Prologue
Traveling the lecture circuit was a major part of my job. I lived in L.A. but spent at least as much time on the road as I did in Southern California. I was an endowed department chair, and with that came responsibilities. I was expected to recruit the best and the brightest scientists in my field, to mentor them and to encourage them to conduct cutting-edge research that supported the aims of the department.
Left to their own devices, they’d spend all of their time in the lab, so it was up to me to make sure they published their results in the most respected journals and to apply for and succeed in obtaining grants. It was the grants that made everything else we did possible. That, and the exorbitant tuition the university charged its students. Attracting the best students — particularly those with affluent parents — was just as important as getting grants. That meant maintaining our reputation as one of the top astrophysics departments in the world.
I’d like to think I was recruited because of my demonstrated leadership abilities, but I knew that wasn’t the case. Department chairs were almost never chosen for that reason alone, if for that reason at all. I liked to think I was personable and got along well with my faculty, but I knew that that wasn’t the reason I was chosen, either. Some of my fellow department chairs were absolute bastards, and yet their departments were successful in spite of their lack of social sensibilities.
No, most of us were recruited because of our renown — and few things brought more renown than a Nobel prize. Even all these years later, I still have trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that I won a freakin’ Nobel prize in physics for my research on quantum effects in black holes. The funny thing was that I wasn’t even looking for quantum effects at all. Actually, it was one of my graduate students who suggested that the data might be better explained by quantum effects. She went on to obtain a plum teaching position at MIT, but it was I who won the Nobel.
Not that I felt guilty about it. It took years of additional study before we had the evidence to support our conclusions. Still, I thought there were others in the field who were far more deserving than I, but I wasn’t about to turn it down. Receiving the Nobel prize was surreal. It certainly changed things and although the prize money was extraordinary, the offer of an endowed chairmanship at UCLA was what made it possible for me to use the prize money to establish my own charitable foundation.
That money, plus what I earned from the lecture circuit, made it possible to provide scholarships so that all of the most deserving students could afford to seek a career in astrophysics. I came from a rather modest background myself and had an appreciation of just how difficult it could be to pursue one’s dreams. Ironically, the lecture circuit took me away from the very research that had earned me a Nobel in the first place, yet I enjoyed it no less. Lighting the spark in others that would lead to a career in science was even more important.
The dean didn’t mind so much that I spent more time on the road than on campus. He knew that my efforts helped to increase the visibility of the department. He knew that some of the high school students I lectured today would be our undergraduate and graduate students tomorrow. The lecture circuit had never been a career objective, but now that I was in a position of renown, it was the best way I could contribute to the field.
I would be spending the coming week in New York City, where I’d be giving lectures in six different high schools as well as at Columbia University and New York University. Three of the schools were among New York’s elite public high schools and for those, I didn’t charge a fee. New York was lucky to have public schools of such a high caliber, but every year there were calls to disband them or to open their enrollment to all students, regardless of ability, which would have amounted to much the same thing.
New York had a critical mass of genius kids, and yet many of them were of modest means. Their parents could never afford to send them to a private school. Schools such as Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech offered a chance for the best and brightest kids to reach their full potential and to prepare them for higher education at top universities. The three private high schools I’d visit as well as Columbia and NYU could afford to pay my fee, but the public schools could not. Yet it was at those schools that I enjoyed teaching the most.
I loved visiting New York, particularly because my twin sons lived there. Brad was the chair of the Economics department at NYU, and Lyle was the dean of the business school. They shared a spacious apartment in Greenwich Village, which was not only in the heart of the NYU campus, but was also in one of the most gay-friendly neighborhoods in America. I’d long-suspected that both my sons were gay, although I’d never brought it up with them. I worried that they’d ask me if perhaps I was gay as well. The answer to that was complicated.
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I grew up in the Midwest in the 1960’s and 1970’s, at a time when only the ultra-religious thought that homosexuality was an abomination. Most sensible people realized it was merely a mental illness. As such, it was a treatable disorder. Sex education in schools was fairly new and it focused only on adolescent biology and pregnancy. That was in eighth grade, the middle year of junior high, and it was taught in our physical education class by our gym teacher. Thus the boys and girls were taught separately.
