The drama coaching paid off and the fall of 1964 I arrived at Boston University, accepted primarily on the basis of my auditions—not the casting couch. None of my fellow students believed that ‘Lance Edwards’ was my real name, as an acting major they thought it was a stage name. They also thought that my teeth were capped, but they weren‘t. Aside from school, on my own in the big city I was quickly immersed in Boston’s ‘gay’ scene, again enjoying a new found popularity while forsaking my studies, yet life in the high-rise dormitory was not going well.
My floor of that sterile monolith was occupied primarily by jocks, my roommate one of their ringleaders. We drew a line in the linoleum and made a pact ... which he failed to honour. The nature of the harassment was not criminal, just annoying, until one night I was awoken by the sensation of moving. My mattress was being pulled off of my bed, and I was unceremoniously dumped on the floor. A few of the neanderthals had taken a buddy’s mattress, stashed it under mine, and then told him that I took it.
The following week I moved in with my friend Vern, who had a spacious apartment on Ivy Street at the corner of Saint Marys Street, just off of Beacon Street where the MTA comes out of the subway in Brookline (ADDRESS #4). Vern looked like a Marine (an enigma) and was a graduate student at M.I.T. as well as an I.V. amphetamine junkie ... about which I was clueless at the time, always thinking that he was just very intense.
The university would only refund the unused portion of my meal ticket, which I actually could have still used, but no refund on my room. They said my space would probably remain unoccupied, it didn’t. These days I could sue for ‘effective eviction’ from the dorm, because the university had failed to live up to its obligation to provide me with safe accommodations regardless of my orientation ... alas, this was 1965. So I turned in the meal ticket and took the cash, I needed the money. Next I started looking for part-time work.
My ad in Boston’s premier daily The Boston Globe read, “College student desires employment cleaning apartments, excellent ironing shirts.“ I generated a lot of interest and offers, but none involved cleaning or ironing; must confess that I did pursue a few. One an arts and antiquities dealer from whom Jackie Kennedy had purchased a Houdon bust when she was redecorating The White House. The terms were extremely lucrative, but when he held my jaw in his hand and started inspecting my teeth ... I felt like a horse, and that interview was over!
Another offer included a lavish boy toy lifestyle with lots of travel, only one caveat ... at cocktail parties I’d have to serve drinks wearing a red vest and bow tie. Okay. Just a red vest and bow tie. Oh! No, that’s not going to happen. As it turned out, being a kept boy was not my style. I was too independent, and would only be physical with someone I found appealing. When Vern’s friend Nelson—purveyor, restorer and tuner of pipe organs and other enormous musical instruments—heard that I was looking for work, he offered me a job. It wasn’t long before we started having an affair-ette, and thanks to Nelson I was introduced to a level of luxury and panache that I had never known.
My reputation in the Boston ‘gay’ scene had quickly become legendary, and I came to be known in some circles as Miss Elliptical Buns of 1965. Seriously. I would frequently get phone calls from perfect strangers asking for a date, Vern being notorious for giving out my stats, as well as my name and number. One date of memory was dinner at the exquisite Back Bay brownstone of the Executive Director of Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in western Massachusetts, as well as the venue for the renowned Tanglewood music and jazz festivals. The meal was superb, after which we adjourned to the drawing room for aperitif and desert, at which time he dismissed the butler and chef. A little music, a little dancing, a hand in my pocket, there was a small hole, it got bigger, going way too far. No, no, no, dinner was lovely ... but not that good! Thank you very much, where is my coat?
Truly I was generating major buzz, and getting a lot of attention—it was quite obvious that I was considered very good-looking and desirable, yet it never registered with me. After so many years of derision, harassment, and self-image abuse, whenever someone did seem interested I always felt grateful. It would be seventeen years including five years of psychotherapy later, when my frustrated psychiatrist asked, “Why is it that when you connect with someone you think you are lucky, why don’t you ever think they are lucky?” I had called while visiting San Francisco, where I was overwhelmed by the attention I was receiving even at the ripe old age of thirty-six.
