Epilogue
“Earth to Jeff. Come in, Jeff,” I heard as the fog cleared from my brain. Paul and I were enjoying a leisurely Sunday brunch in our apartment on the Upper West Side. I’d gone out earlier to Zabar’s to pick up bagels, lox and schmear. I could have gotten delivery from Kossar’s, but Zabar’s was a local institution within easy walking distance of our apartment, and frankly, I liked their lox even better than Kossar’s.
Apparently, I’d zoned out while in the midst of eating my bagel sandwich. “Sorry, Paul. I was just reminiscing.”
“We’re not old enough to be reminiscing,” Paul complained. “Neither of us is even seventy.”
“I don’t think you need to be seventy to reminisce,” I countered, “especially when it comes to the significant times in our lives. In this case, I was remembering the summer we met.”
“Now that was really something,” Paul agreed. “You were sixteen and I was thirteen, and by pure luck, we were paired up as roommates in the SSTP at the University of Iowa. That was quite a summer.”
“There were many firsts for us indeed,” I related, “but nothing compared to being each other’s first love.”
“Fisrt love and last love,” Paul exclaimed. “Who knew we’d get back together in the end.”
“And that was purely by luck as well,” I added. “Had it not been for your grandson, Seth, attending my lecture at Stuyvesant High School, I’d have never known you were here in New York. I’d have never thought even to try to contact you.”
“Thanks to my grandson and his husband, we found each other after all those years,” Paul chimed in as he placed his hand on top of mine.
“Do you ever wonder what would’ve happened if we’d not gone our separate ways after that summer?” I asked. “What might have happened if we’d acknowledge what we were and went with it — the rest of the world be damned?”
“I think about it all the time,” Paul replied. “It’s so easy to imagine what might have happened if you’d decided to stay in Iowa, too, and if we’d continued as roommates. We might have gotten away with it, but chances are we would’ve been discovered. There already were suspicions about you from our friends.
“At the time, Iowa still had an anti-sodomy law on the books. Perhaps even more importantly, you were three years older than I, and although we were at the same level in our education, an aggressive DA might well have gone after you for statutory rape. In Iowa, they’d have gotten a conviction too.
“And then there’s what would’ve happened if my parents found out. They’d have pulled me out of college for sure. Maybe even sent me to some Bible camp claiming to be able to turn gay kids straight. I’d have probably killed myself in the end.”
I shuddered at the thought. I responded, “My mother already suspected we were involved and got me to admit to having had a sexual relationship…”
“Really? You never told me that before,” Paul interrupted.
“I never had a reason to bring it up,” I explained. “I told her over and over again I wasn’t gay, but she kept emphasizing how wrong it was. She even read the chapter on homosexuality aloud to me from All You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex.”
“The first edition of that book was blatantly homophobic,” Paul interjected.
“Yeah, it was,” I continued. “Even after that, she clipped letters from the Ann Landers and Dear Abby columns in the newspaper. She gave me anything related to questioning youth to show me that it was normal for straight kids to think they might be gay. It was ridiculous.
“Then in 1976, my step-cousin, Bret, ended up on the national news when he participated in a Pride march. He went to college at NYU, and with its location in Greenwich Village, he felt comfortable being out. Finding out that her husband’s nephew was gay was a real eye-opener for Mom. I’d befriended him after being introduced to Tom’s family, and we even had a couple of sleepovers, so Mom knew him well.”
“How come you never told me about him?” Paul asked.
“Because he died of AIDS,” I explained as tears came to my eyes. “He was one of the first cases.”
“We lost so many good people in such a short time,” Paul responded. “That does bring up another point though. I’m not saying either of us would’ve cheated on the other, but we’re human, and we didn’t use protection. We could’ve both died from AIDS.”
“That’s true, although I still would like to think we’d have been faithful,” I replied. “Any one of a number of things could’ve happened to either of us. For one thing, my sons would’ve never been born. Hell, I might never have won my Nobel Prize.”
