ARE YOU KIDDING?: A Life

Copyright © 2022 by Bob May

All Rights Reserved.

This book has been written, designed and published by Bob May, who is solely responsible for the content, and printed by Ingram Spark. All opinions are those of the author.

Ingram Spark/Ingram Content Group

1 Ingram Blvd.

La Vergne, TN 37086

(855) 997-7275

Ingramcontent.com

ISBN 978 1 7350600 1 9

ISBN 979 8 2181185 6 3 (e-book)

Also available as an eBook

Printed in the U.S.A. by Porto Place Publishing

Topics:

1. growing up gay in the mid-20 th century

2. living with HIV long-term

First edition March 21, 2022

The Draft section added to Second Edition Jan. 30, 2023

Cover: The author visits Santa, Minneapolis, Minn., 1954.

(Photo courtesy of the author.)

For Sam, who asked.

And, the Pandemic of 2020, without which

I probably would never have gotten to it.

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

--The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1

Contents

Preface

The 1950s: My First Ten Years/ Nature or Nurture?

The 1960s: My Teens/ Hello, Goodbye

The 1970s: My 20s/ Back to Square One/The Draft

The 1980s: My 30s/ My Hollywood Adventure

The 1990s: My 40s/ A New Life

The 2000s: My 50s/ Conversions

2005: An Early Retirement

Early 2007: On the Road

Late 2007: A Hit and a Miss

The 2010s: My 60s: Pushing Through

2011-2019: The Family You Make

2017: Love in the Afternoon of Life

The 2020s: My 70s/ Borrowed Time

2021: My 71st Year/ A Day at a Time

A Searching and Fearless Inventory

A Normal Day

Afterword

Appendix I: Studying and Learning from Hitchcock

Appendix II: On Directing

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Preface

I’m sure someone somewhere has said, The only thing any of us can write about definitively is ourselves. Whether anyone wants to read it or not, is another story.

The telling of my story started around September 2020, when I met Sam, a late-twenty-something college grad, playing all-gay on-line UNO during the pandemic.

Sam and his friend Trevor were significantly younger than the rest of the men in our Meet-Up group, all men in and around forty to sixty years old. And me, seventy-years-old.

During the idle chat that accompanied the game, Sam happened to mention that he had always wanted someone to explain the Beatles, their popularity and significance, to him.

This was something I could do: the Beatles having been the soundtrack and North Star of my teens. So, a little while later, Sam, Trevor, my friend Jim (another Beatles aficionado) and I sat down at my place to walk down memory lane.

What soon became obvious during our conversation was how different Jim’s and my life experiences had been from those of Sam and Trevor.

For us, the Beatles represented an absolute breakthrough departure from the past, and a breath of fresh air against a dismal history of Elvis’ toxic manhood, Lawrence Welk’s mind-numbing one-two polkas and Mitch Miller’s echoing barbershop choruses.

For Sam and Trevor, the idea of one boy band emerging to dominate and inspire the zeitgeist was hard to conceive. What analog did they have for that?

How do you say that the first thing about the Beatles was that there was nothing like them before? No one exploring new looks in styles, expanding the technology of music and music itself.

Everything the Beatles brought new to us, Trevor and Sam’s generation was born into. What current artists with which they would be familiar could be said to have had anything like the revolutionary impact to their generation that the Beatles had on ours? Lady Gaga, maybe? Great chameleons like David Bowie and Madonna were also past their prime before Gen Z’s time.

I googled their generation’s favorite artists and it included Michael Jackson (the Beatle’s equal in impact certainly) well down the list, but he’s dead; a flash from the past. At the top of their list are Taylor Swift and Beyonce, great artists, yes, but nothing as new and revolutionary in their time as the Beatles were in theirs.

How do you begin to compare our eight TV channels, LPs, and AM radio to their legion of channels, choices and streams?

I had never felt more like a time traveler from the past than I did in that moment; trying to explain an entirely different way-of-life to young adults who had no clue of it.

In the midst of all this reminiscing, I happened to mention that my parents re-keyed all the house door locks, locking me out when they accidentally found out I was gay by looking through my stuff.

Are you kidding? was the immediate response from both of them.

No, I said, it was a really common thing for parents to do in those days.

This was beyond the pale for them. They had gone to their parents freely with the news of their sexuality. There had been some tension, but they were quickly embraced with blessings. They had told their friends and school mates without fear of bullying and violence.