Sex education covered the basics of how our bodies were changing and how babies were made, but it skipped the most important part — how to use your penis for things other than urination. We learned about how eggs were fertilized, but I was an only child and incredibly naïve. I was far too embarrassed to ask how the sperm actually got into the fallopian tubes to fertilize those eggs.
In other words, I knew that people had sex, but I had no idea what intercourse actually was. Hell, I didn’t even know about masturbation! The sex education teacher treated it as if it was something dirty. It wasn’t until later that year, while on an overnight field trip to Chicago, that my roommate showed me how to jerk off. At long last, I was freed from having frequent wet dreams. The significance that those dreams involved other boys hadn’t yet dawned on me.
It wasn’t until late the following year, when I’d just turned fifteen, that things began to come into focus. Believe it or not, Planned Parenthood was invited into our health class. They taught us about the various kinds of birth control without being judgmental. That was before Roe v. Wade and before legal abortion in Indiana. It was before the Religious Right had made even the discussion of birth control taboo.
I learned more about sex from Planned Parenthood than I learned from the health education teacher who taught the course, or from the boys’ gym teacher who taught our sex education class. However, when the guy from planned parenthood talked about condoms and the importance of using them properly, I was clueless.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and I raised my hand and asked, “How does the sperm actually get into the woman to fertilize the egg?” No one laughed and the instructor actually thanked me for asking a question that most were too embarrassed to ask. He assured me that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what sexual intercourse involved, and went on to explain what should’ve been taught in sex ed.
There was one other topic that was covered in sex ed back in 1969, when I was still thirteen and an eighth-grader. They showed a film on the danger posed by homosexuals. The movie was narrated by a sex crimes investigator, and it depicted a gay man who befriended a teenage boy… and then was arrested and led away in handcuffs. The moral of the film was that we needed to be careful of strange men. It taught us that homosexuals were mentally ill and their only interest was in seducing young teenage boys.
At the time, I knew I liked going around shirtless and barefoot in the summer. I liked looking at boys who were shirtless and barefoot. It made me feel tingly inside. Once I learned how, I jerked off to thoughts of going shirtless and barefoot with other boys. Sometimes I even thought about walking naked in the woods with other naked boys. I even kept a stash of catalog pages of boys in swimsuits, hidden behind a dresser drawer.
But that didn’t make me a homosexual. Homosexuals were men who preyed on teenage boys. That wasn’t something I would ever do. Besides which, homosexuality was a mental illness. Surely, it was something I could overcome. Then again, after that film in sex ed, one of the boys in the class made a comment to his friend as we exited the classroom. He said, “They shouldn’t treat them like criminals. They can’t help the way they are. Most of them keep to themselves.”
It would be years before that comment registered with me, or that I recognized the Stonewall uprising as something more than a riot of the mentally insane. My parents said homosexuals were deranged, and I believed them. Stonewall happened in New York, where crazy things happened. We lived in Indianapolis, where no one was queer.
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I was already tired by the time I entered the lecture hall at Stuyvesant High School. It was my third lecture of the day, having spent the morning at Brooklyn Tech. Brooklyn Tech was the largest and most diverse of the elite specialty high schools. With more than six thousand students, all of them in a STEM curriculum of science, technology, engineering and math, it wasn’t possible to address them all at once. My talk had been split into two lectures but even so, the auditorium was filled to capacity. The few questions I was allowed to answer had to be submitted on notecards, and only a handful were selected.
Stuyvesant, however, had less than half as many students, with only 700 in each grade level. It was the top-ranked specialty high school and occupied a relatively new facility in the heart of the financial district — in Battery Park City and right on the Hudson. Although the auditorium was cavernous, it had a more intimate feel with microphones available at every seat, so that anyone who wished to ask a question could do so without an intermediary. I valued being able to see the questioners, face-to-face. Because the school had a more diverse curriculum, less than half of the student body attended my lecture, leaving plenty of time for discussion.
I kept my lecture short so as to leave plenty of time for questions. My focus was on the improbability of life. I felt it was an important message for the present day, since humanity seemed to be hell-bent on destroying what might well be the only intelligent life in the universe. The Q & A was lively, but then a student got up to ask a question, and I nearly gasped out loud. With his unruly mop of golden curls and his piercing green eyes, he was a dead ringer for a boy from my youth — the first and only boy I’d ever loved.