“As profound as the effects of staying together might have been on our lives, Jeff, your life probably wouldn’t been much different. It’s likely you’d have ended up in the same place, doing the same things and getting your Nobel Prize. The direction of my life, on the other hand, would have been drastically altered. I certainly don’t want to diminish what you went through, losing your wife to breast cancer, but when my wife developed a particularly aggressive form of MS, it completely upended our lives.
“Up until that point, I’d been on a traditional academic tenure track at the University of Chicago. I don’t need to tell you how renowned Chicago is for astrophysics. But when Julie got sick, my career took a back seat to finding an effective treatment or maybe even a cure for her MS. However, the clinical trials available in academia were limited and geared to less severe forms of the disease. The only place doing high-risk, cutting edge research on MS was the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda. The trouble was that there were no comparable academic positions available in astrophysics anywhere near Washington. Then I saw that the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institute was searching for a new director.
“I had no experience running a museum, nor did I have the kind of background in astronomy they were looking for, but I was desperate. I’d trained under the legendary James Van Allen himself and I’d grown up, obsessed with the space program. In that sense, I was almost overqualified. I managed to talk myself into contention for the position, and amazingly, I got it. It was a new direction in my life and I’d like to think I was good at it.”
“You were great at it,” I responded. “You made the museum what it is today.”
“The effect on Frank and Marissa was equally profound,” Paul added. “Thanks to my involvement with the Smithsonian, Marissa took an interest in anthropology and particularly in the native peoples of the South Pacific. We tend to be so focused on the effects of European contact on New World cultures that we often forget that something equally profound happened with the Pacific Islanders. She’s a full professor at the University of Melbourne, which is the absolute best place in her field.
“Likewise, being in school in Bethesda with the sons and daughters of senators, representatives, cabinet members and the like shaped Frank’s destiny as nothing else could have. It’s likely he would’ve gone to law school, regardless, but his interest in politics could only have flourished in Washington. And now he’s a US congressman. None of that would’ve happened if we’d stayed together.”
“Frank and Marissa wouldn’t have even been born if we’d stayed together,” I pointed out.
“Yes, there is that. I wouldn’t have had my children, I wouldn’t have been the director of the Air and Space Museum and I wouldn’t have moved on to become the head of astrophysics at the National Museum of American History in New York, nor the director of the Hayden Planetarium. Undoubtedly, I’d have stayed in an academic tenure track at the University of Chicago or more likely, I’d have followed you to Southern California.”
“But would our relationship have survived our being discovered?” I asked. “We were young and naïve and terribly ill-equipped to deal with the consequences. Chances are we’d have been split up, whether by choice or not. If that had happened, would we have ever gotten back together? When I was reintroduced to you by your grandson, the decision to relocate here was an easy one, but would I have still done so if we’d been outed when we were young?”
“We’ll never know, now. Will we?” Paul stated more than asked.
“You know, you’ve never said much about your daughter until today,” I continued. “I realize it must be difficult to make contact with her when she’s on the opposite side of the planet, but what’s her story? Does she have a family? Do you have grandchildren down under?”
Shaking his head, Paul replied, “I’d be talking your ears off about my Aussie grandkids if I had them. No, Marissa is a dedicated professional, married to her work with no time for a family. Sometimes I wonder if she’s happy, but then that reflects my own biases.
“We do email each other regularly,” Paul went on, “but communication in real time is problematic. For one thing, when it’s daytime here, it’s nighttime there. When it’s summer here, it’s winter there. Secondly, sending digital signals through myriad underground and undersea cables, or relayed by orbiting satellites, results in noticeable lag. A simple conversation can be exhausting.”
“How long has it been since you last saw her?” I asked.
“Oh god, too long,” Paul replied. “I always do make it a point to visit her every few years or so. It’s a very long journey and expensive. At least Australia provides one of the best vantage points for observing the southern skies, so I can justify the trip, and the museum will pay for it, but there are rules. I have to justify anything other than the cheapest advertised flight, which means traveling off-season and in the cheapest economy seat. The need to justify each and every trip pretty much limits me to going every three to five years.”
