked us to leave.  We could have protested, but we feared for our safety. We got out of there as fast as we could, and moved into a guest house on S. Warren, a couple of blocks south of Broadway near Campbell, that belonged to another gay man, and things felt much safer there. As I’ve said once already, being gay back then was sure a lot different from what it’s like now.

Being 10 years apart had its disadvantages, but was also beneficial in many ways. I was very happy and in love. John had a lot of friends and over time, they’d become my friends too. These guys were usually several years older than me, and I learned a lot about gay history and culture from them. We saw lots of movies together, including The Rose, La Cage Aux Folles, and the Rocky Horror Picture show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFNmlEdXVj0

By this time, I was also a big Aretha Franklin fan, and was starting to acquire as many albums of hers as possible. She started out recording for Columbia Records in the very early 60’s and then switched to the Atlantic label in 1967, the year she hit it big with her single, “Respect”. This recording, her last for the Atlantic label, was released in early September, and was a major flop. It would take a change in management and record labels and a few more years for Aretha to bounce back from what was considered a low point in her recording career. This album included two disco songs that didn’t go anywhere at all, lending creedence to the popular phrase, “disco sucks”.

John was a big music buff too, and he loved jazz and Frank Sinatra. He turned me on to singers like Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, and I too became a big fan, (but I drew the line at Sinatra. I couldn’t stand him). We also listened to new music like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, Bat Out of Hell, by Meatloaf, and the recent album by The Cars. I still loved my Bob Dylan, however, and bought Slow Train Coming as soon as it came out. In December, one of John’s friends got us front row seats to see Dylan live at the Tucson Community Center Music Hall. It was an incredible show, with some very talented musicians. Dylan played all of the songs from Slow Train Coming, and the singers he had with him were amazing as they belted out one gospel tune after another.

By the end of the year, John and I had lived together for almost five months. We were both very busy. I was working and going to school, and John had two jobs. We clearly loved each other, but it wasn’t all perfect, however, and the relationship had its rocky moments. John was sometimes bossy and moody, and I had a hard time standing up for myself at times. Nevertheless, my dream to have a “lover” had come true, and we did have a great time together. I was happy, and did well in school and continued to work at Fry’s as the year came to a close.

My cousin Tish sent this Christmas card to me from California. When she came to town for my grandmother’s funeral at the beginning of the year, I asked her about the Harvey Milk assassination, which had just occurred the previous November. She told me she had attended the vigil for him and said there were thousands of people there, all with candles lit, and that it was a beautiful sight. She was one of the only family members who knew I was gay at the time.

Overall, 1979 ended on a high note, as things were going well with John and me. I had new friends too, that included Dennis Krenek, Leonard Brown and his partner, Virgil, and others such as Kidd, Leonor and Shirley. These were all people that John had introduced me to, and they were all very nice.  My old friends Richard and his brother Albert were still around too and I’d hook up with them occasionally, but John and I didn’t hang out with them together much at all.

Things to know up front:

You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Click the back arrow key to return to the post.

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.