Whether it was my parents’ response to learning I was gay, or my experience of the AIDS epidemic, or of the homophobia I confronted in my workplaces, the reaction of these young people was always the same:

Are you kidding?

They had all grown up together on Will and Grace and Queer as Folk.

And now, in many cases, they were being recruited by companies specifically for the creativity and diversity they could bring to workplaces as gay men.

It was true that they’ve never known a time of sexual freedom without AIDS. But AIDS for them was something you take prophylactic PrEP for, not something that killed a generation of your friends.

The more we continued sharing experiences, the more I realized I had a story to tell that would die with me if I didn’t share it.

A lot happens in seventy years: technological advances, plagues, wars…

I think about all the things my folks saw change before they died: sound films, color TV, space flight, cell phones, a black president…a gay son…

This book, then, is one gay man’s mind-boggling remembrance of seventy years from Eisenhower to COVID-19, coming of age and coming to terms with his sexual identity, surviving and pursuing a show business and business career in the face of prejudice and homophobia, celebrating the sexual revolution, surviving the AIDS pandemic, substance abuse and depression, and witnessing the decline of the middle class he grew up in. It is a look back across six decades from the hard-earned perspective of age and wisdom.

The idea was never to make money or gain fame or start a new career (dear God, at 71?) as a writer.

The idea was to tell my story: what happened, what I felt and thought of it, what I learned, what I cared about and my preoccupations and enthusiasms (you will find The Beatles and Alfred Hitchcock prominently featured), and by so doing put a period at the end of my life so far.

I have a feeling I am bound to be occasionally politically incorrect herein and very un-woke. I am a creature of another time, a time traveler from the past. Things were different then. We can pride ourselves today that we’re much better now.

Just like we thought we were back then.

I hope you can meet me where I am, not where you want me to be.

Mom, Me, Dad and Sue, Christmas 1954, Minneapolis

The 1950s: My First Ten Years Nature or Nurture?

There was nothing in my background to the time I was ten that accounted for my sexual feelings. Why am I the way I am? Genetics or up-bringing? Nature or nurture? I say nature.

There used to be a family photo in an album somewhere, but I can’t find it anymore. The one above is not it.

It’s a black-and-white photo of my sister and I on Christmas morning. I must’ve been about four at the time, and my sister must’ve been about three. We are standing in front of the tinseled Christmas tree, she on the left and me on the right. She is in her Dale Evans cowgirl outfit complete with holster and toy guns: very popular with girls in 1954. I was on the right in my pajamas and robe, very earnestly and intently ironing on a toy ironing board. It’s amazing this photo has been lost; it is so telling of what was to come. I wonder if it was lost on purpose?

We lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota then. All I remember is that it was very cold there and I was sick a lot. I was bed-ridden a good deal of the time, with coughs and high fevers and rashes. When I was sick, I was often delirious and had bad dreams.

I had one recurring dream in particular. It was of a little girl next to a little house that was in an enormous airline hanger-like building. All around her there were enormous metal pipes stacked in pyramids to the ceiling. And, though it never happened, I was dreadfully afraid the pipes would roll down and crush her. I was powerless. I could do nothing.

Was the little girl me? Were the enormous pipes … something else? Ask Freud, I guess.

From as early as four-years-old, and probably earlier, I have been playing characters and putting on shows. I would dance and perform on top of the picnic table in the backyard of our home in Minneapolis.

I’m sure I had a need for attention but I think I had more of a need to make fantasy real. I’ve always wanted to be an actor and director. This may have come from my need to hide from my sexual feelings, or from some inbred affinity or appetite for fantasy and make believe. I don’t know.

I started kindergarten in a big two-story brick building down the block within walking distance of my house. I remember carrying a rug to school on which to lay down for my nap. It was a multi-colored rug with knots more than stitches.

That was in September, 1954.

By Halloween, right on schedule, I was sick and had to stay home on the front room sofa while watching my mom hand out candy to kids standing in banks of snow. My mother had made me a Superman costume to wear. I smelled of Vicks VapoRub. My superpower was menthol and camphor.

The story goes that our doctor told my folks that I was so sickly that, if they didn’t get me to a warmer climate, I would die.

All my dad’s family, parents and siblings, and friends lived in Minneapolis. They were all very close, and many of the men my father had known in the military were there too. Both my sister and I were born there.