Back to Boston. During Spring Break of 1965 I joined my first true love (more or less) Tommy, a Harvard senior, and four other students that we had met at Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) meetings, for a trip to Selma, Alabama, in a beat up old Ford, to participate in the Freedom March from Selma to Montgomery. The documentary Eye On the Prize shows the scene at the beginning of the march when everyone is crossing The Edmund Pettus Bridge leaving Selma. Clearly I cannot be picked out in that clip, but I am there. Not long after returning from Selma ... Tommy dumped me; I dropped out of school, and started working for Nelson fulltime.
Despite having raised me to treat all people equally regardless of anything, my parents had not been particularly pleased with my participation in the Selma-Montgomery march—clearly they were more cognisant of the dangers than I. Nonetheless, because of a phone call that I had made to them from Selma, during which my father had hung up on me, upon returning to Boston I had remained incommunicado. Inevitably I got a call from my brother, telling me that he was on his way to Boston and we needed to talk. He picked me up at my apartment and we went out for dinner. Upon returning to my place it was quite obvious that a big party was going on, it was our usual Saturday night bash. He pulled up in front and asked if he could park there.
“Oh, you want to come in?” I asked. “You don’t want me to?” he questioned. “No, not really.” Then the expletives began. “Okay, if you want to, fine.” I demurred. “Come on in. You can park on the next block. Just don’t say anything to me.” “Lance, I’ve been to wild parties before.” he responded. “Jay, you’ve never been to a party like this one.” I assured him. Before we got to the door it was flung wide open by my new roommate, Paul, who looked like a line-backer and acted like Tinkerbelle. “Hello Darlings!” he gushed. Nodding feebly towards Jay, I mumbled, “He’s my brother.“ Paul turned to the living room and shrieked ever so effervescently, “Okay girls, stop dancing!“ Oh, that helped.
Jay followed me into the kitchen in tears. While I was making him a coffee he jerked his head towards the living room and asked, “Like those in there, you too?” “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.” He finished the coffee quickly and got up to leave, I said I would walk him to the car. As we got to the lobby door the police were arriving. They did every Saturday night. This was the sixties, harassment of homosexuals was commonplace. At the car Jay told me to get in and I said, “I’m not going anywhere with you.” He said, “No, I won’t pull anything.” We had a history. “But you shouldn’t go back there right now.” He drove down by the Charles River and parked, we talked. Not long thereafter I walked back home.
A year earlier when I was going through a rebellious period, my mother told me that she had a lump on her breast. She had discovered it two years previous, but I was the first person she had told ... she had not sought medical attention. Although she never said so, it became apparent that she had seen this as a means to finally get away from my father, permanently. Passive suicide. That’s why she took no action. Needless to say, I blew the whistle on her and she was soon under the knife for a radical mastectomy. It was too late.
A few weeks after my brother‘s trip to Boston, more despite his visit than because of it, I decided to move back to Connecticut. Nelson beseeched me to stay and continue to work with him in the business. There was a commodious studio apartment in his elegantly restored five-story South End brownstone, which he offered to me gratis ... I was still not for sale.
My mother’s situation was deteriorating rapidly. It was time to go home. So I moved back to my parents’ home, which was now on Slater Road in New Britain (ADDRESS #5). They had moved while I was in Boston. However, I was determined to get my own place, and my mother gave me the money to rent a cute one bedroom cottage (former blacksmith shop) in Kensington, attached to a 1742 farmhouse, on five acres of land overlooking a big pond.
At her insistence I continued to stay with them, until she gave me the okay to tell my father about my rental. This was a lifelong methodology, my mother assessing the mood before my brother or I discussed something with my father. When that day came, without giving a reason I took my father for a drive. Once on Chamberlain Highway he said, “I know where we’re going. I saw ‘Edwards’ on a (rural) mail box the other day. It looked like your handiwork.” My mother had once called me the ‘artist’ in the family, but with the Rhode Island accent dropping the ‘R’ it sounded like ‘oddest’. I asked if she meant ‘artist’ or ‘oddest’ and she said, “Both!”
