Gay vs. Straight? My New Year’s Resolution.

When we get to a New Year, I tend not to think about the time ahead of me, but instead about the times behind. And what I tend to focus on memory-wise are things which happened and demonstrate to me how life has changed.

This story is from 1991 or 1992. I was out in San Francisco on business and found myself in a conversation with a guy my age who was born and raised (like me) in New York but had been out on the West Coast for the previous twenty years.

The guy was gay, in fact we met at the weekly potluck dinner held after the Friday night service at the Gay and Lesbian Synagogue in the Castro district, which at that time was the San Francisco neighborhood considered to be the ‘gay’ place.

The man told me that he was raised in an observant Jewish family in Brooklyn and realized by the time he was out of college that he was not only gay, but couldn’t bring himself to continue pretending that he was straight in order to keep things cool both in his home and where he worked.

So, one day he picked up, moved out to San Francisco, got a job in the city and an apartment in the Castro district and everything was fine.

Once a year he would go back to Brooklyn to see the folks, and as far as he could tell, his parents simply regarded him as the bachelor son.