Yet, it is a testament to my parents, and my father particularly, that they pulled up stakes and tore apart all those important family connections, and I soon started first grade in Anaheim, California.

None of the rest of the family ever followed us West, though of course, they visited.

My Uncle Bob, my dad’s brother, after whom I was named, and his wife Thea and their kids visited us one whole summer. All I remember was having pizza every night while the adults played cards and hung out. By the end of that summer, I was sick to death of pizza.

Grandpa and Grandma May, Guy and Ruby, also visited and had their picture taken in front of an orange grove. I can’t find that photo either. Guy was from Croydon, England, and had met Ruby, who was from Canada, and married her in Minneapolis. They looked like a little Winston and Clemmie Churchill. I remember Guy smoked a pipe, and I liked the smell.

Anaheim was mostly orange groves then, except for Disneyland which had just been built, and the burgeoning neighborhoods of tract houses around it.

We moved into a one-story three-bedroom pink-and-white tract house at 635 Porto Street in Anaheim. My mother quickly got the exterior painted a nice contrasting green-and-white.

A few days a year you could see mountains through the green smog which smelled of lead and ozone, until the government took the lead out of gas. Yay, government!

My dad went to college and bought our first house with the help of the GI Bill. We have much to thank the government for.

My dad’s first job in California, though he had completed his teaching credential at the University of Minnesota, was at Disneyland. He started driving the Casey Junior Circus Train ride and even got to know Walt Disney himself, who would prowl the park in those early days.

I thought we had moved to California so I could go to Disneyland. In those days my dad could get us in for free almost every summer weekend. We thought of it as our private playground where we could go for a short afternoon and not have to make a tiring day of it. It wasn’t so crowded then, with a lot fewer things to do, but all new and exciting to us.

When I was around seven, I got to see live appearances of Zorro there, and Spin and Marty, and Davey Crockett. I remember the young actor that played Marty had terrible acne that you couldn’t see on TV. When my dad took me backstage, I also got to watch Guy Williams as Zorro switch horses with his stunt double who did the real tricks. It actually increased the magic for me seeing how it was done. I knew I wanted to make that kind of magic myself someday.

Shortly after we arrived in California, dad began teaching during the school year and working at Disney weekends and summertime. Again, he was a remarkable man when it came to sacrificing for us.

He had been born in 1925. He was ten during the worst of the Great Depression. Like many of his generation, the experience of poverty left a mark on him. My mother told me his feelings of inferiority were so strong as a boy, he would quit clubs whenever it came time to meet at his house. His fear of poverty and insecurity later drove him to seek a sense of financial security for himself and his family that he had not felt growing up.

We often didn’t see him on birthdays and such because he was always working, but his absence taught me about priorities and that fun sometimes had to be deferred. As an adult, I would do the same thing, working multiple jobs at the same time later in our relationship. My dad always understood me not always being available to him because of work.

I remember my dad in conversation on the kitchen phone learning his dad was dying, but deciding he could not afford financially, nor in good conscience, to leave his work and school responsibilities to fly to Minneapolis to be there for those final moments.

I remembered this when he himself was dying, and me not having the time or wherewithal to visit him in Phoenix, hoping a visit with him only a few weeks before would compensate.

I hope both fathers knew they were loved.

I remembered this in the 70s, when I was a tow-truck dispatcher and would volunteer to work alone all night on Christmas Eve for double-time. I learned a person could be just as sentimental alone or by hanging out with tow truck drivers rather than family. As they say in the army at the front, It’s just another day.

My dad’s absences was harder on my mother, who occasionally felt neglected and demanded he make more time for her and his children. Even though she was always busy and had lots of friends, at times she would exhibit frustration and anger at being the one who had to stay home—even though that was a conscious choice both had made in the marriage.

Weeknights when I was a kid were built around dinnertimes, when my dad could be home. He would sit at the head of the table, and the rest of us would be gathered around it. I sat opposite my dad at the foot of the table, while he, ever the teacher, drilled us on times tables and grammar and parts of speech.

Dinner was generally meat and potatoes, my dad’s favorites. If Mom tried to sneak in something new, like asparagus or liver, there would be trouble: sulky eaters, heated arguments, uneaten food. Poor Mom.

Friday nights were special. We would go to Thrifty Drugstore in Garden Grove which had a fountain and café at the front of the store with two aisles of two and four-top booths along the front windows facing the street.

