Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle by Michael Thomas Ford Page A

class upon class. There would be no more dreary sessions of calculus, with Mr. Larson droning on about implicit differentiations while the afternoon sun made me struggle to stay awake, no more essays to write for Mrs. Peabody aboutBabbit orOf Mice and Men . High school and its petty obsessions with rules and schedules was finally behind me, and the open road of college awaited. Jack and I did not go to Treasure Island that final summer, having grown too old for tents and campfire songs. Instead, we took jobs to save some money for our first year at Penn State. Jack worked for a landscaping company, putting his muscles to use, while I, in a peacemaking gesture to my father, toiled in air-conditioned boredom at the office of the Quaker State Insurance Company, filing claim forms and being flirted with by the middle-aged secretaries. At night we escaped, as our mothers before us, to the movie theater, where we saw a string of films seemingly designed to inflame our gay sensibilities. Midnight Cowboy ,Easy Rider , and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid all provided us with emotional kindling, and I still recall giving Jack a hand job in the balcony of the Milgram Theatre while watching Jon Voigt's Joe ply his trade on the streets of Manhattan.
    While we found Cowboy 's Joe and his seamy sexuality erotic, we saw ourselves more as Butch and Sundance. We were living in our own buddy movie, an idyllic place where two 18-year-old boys could be in love with one another and it was okay. In a short time we would be off to the beautiful town of State College and the campus of Penn State. We would be far enough away from our families that we would have our freedom. What this meant, exactly, we didn't know. We knew only that we were about to fly.
    We weren't the only ones ready for change. In the early morning hours of June 28, the patrons of New York's Stonewall Inn gay bar fought back after the latest in a series of raids by the city's police department. The resulting skirmishes, taking place over several days and since given the somewhat mythological name of the Stonewall Riots, signaled a change in attitude on the part of the gay community. In Philadelphia, however, demonstrations for gay rights had been going on since 1965 in the form of the Annual Reminder, a protest held in front of Independence Hall each Fourth of July. Less theatrical but arguably much more political, the Annual Reminder following the events of Stonewall was the largest yet. (It would also be the last, as in 1970 gay pride parades took center stage and became the event of choice for proclaiming gay power.)
    Jack and I, in Philadelphia to see the fireworks, witnessed the 1969 Annual Reminder in person. We watched from across the street as protesters stood in front of Independence Hall holding signs proclaiming messages such as 15MILLION U .S.HOMOSEXUALS ASK FOR EQUALITY , OPPORTUNITY ,AND DIGNITY andHOMOSEXUALS ARE AMERICAN CITIZENS TOO . We had heard about the incidents in New York, but only through newspaper articles. This was real. The neatly-dressed men and women standing not 100 feet away from us were real. When they saw us watching them, some smiled. These were not faceless people; they were like us. We watched them for a long time, listening to the speakers who talked of equal rights and the importance of community. When the crowd began to disperse, we followed several of the men as they made their way west through the city, finally coming to The Spot, a small bar on Chancellor Street. I don't know why we followed them, except that we were curious to know what real homosexuals did and where they went. For all we knew, they were ghosts, appearing for a moment to shock and frighten unsuspecting humans and then returning to some mystical place unknown to mortals. There they were, though, going into a very real place. Jack and I watched the door to The Spot for some time, watching men (and a few women) come and go as if it were the most natural thing in the world