To Ornament My Soul

By Michael D. O'Connor

This memoir celebrates 15 years of my life, when I was a young man in love at the dawn of gay liberation. Stonewall. It had to begin somewhere. And each of us had to begin to love ourselves, and each other, for who we really are. "Stonewall made us realize that the journey of discovering what love is must begin with ourselves....Once we do, the sensual and spiritual journey of our life begins."At great cost to each and every one of us, we witnessed to the beauty and wholesomeness of same sex love. We witnessed to the holiness of our love. We changed the world. The Stonewall Generation made the stupendous decision to accept and celebrate our same sex nature. And so we made manifest what had been savagely and murderously repressed for two thousand years: that male love is beautiful. You will meet the man with whom I shared more than my body--we shared our souls. "We believed that gay sexuality could be central to a healthy spirituality." Gay love helped us reclaim a genuine spirituality. Our love for each other helped us re-claim our imperfect humanity, and I believe that is the path to the divine. We proved gay love is a facet of God's love. "Our bodies are made in the image and likeness of God. And our souls are immortal. We are beautiful beings." This book will also take you on a wild ride through "...the bacchanal of the 1970's." Your tour will take you from a notorious all-male cinema, to the Folsom Street leather scene, to bars, baths and backrooms all across the country. I enjoyed the trip, and hope you will, too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael D. O'Connor
• Release date: Apr 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463051597

Michael D. O'Connor

Mike O'Connor, a Washingtonian by birth, spent his childhood on Marine Corps bases in the South. His favorite was Marine Corps Schools in Quantico, Virginia. There he fell in love with the beauty of Virginia, and all of the history around him. Although the 50's and 60's were dark years for gay men, he was to find that they were not devoid of interest and lusty adventures. In 1968, he did not "come out"--he positively danced with joy at his discovery of the gay community in Washington. A few years later, he moved to Boston and stepped into the bacchanal of the 1970's. Almost simultaneously he met the love of his life, Christopher Hail. They loved each other for 42 years. Having experienced the 70's so intensely, convinced him that he lived through a gay Golden age. Hemingway loved his life in Paris in the 20's, Isherwood loved his life in Berlin in the early 30's, and I loved the 70's in Boston.The last 5 years of my life have been consumed with editing a massive scholarly work on the Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti, by Christopher Hail. It is his legacy.

Book preview

THE STONEWALL GENERATION

"Let's drink to the old faggots who were there

and helped make this happen

just by being there." [i]

This old faggot was there.

I am a member of a generation of men and women who achieved remarkable change, at considerable personal cost. We knowingly walked into a homophobic shit storm of almost universal opprobrium, disgust and hate. We endured psychological and physical violence. We were damned as morally abhorrent, security risks, mentally ill, and were illegal in 49 states. Then, on one riotous evening in 1969, at a bar in New York City called the Stonewall, we made the stupendous decision to love ourselves and each other for who we really are.

We are the Stonewall Generation.

Tom Brokaw, in his book The Greatest Generation, the generation of the Depression and of World War Two, wrote that the ...sad reality is that they are dying at an ever faster pace. [ii] Thank God Brokaw recorded many of their stories before they were lost. Now the Stonewall Generation, too, is fast fading into history. Hence, the sense of responsibility in telling my story.

The sacrifices of the Greatest Generation made our country the freest and most prosperous nation on earth. The sacrifices of the Stonewall Generation deepened the meaning of freedom. Bobby Kennedy wrote that young people of the time ...appear to have chosen for their concern the dignity of the individual human being. [iii]

Even the dignity of gay human beings.

From the vantage point of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, I look back with the nostalgia of an old man at what we all accomplished.

My memories just tumble out--like the Joe Brainard's heap of memories in his wonderful book I Remember.

I remember making clover blossom chains. [iv]

I remember green Easter grass. [v]

I remember the sound of the ice cream man coming. [vi]

I remember locker rooms, and locker room smells. [vii]

I remember locker rooms too, Joe. I'll share those memories later. But, for now, to jump start this memoir, here are a few other memories.

I remember Jack Bailey, host of the 50's TV show Queen for a Day asking his audience, Would you like to be queen for a day? And me joining all the women in the audience by loudly replying, yes! And I remember the worried look on my father's face.