“You must have a lot of frequent flyer miles accumulated,” I pointed out. “Couldn’t you use those for travel to Australia?”
“As you probably realize, those miles belong to the museum — not to me. I can only use them for future museum travel, subject to the same damn rules.” Then after a pause, he said, “We should plan on going, though, maybe even later this year. I’ll have to check my schedule and my daughter’s, and of course we’ll have to pay for your ticket separately.”
“I’ve been to Australia a number of times myself,” I noted. “The Australian Outback and the Chilean Andes provide the best earth-bound vantage points for studying the galactic core. With all of the traveling I do on the lecture circuit, I have a ton of accumulated frequent flyer miles at my disposal. Easily enough for the two of us to fly business class to Australia in the winter high season, which is of course their summer. Better yet, let’s go this spring which is their fall, after the danger from wildfires has past.”
“That’s an excellent plan, my love,” Paul agreed. Then after a pause, he stated more than asked, “Aren’t you glad that our kids don’t have to go through what we did? Your sons and my grandson can be who they are without worrying about what other people think.”
“We can never take what we have for granted,” I countered. “Even now, there are those who are determined to see marriage equality overturned. Trans rights are under attack. In half the country, women are dying because doctors are afraid to perform an emergency abortion, even when it’s necessary to save the life of the mother.”
“As you’d say, the battle is never won,” Paul agreed.
“However, sometimes, miracles do happen,” I added. “Who could have ever foreseen that after all these years, I’m back together with the man who stole my heart. The man who was the first and only boy I ever loved. The boy I met during a memorable summer in Iowa.”
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Author’s Note
A Summer in Iowa is a purely fictional story, based on events that happened in the author’s life. It serves as a prequel to the New York Story, Reminiscing About the Future, and a degree of artistic license was necessary to bring events as I remember them into line with those already described. Although the main character, Jeff, is loosely based on myself, the real me was considerably less self-assured and even more naïve.
Paul’s character was based on an amalgam of people I encountered during my summer in Iowa. My real roommate was sixteen and he wasn’t particularly friendly. Although we shared the same close circle of friends, we never really bonded. Besides which, he insisted on keeping the air conditioning way too cold to the extent that I had to resort to wearing pajamas in bed. There was, in fact, a thirteen-year-old boy in my group of friends, but he was way too self-absorbed with trying to act mature that he came off as anything but.
The SSTP was pretty much as described. Attending James Van Allen’s lecture was a true highlight of my life. The trip to Amana has been embellished a bit, but the experience of being billed for a meal that we thought was included did happen. The incident with the kid who burned a hole in the hallway carpet was real, and it turned out he’d faked his credentials to get into the program in the first place. He was sent home. I spent much of my free time in ‘Greg and Gary’s’ room with a close group of friends, listening to the stereo and reading pornographic comics.
Although there were some wild evenings in town, none of them involved alcohol. We did see a double feature with Little Big Man and A Man Named Horse. My friends also went to see A Clockwork Orange, but I was afraid to see an X-rated movie behind my parents’ backs, so I told them about it. Believe it or not, they told me I could go if I wanted to, but they warned me I’d have nightmares for weeks afterward. More importantly, they’d seen it and hated it. I never did get around to seeing the movie, even after it was revised to an R rating.
The flood of 1972 was pretty scary, and I foolishly spent much more time wading through thigh-high water than depicted in the story. Unfortunately, the incident with being outed due to simply not understanding the meaning of ‘gay liberation’ happened. My final two weeks in the program were something I never discussed with anyone until much later. The SSTP is still going strong and I can highly recommend it for today’s high school sophomores and juniors.
Writing a period piece from my own past was one of the most challenging things I’ve attempted. It’s perhaps even more difficult than writing a piece about the distant past. Both require a lot of research, but more distant events are often recorded in greater depth in historic references and archival materials. My recall of events from my own past was sometimes contaminated by more contemporary memories. Unfortunately, search results from the internet are often themselves distorted by more recent times.