Dad and I arrived at the cottage, which by this time was furnished and decorated. It was really quite lovely and in a beautiful location. First he said, “Your mother will be very upset.” I didn’t tell him that she had been my benefactor. Next he said, “Legally you cannot do this.” At the time I was nineteen. “That may be true,” I responded (I wasn’t sure that it was) “But illegally I can disappear and you’ll never see nor hear from me again. Unless, perhaps, you come looking for me on 42nd Street.” I think he knew what I meant, but he didn’t take the bait. We left it at that, and I agreed to stay with them for a while longer.
Those days my mother was in and out of hospital. The day after one of her returns home my father arrived drunk and vile, and started picking on her. Sitting in the overstuffed chair in a corner of the living room, I yelled at him to leave her alone. He took the challenge and came at me. Rocking back in the chair I folded my legs tight to my body, and when he got close I placed my feet on his chest. Then I sprung my legs straight out and sent him flying backwards across the living room, where he banged into the wall and fell down. He proceeded to feign a heart attack (a new ruse) and while my mother looked after him I ran to the den and called my brother. Before I got off the phone my father was on me, and knocked me to the floor. My SCLC training in non-violent resistance came in handy; too bad I hadn’t learned some of that years earlier.
Crouched down while he beat and kicked my back, I got my hands on a footstool and used it to deflect the blows. He got that away from me and started beating me with it, one of the legs raking mine. Next I grabbed a metal ashtray floor stand, like a barbell, and used that to protect myself. Before long he wrenched that from my hands and beat me with it as well. As I cowered for protection he hissed, “Why don’t you get up and fight me like a man?” “I’m not going to fight you, Dad.” “No, because you’re not a man, you’re just a cock-sucking tutti frutti.” Under different circumstances I probably would have burst out laughing. Tutti frutti was a new one, and here I thought I had heard them all.
When my brother arrived my father directed his wrath towards him, while I dragged myself down to my car, nursing my bleeding leg, and drove HOME to Kensington (ADDRESS #6). That was the last time that my father beat me (not that he didn‘t try a few times in the future), and I never again lived under his roof. Unlike the emotional wounds, the leg wounds healed, yet ever since then I have been plagued with unrelenting, and frequently excruciating, pain in the right side of my back where I had been so brutally kicked and beaten.
At the time there was only one ‘gay’ bar in Hartford, to which my fake I.D. and I found our way rather quickly. One night I was invited to an after bar party, and followed these fellows to Sigourney Street, and up the rickety fire escape of a three story brownstone duplex, to a strange little attic apartment. There I met the host, the ever repugnant Leslie Clark, as well as Leslie’s ward, Bobby (my senior by six months, although at the time I thought he was younger). Bobby and I started dating, and it wasn’t long before I was in love.
At ever creepy Leslie’s never-ending soirée, I met a host of interesting and unique individuals. Some the cream of Hartford’s ‘gay’ society … most the dregs of its underbelly. One notable character was Mini-Billy. A beautiful young man, absolutely gorgeous in drag—as he spent most of his time—and alleged to be extremely well endowed. He was forever picking up sailors, then running for his life—precarious in heels—when they found that there was more under that tight skirt than they had bargained for, although some didn‘t complain.
Another character (in every sense of the word) was Priscilla Magee, then in her middle thirties. She brought new meaning to the word loquacious. At first I hated her, and never actually liked her, yet she is the only person met during that time with whom I had stayed in touch, although she never stopped being a garrulous, self-absorbed pain in the ass. If she had a chapter it might be titled “Fag-Hag Extraordinaire!” or “Priscilla, Queen of the Sigourney Street Queens!”
My relationship with Bobby was going well, as was my new life in Connecticut, when one day I got a desperate phone call from John Harris in Rhode Island, still my very close friend and confidant since junior high school. His mother had been searching his room and found a whole stack of letters from me. Oops! She threw him out. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Come live with you!“ he said. “Oh!” Shortly after John’s arrival I ran into Frank, my boyfriend-ette of the previous summer, who had been enraged when I had broken things off with him after my arrival in Boston.