I remember one morning shortly after my seventh birthday my father caught me wearing my mother's high heels and trying on lipstick. I had played with them before and had a lot of fun. When he asked me what I was doing I replied truthfully, playing.

I remember my shock when I saw his face contort with rage heard his voice cold with fury I never want to see you do this again! Those words are seared into my memory. It was the start of a terrifying confrontation that defined our relationship as father and son for life.

So, the boy who wanted to be queen for a day became a queen for life. Of course I staggered into the Stonewall Generation in high heels!

Like her friend Lindsay Woolsey once suggested to Auntie Mame, a friend once suggested to me ...why don't you write a book [viii] And, like Mame, ...I simply thought, well, why the hell not? [ix] It ended up on my to do list for years. When I finally started pounding away at the keyboard, I churned out hundreds of pages of a jumble of memories. It was god awful stuff. I threw it out. How to proceed?

I found the answer in Jim Stewart's terrific memoir Folsom Street Blues, about his life in leather on Folsom back in the 1970's. I lived in leather on Folsom myself during the summer of 1981--more on that later. Stewart's gift for story telling about that memorable period of his life, gave me the idea to focus on specific people, places and dates that I vividly remembered.

Stewart wrote that those who lived in San Francisco in the 1970s, like those who lived through Hemingway's Movable Feast of Paris in the 1920s, felt ...that wherever they go for the rest of our lives, that time and place stay with us. [x] That is how I feel about this decisive period of my life: 1968-1983, the years of my "Movable Feast," when I was a young man in love at the dawn of gay liberation.

I hope this memoir will inspire others of the Stonewall Generation to record their stories. The Village People, on their first album, sang a song I always thought of as a stirring gay anthem. It was called Village People and the lyrics implored us all to ...do your part, write a song, the time has come. [xi]

The time has indeed come--we are now celebrating the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. Let's make do your part the way we observe this momentous occasion. So write a song, a poem, a memoir, or record an oral history. Let us produce--from the ground up--the peoples' history of how the Stonewall Generation changed society.

Dirk Vanden published the early gay classic I Want It All in 1969--the year of Stonewall, and in it voiced the hope:

"Maybe we can stop being ashamed of our bodies and the pleasures

they're capable of feeling....And maybe we can find out what it

really means to love somebody.[xii]

Stonewall began the process of fulfilling Vanden's hopes.

Stonewall made us realize that the journey of discovering what love is must begin with ourselves. We realized we must love ourselves before we can love others. Once we do, the sensual and spiritual journey of our life begins.

My upbringing and catechism class taught me that mine would begin with my Catholicism. To serve the Church, I entered a seminary in 1966. The seminary experience ended disastrously two years later. It was a painful way to learn that spirituality and religion are not the same thing.

To my joy, I encountered authentic spirituality in the classic gay novel, Song of the Loon, published three years before Stonewall. In the story, two men, Cyrus and Ephraim, accept their capacity to love each other and know great happiness. In the novel, men who loved other men wore a carving of a loon around their necks to identify themselves to others. They followed the Way of the Loon. This is the spiritual journey of gay men. When I saw the movie version back in 1970 or 1971, it rocked my world. My heart filled with the truth that the ...Way of the Loon is the right way. [xiii]

I have tried to follow the Way of the Loon ever since. With mixed results, as you will see.

I had real reservations about writing this memoir. I thought, well, well, well--aren't YOU important? I was taught that it was rude to talk about myself, to engage in what Tallulah Bankhead called ...doing a duet with the perpendicular pronoun. [xiv] See what I mean? I used the perpendicular pronoun five times in this short paragraph.

But, over time, I realized it might be interesting for young people to read what it was like, for a gay man to put his life together in that long ago, pre-Stonewall, pre-Internet period. How challenging it was--and how thrilling the journey has been--because it was a journey towards love. We fell in love and then told the truth about it over kitchen tables, at the office water cooler, just about everywhere. For we knew that,

"...in the war against homophobia, a million gays marching on Washington

would have less impact than a million gays being honest...in their

respective homes and work places and houses of worship." [xv]

So now, here I am, about to relate some of my personal history.