Much has been written about the seventies, but there are little details that are seldom remembered. Yet it’s those details that can make a story feel more real. How many people remember that that college lecture halls used to have ash trays on the backs of the seats? Diet Seven-Up used to be sold under the trade name Like until 1969, when cyclamates were banned in the US for use as an artificial sweetener. Corn oil margarine was thought to be healthier than real butter, as we didn’t know about trans-fats. Afro-American, rather than African-American, was the preferred term for black people.
Most deodorants came in aerosol cans, as the ozone hole wasn’t discovered until the mid-1980s. Sunscreen was called suntan lotion, and it did little to screen against harmful UV rays. Boys wore their hair with bangs that came down over the forehead to the level of the eyebrows. Tie-dye shirts were still popular and bell bottom pants, sometimes with vertical stripes, were the norm. How many remember that white socks were unfashionable and that we wore black socks with our sneakers? It’s those little details that make a story come alive.
Some things have changed dramatically since 1972. For example, Holland, Michigan used to be a little tourist hamlet. Now, it’s a sprawling city! Just trying to find the details necessary to recreate the experience of a visit there in the early 1970s was a challenge. Internet searches tend to bring up only current data from tourist sites. Online archival information is very limited and much of it behind paywalls. A more exhaustive search, perhaps in multiple public libraries, would have been overkill for this simple story.
One of the most useful resources for exploring the University of Iowa campus as it existed was an interactive online aerial view of the entire state of Iowa in 1970. I also made use of a University of Iowa 1970-1972 campus map. Many things have changed since then. The Quadrangle residence hall was long ago demolished and replaced with a new pharmacy building. Indeed, much of the medical center complex of today didn’t exist in 1972. The Engineering Building has been greatly expanded to the extent that it’s barely recognizable. The cafeterias where we ate have all been replaced with ever more popular eateries. Interestingly, a downtown shopping mall, the University Capitol Center, was built, flourished and died in the interim.
Locating suitable restaurants where we might have eaten on the weekends posed a particular challenge. When it comes to my hometown, I can remember many of the places where we ate in my youth that are no longer around — places like The Huddle, The Tee-Pee, Frisch’s Big Boy, Burger Chef, and L. S. Ayres Tea Room. Hollyhock Hill, where we celebrated many a special occasion, is still around, along with its artery-clogging food. Finding places like that in Iowa City posed more of a challenge. I just don’t remember the places where we ate in 1972.
In some instances, I simply invented restaurants based on what was common at the time. The pizzeria where the boys spent an entire afternoon is such a place. Still, I like to give my stories a sense of realism and that means including real places. It took a lot of perseverance to find references in newspaper articles and Reddit posts. Far too many avenues led to dead ends as, for example, when I discovered that a venerable old restaurant didn’t open until 1974. Real restaurants used in the story included Howard Johnson’s, Burger Chef, Pearson’s Drugstore, George’s Buffet, Hamburg Inn, The Sanctuary Pub and The Mill.
The flashback to 1968 was important to me. I was barely twelve when RFK was shot, but the trauma of that year cemented my interest in politics for life. The fact that 1972 was a presidential election year yielded particular fodder for discussion. Thanks to the Vietnam War and Watergate, kids talked about politics back then. We all knew kids who’d lost a brother in the war. Many of my friends had brothers and sisters in college who participated in the campus protests. I was in the last draft lottery ever held, but my lottery number was 355 out of 365, and the call-up had ended a few years before then in any case. However, a lot of the students in my classes at Purdue were Vietnam vets, attending college on the GI Bill.
Although the story is loosely based on key events in my life, the relationship between the characters of Jeff and Paul is purely fictional. My junior high and high school education was pretty much as described here. Some of the associated characters in the story were based on real people in my life, although the New Year’s Eve encounter with ‘Zoe’ thankfully never happened. My real aunt’s daughters are considerably older and it was her granddaughters that were the true terror. Twice I was asked to babysit them, and I still bear the scars of those episodes.