My favorite dinner was open-faced roast beef sandwich on white bread with mashed potatoes and gravy. I guess I inherited my taste buds from my father. I even liked the bread crusts. Later, I learned they tasted like beer, but I didn’t know that then. At that time my drink was a Red River, soda water with cherry syrup. Yum.

After dinner we would run through the toy aisles and beg our folks for whatever had struck our fancy. And they would say, as always, Save your allowance.

Some nights my dad would bring home McDonald’s burgers, fries and Cokes for us kids, and the folks would dress up and go to dinner. Sometimes, there was a babysitter, and sometimes we were supposed to be good and take care of (that is, terrorize) each other.

I was always a scaredy-cat and never an athlete. I was scared to death to take my shirt off. I only sunburned anyway, not tanned, and I never learned to throw or catch. I was always the last one chosen for teams. I was that guy.

I wish now someone had taken me in hand and taught me to catch and throw. My dad loved sports, but primarily from an easy chair in front of a TV set. We did eventually bond together around sports when I discovered I enjoyed watching Dodger baseball in my 20s. I remember one autumn in 2000 sitting beside him every afternoon for a whole week in side-by-side recliners which, with the TV, completely filled the tiny TV room of his retirement house, watching the Yankees beat the Mets.

My mother had good reasons for being harried. My sister and I were hardly angels. A particular sore point was our constant slamming of the screen door during my mother’s afternoon naps. She had the same late night body clock as me, and would often stay up all night reading or watching TV, and try to catch up on sleep in the afternoons. Trying to make young children stay quiet was never easy or successful.

We also couldn’t have anything nice. I broke lamps and chairs. One year, my sister and I hopped on a fashionable but not very stable string chair, a 50s thing; made for sitting not for standing, and fell head first into the Christmas tree trying to replace tinsel that had fallen on the floor. Dad turned us over the back of the sofa and broke a yardstick over our rear ends for that.

Punishment was corporal in those days and usually preceded by a long how-could-you? balling out that caused my temples to throb and the room to seem to spin around. I am sure this was a precursor of my later high blood pressure.

I was not ill in California as often as I’d been in Minnesota, but an annual case of strep throat was regularly treated with a shot of what I was told was bicillin, a thick stinging serum that was delivered through a long needle into my butt. Not only did the shot hurt, but it would leave me limping and crippled for at least a day while the folks chided me to keep up as I hobbled behind them crying.

I was quite the crybaby and had to be kicked in the rear to do a lot of things. My mom had to force me onto a bike, and threaten to put my head under water during swimming lessons, although she herself didn’t know how to either bike or swim…or drive, for that matter. Naturally, I grew up to love both biking and swimming. Still, I waited until I was eighteen to learn to drive, because I was chicken.

While my dad had been born and raised in a city, my mom was all country, having been brought up and schooled in and around Sparta, Missouri. She’d been raised strictly Southern Baptist, and would remain so all her life.

She was the religious one; my dad just went along with it. Similarly, he went along with his second wife when she made him switch to Lutheranism. Religious details were all the same to him.

In the fourth grade, ever the actor, I played the archangel in the school Christmas pageant. I had the biggest wings of all the angels—in this case, size mattered—almost as tall as me. I remember my mother meticulously gluing white crepe paper feathers on the outside of my cardboard wings and yellow clam-shaped scallops on the insides.

Otherwise, I was bored with and incredulous of religion. My childhood skepticism was apparent as I remember opening one eye during silent prayer at church and looking up, wondering if I’d see God. There was nothing there. Just the roof.

My mother saw to it that we not only heard the call, but were baptized. Try as I might, I didn’t feel a thing. We also had to attend religious release all through sixth grade. A big trailer would pull up at the curb in front of the school (separating church and state) and those of us whose parents wanted us to, would file into it at the end of the school day. It was set up like a classroom with desks and chairs, and there we’d hear Bible stories and dogma for about an hour or so after school about twice a week.

I actually got to be very conversant in Bible knowledge from this experience. It came in handy when my friends and I started having meaning of life discussions in high school.

Once my sister and I were old enough to walk the mile to church alone, the folks would give us offering money and send us to Sunday morning service without them. I think they wanted the down time for intimacy and relief from kids. Understandable. We would walk another mile past the church and spend the money on Winchell’s Donuts’ maple bars in old downtown Anaheim.

A while later, I told my mom I was thinking of becoming Catholic.