The best definition of the word history--and the funniest--that I have ever heard was uttered by hottie Russell Tovey on stage and screen in Alan Bennett's the History Boys. When asked what history is, he replies:

How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another. [xvi]

So, here's mine.

Just one fucking thing after another....

Ooo-Rah!

First to fight for right and freedom

--the Marine Corps Hymn

Ooo-rah, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a common greeting between Marines. Marine brats, like myself, used it as well--after all, we were (and still are) part of the Marine Corps family. Kids gave the Marine Corps what it asked of us. And the Marine Corps gave all of us the opportunity to do our part in fighting what President Reagan would call, with bulls-eye accuracy, the evil empire. I was proud to do my part.

For example, in 1961, I started reading the Washington Post every day for the same reason a sailor scans the horizon: signs of bad weather. I was a child of the Cold War, and the bad weather I scanned the paper for was bad news that could mean that my father would be called away and get hurt or killed. Every Marine Corps kid lives with that dread.

When the Soviets built the Berlin Wall, I was scared for my father. Berlin was for many years the place where the cold war could turn extremely hot, extremely fast. Nikita Khrushchev had threatened to bury us. Khrushchev scared the living daylights out of me. So when I was growing up I always had one eye focused on Berlin. Berlin would be the first headline or story I would read in the paper and it always got my complete attention on TV. It was around this time that I first heard the word Vietnam.

There was a lot of bad weather when I was a kid.

I encountered bad weather of another sort one October morning in 1957. My father happened to walk in on me when I was playing in my mother's high heels and trying on lipstick. I loved it, it was so much fun.

He was furious and could barely restrain himself from hitting me. I thought, for the first time, that he would beat me to a pulp. In that instant he went from being Daddy to being Sir. I saw in his eyes a look that only those who engaged in combat with him saw. He hated what he was looking at.

Me.

This terrified me. So, avoiding the look at all costs became my priority. But how? I was just a young gay kid being himself. His terrifying reaction baffled me because I had no idea how I provoked this level of anger. I never want to see you do that again. Why?

I got the look often. I got the look when I played with girls. I got the look when I was too expressive, or too funny, or too emotive. I got 'the look when I dropped the ball or didn't hit the ball. I even got the look when my father was at bat and hit a line drive right at the shortstop and hit him in the balls resulting in pain he never forgot. I was that shortstop. And that time the look said, oh suck it up."

He was hard on me, on everyone--but on no one as much as himself. He was an officer in the United States Marine Corps and there is no other aspect of the difficult man who was my father I admire as much. I have always thought that he and my mother were the greatest members of Brokaw's Greatest Generation, and was blessed to have them for parents.

But Dad was of his time, and I had chosen to play with gender non-conformity in 1957. Bad timing. The 1950's, for gay people, really were the dark ages. McCarthyism was rampant (Homosexuals in the State Department! Security risks!). Fear of homosexuals motivated the fist that landed right in my face that same year. It was the first time someone called me queer. I had no idea what the word meant.

But I was picking up clues that parts of me provoked inexplicable reactions. So whenever I became aware of them they became secrets, which is the ...first homosexual lesson: that your survival depends upon self-concealment. [xvii]

That was the basis of what I realize, in retrospect, was becoming my modus operandi, or way of operating. I just added secret after secret. I screwed the lid on tight. I wanted and needed to get along with my father. When he wasn't furious with me he could be fun to be with, and when he wanted to be funny no one could be funnier. I just wish that had happened more often. I was also concerned about my mother and siblings--I did not want them to become collateral damage in some confrontation. Since I was clueless as to why I provoked him, I became very cautious about my conduct, and became a loner.

One of the hardest lessons life can teach is the importance of being generous with yourself. It took a long time for me to realize that I was not a Parris Island grunt and did not have to grovel before D.I. Dad all my life.

So, eventually, I allowed my anima, my alternate persona, my inner drag queen, to emerge again. When she did she had the sultry voice of a Lauren Bacall and the daffiness of an Auntie Mame. To my amazement, and after a lot of help, she looked believable. At first she took the feminized version of Michael for a name--Michelle. But a great old aunty told me that that would not do--it was too obvious. So she suggested I take the chelle part, add a few letters and voila, Shelley was born. I