Professor H. Marshall Dixon, the head of Astronomy and Physics at Butler University, was very much a real person who gave of his life to the community. He passed away in 2022, at the age of 92. I owe so much of what I am today to that one man who gave generously of his time and mentored so many kids who otherwise might have languished in public schools. My only regret is that I didn’t keep in touch with him the way many of his former students did.
The death of my father, depicted in the story as occurring in 1968, didn’t actually occur until October, 1972, after the major events in this story. My mother was 52 when he died and she never remarried. She went back to work as bookkeeper in her sister-in-law’s high-end dress shop, just as mentioned in the story. She rose to become the office manager and didn’t retire until my aunt sold the store, when they were both in their mid-eighties.
My mother’s concerns that I might be gay were born out when she actually did read me the entire chapter on homosexuality from the first edition of All You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex. She also slipped me newspaper clippings from time-to-time from Dear Abby and Ann Landers. I never questioned why she’d saved them in the first place. The argument about interracial marriage was one of the most heated arguments I ever had with my mom, but it occurred at a separate time. Ironically, my mom was quite accepting of her grandson when he came out.
The cameras in the story were exactly as described. My dad had a Kodak Duaflex camera that still worked long after my father passed away. Unfortunately, my sister simply gave it away with all my mother’s old junk when Mom had to go into assisted living. My first 35mm camera was an Olympus 35SP. I bought a GAF 1690, slide projector, which worked quite well until I replaced it with a Kodak Carousel 4600 projector that cost $240 in 1983, the equivalent of $775 today.
I did indeed inherit my father’s car when he died. It was a green 1971 Ford LTD with a vinyl roof. With a 6.5 liter V8 engine, it managed 11 mpg in combined city-highway driving, if I was lucky. I kept that car for twelve years, to the point that I was spending around $2,000 annually on repairs and maintenance, the equivalent of over $6,200 today. It had 165,000 miles on the odometer when I finally decided it was time to move on. I bought a 1984 Audi 4000. It was an impressively engineered car, but the ‘vanilla’ exterior might as well have been called lemon yellow. I sold it after only three years.
The car accident in Michigan depicted in the story really happened. There was no damage to the bumper, but the primary attachment of the bumper to the car was via shock absorbing struts and those sustained hidden damage. No one thought to look at them because they were tucked inside the bumper, on the sides of the car, and they eventually rusted through. Fortunately, that was discovered before the bumper fell off the car. The cost of replacing the struts was minor.
The Marott Hotel has nothing to do with the Marriott Hotel chain, even though spell checkers and search engines try to make it so. It remains a popular wedding venue. The hotel ceased operations in 1976 and was boarded up for two years before being purchased by a developer and rehabilitated. It has been converted to luxury apartments, with amenities unmatched in newer buildings. It might not be in a great location for a hotel, but it’s in a fantastic location for city apartment dwellers. For years there was a sign on the corner that read, “If you lived here, you’d be home now.”
As with Bret’s character in the story, I decided on a career in biomedical engineering and ended up going to medical school. I eventually went to Stanford, but not until my years of residency. I went to Purdue for my undergraduate engineering degree, so that I could remain close to my mom. After all, less than a year had passed since my father died. My biggest regret is that I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to go to MIT. The cachet of a degree from an institution such as MIT opens doors that require a hell of a lot more effort to open by a Purdue grad.
Then again, I was in exactly the right place at the right time after all. I was in my residency at Stanford and was finally coming to terms with my sexuality, when I met the love of my life, who happened to be a woman. We recently celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the day we met. The strange thing is that the night before we met, I spent the evening with friends and we watched a movie together. Before leaving to return to my apartment, I had a premonition, which I shared with my friends. I told them my life was about to change in a big way. It certainly did!
In case you’re wondering, I never did win a Nobel prize, but I got to travel the world. More importantly, I found true love.
Thanks for reading my story. As always, I’m grateful to Rob and Jerry for editing it and to AwesomeDude and GayAuthors for hosting it.
