Project Rebirth (13 page)

He takes a deep breath of the cold winter air and exhales, imagining a little bit of grief leaving his body. The lights shine ferociously. He misses his love.

“I'm in love with you, Gene.” The words first came out of Larry's mouth on October 30, 1987. It was, of course, an impetuous thing to say. After all, Larry and Gene had met only a few hours earlier at a Washington, D.C., piano bar. Even offering to give Gene a ride home after their few hours of electric conversation had seemed like a risk, but Larry was filled with a sort of audacious attraction. As he and Gene searched the D.C. streets for Larry's car, he just let it fly.

Eugene, thirty-three, flashed Larry, then forty-two, a “get real” smile and said, “You can't be in love with me. You just met me.”

“Just watch,” Larry said confidently. When Larry first laid eyes on Gene—this “gorgeous” African American man with a bright smile topped by a dark mustache, and graceful hands—he'd simply known they'd end up together. It was unusual for Larry to be so assertive, but there was something about Gene that made him feel courageous.

Courage was important to Larry, as it hadn't always come easily. For years, he'd lived the life that he believed he was supposed to live, the life that was expected of him and modeled for him by his parents and grandparents back home in rural Nebraska, all the while ignoring an unalterable truth in his own heart. He'd married and created a family with a woman, although he had long known he was gay.

“It was an act of self-preservation,” Larry now explains. Having grown up in a very conservative, religious small town in the late fifties and early sixties, Larry knew from an early age that his gay identity would not be acceptable, so he buried his true sexual orientation and fell into step with his peers—dating, getting married, and having children, just like everybody else.

Larry, his wife, and his three children lived outside Portland, Oregon, and, contrary to what one might expect, had a fairly happy life despite Larry's secret about his true sexual identity. “My wife and I had a number of good years together,” Larry explains. “I really loved her even if I wasn't
in
love with her.”

They attended a strict Pentecostal Baptist church. At one point, the church organized a protest against an upcoming bill created to ban sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace. Larry did not participate in the march, but he didn't make any public statements against the march either. His betrayal was getting harder and harder to bury.

In 1979, the family moved to Columbia, Maryland—just outside of Washington, D.C.—to fulfill his wife's desire to live near her childhood home. It was in Columbia that their marriage finally unraveled under financial and emotional stress. Larry asked for a divorce.

After the dissolution of their marriage, Larry began going to gay bars in Washington and finally reckoning with his true sexual identity. When he told his ex-wife that he thought he was gay, she admitted that she'd always wondered and offered her loving support, not condemnation. They've maintained a good relationship over the years.

By 1984, Larry was living in his own place in Columbia, working as an accountant in a gourmet food shop during the day and exploring the vibrant gay scene at night in D.C. He was torn about not living with his three teenaged children, whom he loved more than anything in the world, but he also knew that he would be a better father if he learned how to fully be himself. He was committed to seeing them frequently
and
he was committed to living his whole truth for the first time.

“I finally felt that I was being honest with myself and living the life I should live,” Larry explains. “In fact, I felt doubly blessed—I had three children who loved me, which is not something that every gay man can say.”

For a few years, Larry was content to explore his new liberation mostly on his own. His life was very full with frequent visits with his kids, an active spiritual and social life, and lots of work. But things shifted when Larry set eyes on Gene. Gene, who taught ballroom dance in his spare time; Gene, who could walk more gracefully in a pair of stilettos than most women could; Gene, who lit up every room.

That beautiful, burnt-orange autumn felt more like spring. “That was it. I was just smitten,” Larry remembers. “His eyes, his smile; everything about him was just
life.
”

“I would have to describe my childhood as ideal,” Larry says. “We had a very close family.” Albion, Nebraska, was a small, rural community, where the two thousand or so residents worked and worshipped with fierce commitment. Larry's father was the quintessential selfsufficient Midwestern man of the house—an electrician, a carpenter, and a handyman. His mother reigned in the domestic realm—making shirts, canning food for the winter, and taking care of Larry and his six siblings. The family was tight-knit and very traditional.

In retrospect, Larry now realizes that they were also short on resources: “We were very poor, but I never thought that.” Case in point: Larry was nine years old before his family had their first indoor bathroom.

Larry fondly remembers dinners around his grandparents' table and square dances. “When I was little,” he recounts, “the men would go on pheasant hunts on Saturdays in the fall, after the fields had been cut. They would bring back all these pheasants and we'd have feasts.”

By six years old, Larry was already noticing that he was more attracted to the boys than to the girls at his elementary school. He didn't think much of it, as he didn't know it was wrong. The church he was raised in never mentioned the politics of sexual orientation, instead focusing on the idea that God loved all of his creations, no exceptions. It was as if homosexuality was so foreign to this congregation that it didn't even warrant mention.

But when fifth grade came around and Larry's family moved to Oregon, he started noticing that the other boys seemed much more interested in girls than he was: “It was at that point that I knew that I was different,” he remembers. “I knew that being gay was being queer, and queer was not good. I kept my feelings to myself.”

It was around that same time that Larry first heard his new ministers declare that God hated homosexuals. He puzzled at the contradiction: “That can't be true, because he loves me.”

With a child's innocence, Larry reasoned, “God created me the way I am, so why would he hate me? I have always been a child of God.” But despite his intuition that the God he'd grown to love would never condemn him for liking boys, he knew that his neighbors and schoolmates would. He didn't want to expose his family to that kind of shame, so he swallowed his secret, determined to create as normal a life as possible.

But as famous writer and gay rights advocate James Baldwin wrote, “An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.” Larry's extraordinary life would not lead him down a normal path. It would inspire his honesty, demand his courage in the face of tragedy, and shape him into an unlikely activist.

Larry's audacity paid off. By Halloween night of 1987, just one day after meeting for the first time, he and Gene had declared themselves an official couple. Larry took Gene out to dinner to celebrate, then on to the piano bar where they'd first laid eyes on each other. They talked and drank so long that they shut the place down, spilling out onto the street with the lightness of new lovers—oblivious to everything but each other.

But their happy oblivion wouldn't last long. As Larry drove toward home, Gene suddenly grew very somber and said, “There is something I need to tell you.” Recognizing the seriousness in his tone, Larry pulled over into a church parking lot.

Once they were stopped in the comforting anonymity of the dark lot, Gene said, “I'm HIV positive.” He waited a few moments and then added, “I'm going to give you some time to process that,” before getting out of the car and standing a few feet away.

Larry, overcome with emotion, leaned his head on the steering wheel and began to cry. He remembers, “I asked God, ‘Why? Why, after I've finally found the man I love, are you going to take him away?' I thought it was an immediate death sentence.” In fact, the prognosis for HIV-positive Americans has continuously improved thanks to new treatments; according to a federal study published in the January 2010 issue of the
Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes,
average life expectancy after HIV diagnosis increased from ten and a half to twenty-two and a half years from 1996 to 2005.

But Larry, of course, couldn't have known this at the time. Gene got back into the car and they immediately embraced each other, crying into each other's shoulders. Larry knew, just as sure as he had known that he was in love with Gene, that he would never leave him. He didn't care if his partner was faced with a death sentence. He wanted to live by his side. “I'm not letting you go,” he told Gene. “I'm taking you home.”