I had to focus my entire being on answering his question, rather than just standing there agape at the vision of a boy from my past. After the lecture was over and people were leaving, he and a boy with mixed African American and Asian features came up to me to ask another question. To this day, I’m not sure where I got the nerve, but after answering their question, I asked the blond boy, “Young man, you both asked such excellent questions, but you remind me so much of someone I knew in my youth that I have to ask your name.”
With a shrug, the boy answered, “My name’s Seth Moore, Dr. Franklin.” Was it possible that this was his son? No, Paul would be far too old to be this boy’s father by now, but maybe…“Are you by any chance related to Paul Moore?”
“Paul Moore is my grandfather,” the boy answered. “Frank Moore, his son, is my dad.”
“Not to belabor the point,” I responded, “but in the summer of 1972, when I was only sixteen and just a bit older than you, I think, I attended a secondary science training program at the University of Iowa. In fact, it was called the SSTP. Most of us in the program were sixteen or seventeen, but there was one exceptionally bright boy there who was only thirteen. His name was Paul Moore, and he and I became best friends.”
“That was my grandfather,” the boy with the golden curls replied. “I’m sure of it. Grandpa told me about his summer in Iowa City, about meeting James Van Allen and about the flood that summer.”
“Ah, yes, the flood,” I related as vivid memories came back to me. “I almost forgot about that. The Iowa River crested at three feet above flood stage, flooding all of downtown. Many of the university buildings, including the university hospital, suffered significant damage. Fortunately, our dorm buildings were up on a hill, well above all the flooding.”
I hesitated for a brief moment and then decided that I had to know more about what became of the boy who’d taken my heart so many years ago. With trepidation, I suggested, “Listen boys, would you be interested in being my guests for dinner? Not to impose, and I promise not to spend the whole time reminiscing about my youth, but I’d love to talk with you further.”
“I have an even better idea,” the black Asian boy interjected. “Would you be our guest for dinner at our place? We’d have much more privacy to talk — and much more time. Seth’s parents are up in Albany for the legislative session, so we’ll have the place to ourselves.”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly impose on you,” I replied. “It would be my pleasure to take the two of you to a nice restaurant if it’s okay with your parents.”
“Believe me, it’s not an imposition,” Seth answered. “My boyfriend’s a fantastic cook. Both his parents are professional chefs, and Asher’s cooking is some of the best I’ve ever tasted.”
“Boyfriend?” I questioned with what I’m sure was a bemused expression.
“That’s not a problem, is it?” Seth asked.
“Of course not,” I replied. “I probably shouldn’t say anything, but your grandfather and I were more than just best friends.”
“I wondered if that was you,” Seth responded. “When I came out a few years ago, Grandpa mentioned that he’d had relationship with a boy named Jeff during the summer he was in Iowa. He made it sound like he was just experimenting, but the look in his eyes said it was much more. Being gay was so much more difficult when he was a boy…”
“You have no idea,” I interjected.
“I know a lot of gay boys got married to women back then, just because it was expected of them by their families, and it was so much easier than living as a gay man.” Asher commented. “So, will you let me prepare dinner for you?”
“Well, with an offer like that, I can hardly refuse,” I replied.
To say the evening was life-changing would have been an understatement. Not only did Asher prepare a gourmet meal that was as good as any I’d had at even the finest restaurants in the world, but I enjoyed an evening of intelligent conversation with three teenage and preteen gay couples who were surprisingly mature.
The highlight of the evening, however, was when Paul Moore arrived, just in time for dessert and coffee. Paul’s curls were now more silver than golden, and I was balding, and yet it was as if we’d never been apart. Paul still had piercing green eyes that exuded intelligence and a smile that radiated warmth. We spent the evening catching up on what we’d been up to over the years and then shared a limo home — me to my sons’ apartment in The Village and Paul to his apartment on the Upper West Side. We also shared a kiss.
That night in bed, I couldn’t help but remember all that had happened that led up to and included my relationship with Paul…