Somehow Frank insinuated himself in my life, and maneuvered his way into joining John, Bobby and me on a trip to Jerusalem for a weekend at the beach. It did not go well. Frank’s goal seemed to be stealing Bobby from me. By the time we got back to Hartford late Sunday afternoon, I was in a very bad space. At my insistence John dropped me off at the bar, and I told him to pick me up some time later. When he did I was very drunk, and we went back to Sigourney Street where I found Bobby and Frank in bed. I ran out of the apartment ... well, as fast as anyone drunk as a skunk could run down that steep wobbly fire escape.
Joe and Brad, an on again off again older couple, had just gotten back on again. As they were settling into their new apartment, the last thing they needed was a drunk and hysterical young queen intruding on their nesting, but there I was ringing their bell incessantly, and then crying on their shoulders. Not long afterward John showed up. He had come looking for me, and when I heard his voice on the intercom I went into the bathroom. From the medicine cabinet I took an injector razor blade, and with two quick swipes sliced an apple-like wedge out of my left wrist. The next thing I remember, the three of them had me at the kitchen sink, rinsing and dressing the wound; ruining some of Joe’s best antique linen napkins. When they poured pure iodine onto it, it felt cool like powder. Apparently I was in shock.
They rushed me to the emergency room and gave some cockamamie story about me slipping on a rug and putting my hand through a window pane. It was pretty lame and I doubt that any of the medicos believed it, but whatever they believed I was never confronted with any of the protocol that would normally follow a suicide attempt. As the intern sewed up my wrist he asked, “Does your father know you’re a drunk?” In better condition I might have said, “Yeah, it runs in the family.” but I was in no condition to be flip. After the stitches he tested my fingers and found that I had no movement or feeling in the pinkie and the next two. Consequently, rather than going home I was admitted.
The timing seemed perfect, although there was no conscious connection. When I showed up for my draft induction physical two weeks later, after a week in hospital and surgery to reconnect the nerves and tendons on the three fingers, my left hand and wrist were bandaged to the hilt. I also had a letter from my psychotherapist, saying in so many doctorly words, that not only was I as nutty as a fruitcake ... I was a fruitcake! It was a tad disappointing that I didn’t get past the weigh-in, I had had my eye on a few of the inductees whom I wanted to check-out when they dropped their drawers, but as soon as my letter was spotted I was hastened off to the military shrink.
We had a long chat, during which I assured him that I’d be in touch if I ever ‘straightened out.’ Yes, of course. Back at the arrival hall the grunt told me to take a seat and wait, but after a few minutes I suggested that he look at my papers. “So, you think you’re special do you? Everyone thinks they‘re special!” he growled, as he snatched the papers out of my hand. Then he snarled, “Oh, you’re one of those!” If he wanted to intimidate me about my orientation, he’d have to go to the end of the line. It was a long one; it started with the department store Santa fifteen years earlier. He rubberstamped all of my documents with big one inch high red letters that read ... HOMOSEXUAL. In the end I got the coveted ‘4F’ which meant that I was rejected for good, not the less secure ‘1Y’ which was more common for ... “one of those!”
Long before the American War in Vietnam, however, there was never a time that I considered going into the service. Militaristic summer camp at age ten was a major turn off. At age twelve I swore off fighting. I abhorred guns. I had a history of simply walking away from situations that didn’t work for me. Just imagine how I’d react to some jarhead barking in my face, and ordering me to do something that I considered inane. I’d strut off in a huff. What could they do to me? Nothing worse than what I had already endured during my first nineteen years. Were it not for the sexual orientation exclusion (which years later I would support the fight against—despite not wanting to go into the military myself, all American citizens should have the equal right to do so) I would have gone to Canada or elsewhere. Fortunately I was “one of those” so the issue was irrelevant.
That spring of 1965 my Uncle Bud had passed away. He was only forty-five, but once my grandmother went into a nursing home his life was effectively over. Perhaps he would have done better had he been able to stay with my mother, but we were in Connecticut ... he only lasted a few weeks with my Aunt Lois. After the funeral my mother said, “I’ll be next.“ … which proved to be prophetic.
