I was born in November 1942 and I was close to the ages of Annie Proulx's Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist in the summer of 1963.
I know by experience and reflecting back to what I knew about certain guys in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, the conversation was rarely about girls when the guys had been sexually active with other guys.
When I was a college freshman in the spring of 1962, I became a friend of Darrell Byfield, a sophomore. He was a friend of some of my freshman friends and had known one of them not quite as long as me. Darrell and I were room mates for the next two school terms and he was graduated in in May 1964.
I had no idea as to what his sexual orientation was during our days together on campus nor he mine. We both dated women; but, we really did not do much discussing of our dates. If we talked about women, it was because we were with other guys in the dorm who were talking about them.
I happened to be back in Tulsa, Oklahoma in September 1986 when my oldest niece had a son at a local hospital. She was the daughter of my older sister. Since it was going to be a while before I could see her and the baby, I decided to go out to a club for a little while. I went to a gay bar not too far away and while I was there, Darrell walked in. We did talk some but did not have a long conversation since I did not have much time to get back. He did tell me that he was living in a Tulsa suburb.
I did not see Darrell again until the summer of 1993 after I had moved back here from N. Hollywood. I heard his name called when I was at the VA clinic and I assumed that he was working there in an admistrative capacity. I did not see him; but, when I got back to Mom's where I was living, I looked up his name in the local phone book. I called him in the evening and asked if that was him who was paged. Darrell had joined the Air Force after college and I had been a draftee.
We had many conversations about what we were going through in those closeted days. He told me about being attracted to a handsome male student when he was a freshman but didn't act upon it. Oh, we knew some openly gay types on campus but that was as far as it got. Darrell and I had a mutal friend, with whom I had gone to grade school (but not Darrell), and we just believed that Norman married a woman to further his professional career; but, like Ennis and Jack, Norman did take advantage of going to conferences to be with men when not at home.
Oh, one of my fellow art students in the 1960s was married back then; but, he left the closet after his teenage son left it. His ex-wife is very supportive of him and they are both involved in PFLAG (Parents, family and Friends of Lesbians And Gays).
