Spearfish, North Dakota

Three little windshield wipers rattled back and forth while Rich’s white MGB convertible barreled down the freeway in the rain with the top up. Rich was my roommate at the University of Pennsylvania, and we were going home for summer vacation at the end of our junior year. Our butts felt the shock of every pothole all the way from Philadelphia to Seattle, where Rich had kindly offered to drop me off on his way to Los Angeles. His background was fascinating—he had grown up in London, where his father had produced the two Beatles movies, “Help,” and “It’s A Hard Day’s Night.” He actually knew the Beatles personally, but he was too unassuming to brag about it.

One night, we pulled into a roadside motel in Spearfish, North Dakota. When we approached the desk to ask for a room, the aging proprietors, a married couple, screwed up their eyes and frowned with agitation. After much nervous hemming and hawing, they produced a key and pointed us toward a cottage next to a narrow driveway. Exchanging anxious glances, Rich and I followed their directions, but when we entered the room, we saw that it had only one double bed, so we returned to the counter.

“Hey, mate, could we get a room with two beds?” Rich asked, whereupon the proprietors sighed with relief, managed tight little smiles, and handed us a key to a double room. Their unreasoning fear of gay men was so palpable that I wondered what it was about us that marked us as queer. Then I got it. Neither one of us could ever have been accused of being macho. Having been raised in London, Rich was exceedingly polite, and although he liked to talk in his mid-Atlantic accent about girls, he rarely dated. Meanwhile, I gestured awkwardly and must have looked femme enough to be a bully’s target. That was all the evidence they needed to frame us as gay.

The instant we entered the town’s diner for breakfast the next morning, the loud buzz of conversation slammed to a halt. Clinking their coffee mugs on the counter, a line of beefy truckers swiveled on their red vinyl stools to stare at us. Nobody smiled or nodded. It was the only place in town, so we stayed to order coffee and pancakes, but the air of malice unnerved us.

“They don’t seem to like us here,” Rich observed  when he was sure nobody was eavesdropping.

“I know what you mean,” I whispered. “Obviously, they think we’re gay. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“I don’t know, mate, I’m not gay. It must be you.”

I frowned but nodded as we headed back to the car. In my confusion about my sexuality, I knew I didn’t fit in with the straight crowd. At the same time, I was too scared to jump into the mysterious gay one, which in any case was entirely hidden from me.

Gazing at the endless telephone poles that passed by us on the monotonous miles through eastern Montana, I had plenty of time to reflect about our hostile reception. It was my first visible dragon, the first concrete evidence that I had reason to be afraid of coming out. Granted, Spearfish was in the middle of North Dakota, a part of the country so culturally behind the east and west coasts that it might as well have been Dorothy’s Kansas. Still, that didn’t make the coasts particularly hospitable. Whether in Seattle or in Philly, I hadn’t met a single person, male or female, who admitted that they were gay, and I hadn’t even heard of the Stonewall riots that had taken place in New York five years before. Thousands of young gay men were flocking from rural places like North Dakota to the safe haven of San Francisco, but I didn’t know that either. 

Needless to say, it was a relief when Rich and I pulled into Seattle, where Mom and Dad celebrated by treating us to dinner at the Space Needle. As our table slowly revolved, high above the city, I excitedly pointed out the sights to Rich. Mom grinned from ear to ear while Dad peppered him with questions about his studies and interests. A professor of architecture at the University of Washington, he couldn’t converse without lecturing, but he was good at asking questions. 

“So how do you like Penn?” he asked Rich.

“It’s okay,” said Rich, “But I miss London. It’s so much more cosmopolitan. But I like L.A. too. I’m thinking about transferring to UCLA.”

“Good,” said Dad, “But why don’t you stick it out and finish at Penn?” Of course, Dad would look at it from the academic angle. I enjoyed sitting back while he focused like a laser beam on Rich, glad that for once someone besides me was in the hot seat. My professors’ approval had made me more confident, but I still squirmed at Dad’s architectural harangues. Tuning him out, as I so often did, I found myself daydreaming. What if I confessed to him that I might be gay? I shuddered at the thought, unable to imagine telling him something I was still actively denying.