The beginning of August my mother entered hospital once again. In the middle of the third night I received a phone call from the nurses’ station, saying that she was having a bad night and wanted me there. I got dressed and went. Holding her hand at her bedside she finally fell asleep, and then I went home. No sooner did I get back into bed when the nurse called again, my mother had awoken and was upset that I wasn‘t there. I went back and stayed the rest of the night, as I would continue to do for the next few weeks.
As Labor Day weekend approached the three of us—John, Bobby and I—wanted to go to Provincetown (Bobby and I had reunited not long after the ‘Frank’ and ‘wrist’ episodes). After consulting my father and brother, they agreed that I needed the diversion. Although they had no knowledge of my nightlong hospital stays, they knew I was a wreck. So we left on Friday September 3rd with plans to return on Labor Day, Monday the 6th. I also had a contingency plan to fly back at a moment’s notice if need be.
The weekend went okay, but I was constantly troubled about not being there should my mother need me during the night. Fairly early on the morning of the 6th there was a knock on the door of our room, I had a phone call. It was my father; my mother had passed the morning before. It was distressing to think that she might have called when I wasn’t there, and this haunted me for many years. Then in the eighties and nineties, when I started to experience death and dying up close and personal on a regular basis thanks to AIDS, I came to realize that it had probably been necessary for me to stay away from my mother to allow her to make her transition. My being there was doubtless serving as an anchor.
My poor grandmother, she buried her youngest and then her oldest within a few months of each other. She was devastated. So was I; which is why it was like a blessing from heaven when Mr & Mrs Harris showed up at my mother’s wake. They had been there for me for the previous eight years and, despite the issues about homosexuality, there they were again. They were all apologies about how they had handled the situation with John, and pleaded with me for reconciliation. They wanted me to be a part of their lives again, and begged me to bring John back to them as well. It was truly a godsend.
When I was a little boy I had a chameleon that I got at the circus. When it died I was afraid to touch it. My mother had said, “You shouldn’t be afraid. Will you be afraid of me when I die?“ Interesting what sticks in our minds. The day of the interment when I was saying my last good-bye to my mother, to show her that I wasn’t afraid I bent over and kissed her on the forehead. It may have been better if I hadn’t. She was cold. It was a shock. I turned to my father for support and, although he was standing next to me, he was not there for me. Never would be. Thank God for Mr & Mrs Harris.
Within days of my mother’s funeral my brother stated his demands regarding his control of Union Laundry, and when my father refused Jay walked out. Being that Dad was now even more incompetent than ever, thanks to his drinking, I became the one running the show. I did my best while still trying to have a life. It wasn’t easy. Also during that time John and I moved to a two bedroom apartment in West Hartford, Stevens Street (ADDRESS #7), to facilitate Bobby and me living together.
During the entire ordeal with my mother, Marion and Norman Lavallee, who lived in Hartford (the younger couple that had bought the two cottages on the beach next to ours), had been my primary source of emotional support, and they were very dear friends. My butchered wrist aside, Marion was quite curious as to how I stayed out of the service. “Did you pretend to be something you’re not?” she queried. “No,” I said, “I didn’t pretend anything.” Despite unanswered questions, as Bobby’s and my relationship evolved, so did our close friendship with the Lavallees. And they took Bobby, who was an orphan, under their wing.
A few years earlier they had bought The Seagull restaurant in East Matunuck, right at the ‘gut’ where that frail bridge saved our lives in Hurricane Carol. They had been busy turning what had previously been a lunch counter with eight stools and one table for four, into one of the biggest and most popular seafood restaurants on that part of the Rhode Island coast. In the meantime, Bobby and I had gotten into antiquing, and before the spring of 1966 Marion and Norman offered us a small outbuilding on the edge of their parking lot to open an antique shop.
After I did some major renovations—lowering the front of the building a foot to make it level, building a big front porch with wide stairway, creating an extended display window with a pair of large 19th century windows from a house wrecking company—we opened under the name of Gilded Goodies. We ran the shop weekends during that spring and summer, commuting from West Hartford. Gradually we got to know some of the other antiquers in the area, most noteworthy the couple who ran The Little Gray Mouse in Wakefield, Ray and Mal.
During that time at Gilded Goodies Mr and Mrs Harris visited us regularly, and over time the four of us became very close friends (for me friends in our own right, not just as John‘s parents). They were particularly fond of Bobby who, up until the time of the infamous letters, had always been referred to as “my girlfriend Roberta!” They would arrive just about every Sunday after church, and Mrs Harris always packed an incredible picnic lunch, like a six course meal, which we enjoyed in their spacious passenger van.
Back in Connecticut, things were not going at all well for me and my drunken father at Union Laundry. One of his favourite sayings had always been, “I don’t get ulcers, I give them!“ Thanks Dad! At the tender age of twenty I had my own. Apparently limiting the physical abuse to the exterior of my body hadn’t been enough. After much persuasion I was able to arrange a meeting between my father and brother, mediated by their lawyers, to try and negotiate reconciliation.
It was an uphill battle, but eventually we put something together that they could both live with. While leaving the lawyer’s office after the deal was finally done, the signatures still wet on the agreement, Jay said to me, “The first thing I’m going to do when I get back is fire you!” Well screw him! Talk about obtuse. My only motivation for orchestrating their ceasefire was my escape. My head had had enough of the brick wall, and I planned to put as many miles as possible between myself and those two.
As the summer went on Bobby and I had become best of friends with Ray and Mal—for me they would be my dearest friends of my lifetime. That fall we moved Gilded Goodies to a partially stocked antique shop in nearby Peacedale that we had rented, taking the existing merchandise on consignment, and we continued to do the weekend commute. Ray and Mal lived in Narragansett, on Foddering Farm Road which lead to Harbor Island, one of the inhabited islands on the east shore of Salt Pond.
Ray also owned a two story house on Sweet Fern Lane in Peacedale. The first floor had already been converted to an individual apartment and was rented; the second floor was simply four rooms that hadn’t been used in twenty years. Ray said that he would have one of the rooms divided to accommodate a bathroom and kitchen, if we’d refurbish the rest of the place. It was deal.
We continued our weekly commute from Connecticut to Rhode Island, and were now staying on Foddering Farm Road every weekend. For the longest time Mal kept saying that I looked familiar to him but he couldn’t place me, and then one day he made the connection. His full time job was that of a janitor at the University of Rhode Island (Ray was a letter carrier in East Providence), and Mal’s building was the one that housed the theatre department. Professor Will still had my yearbook picture framed on his desk, which Mal had been dusting for years. That picture had caused a bit of a scandal three years earlier, when a friend of my brother had seen it on that desk and asked Jay what I had to do with Professor Will.
As fall then winter rolled along work on the apartment continued—the bathroom and kitchen progressing very slowly—and when not there or the shop we were forever bar hopping with Ray and Mal. Not exclusively to ‘gay’ bars as the nearest one was in Newport twenty miles away. Nonetheless, any time they’d be taking us to a different bar, we’d ask if it was a ‘gay’ bar, and the two of them would always respond in unison, “It will be when we get there!“ For my birthday November of 1966 they took us to all of the bars that we had been frequented during the past few months, while I was underage, where they gleefully announced that I was now twenty-one and legal.
Mid November we vacated the apartment in West Hartford. John had moved out earlier (we had had a falling out, and he had taken a room in the building where Leslie lived). Bobby and I stayed with my father from Thanksgiving through Christmas, and I insisted that we go out for Thanksgiving dinner. We went to a lovely old inn in Farmington. True to form Dad got plastered, and the bartender who helped us carry him into the car followed us home, where we had our own party of three with my father passed out in another room.
Despite going out to dinner, Dad still cooked a turkey. The next evening, while we were sitting in the living room watching television, I did a double take. They asked what the matter was and I said, “I think I just saw the turkey going down the hallway.” Sure enough I had. Our Siamese cat had pushed the cooked and stuffed twenty-two pound turkey off of the counter, dragged it the full length of the house, and when we caught him he was trying to pull it under one of the beds in the guest room ... but the turkey was too big, it didn’t fit. Christmas with Dad was not as eventful—no drunken scenes at a restaurant, no stolen turkey—after which we left for Rhode Island to ring in 1967 with Ray and Mal, and start our new lives in Peacedale.
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