“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”

― Oscar Wilde

Of course I’ve never been as posh or clever as all that, though like Oscar I sometimes find my own train of thoughts confusing, and have always felt a bit on the outside of things, observing. Unlike Mr. Wilde I was fortunate enough to be born into a time and place where my “nature” (his word) would never exact such a cost. Funny that perhaps the first gay bar I ever entered was called “Wilde Oscars” back in Portland’s Skid Row, though at 19 or 20 I didn’t get the literary reference at all, in spite of all his portraits and quotes decorating the walls—I’d not yet read Oscar Wilde. Neither is it exactly true that I followed a beautiful boy off to school in Eugene at the age of 25, but I suppose it could be interpreted that way—I had however read EM Forster’s “Maurice,” and watched “Brideshead Revisited” on PBS in a near state of rapture in the fall of 1981. The reasons that I ended up at the University of Oregon are a little more complex than that, but the fact that one of the blonds in my life—a particularly unattainable object of my desire—was heading off to Eugene around that time made the choice a bit easier. Of course that it was at the time the only architecture school in the state and that I couldn’t afford anything else were factors of at least equal weight, and easy choices are the only kind I made in those days.

I call the 13 years between graduating from high school at 16 and graduating from college with a professional degree the “in-between years.” It’s not that they were wasted, but they bounced along very much without a plan; school to school, job to job and boy to boy, including one profound four-year romance that still haunts me today. Those years were mostly spent on the fringes of poverty, which of course has a huge impact on the choices one makes or doesn’t. Looking back now the poverty part seems to matter little in terms of happiness though—well maybe—poverty is so easily romanticized.

In 1984 I was just scraping by, renting a room from a middle-aged realtor/psychic in an iconic old Portland house, a 3600 square foot 3-story pile of brick in Laurelhurst just off one of the city’s few original roundabouts—before the hipster “Portlandia” variety traffic circles became popular and incorrectly referred to as “woonerfs” (a Dutch system of residential street design). I’d recently ended a four year relationship that started at 19, and bounced around several jobs and living situations in the interim. That relationship, much enhanced and/or twisted in my mind by the passing of time, had always I thought in started in 1979, but a recent article in an Oregon newspaper about a United jet that crashed in NE Portland in December of 1978 caused me to refile that data entry. I now know that I must have met Dale in late ‘78 because we drove to the crash site and photographed the wreckage, and we were already living together by then. Either way I was 19. Oddly enough that also means I can pinpoint the exact date and time that I was fucked for the first time: Thanksgiving Day 1978. I remember that odd stirring sensation, sitting down to turkey dinner in the family dining room with my parents and grandparents, feeling a bit squirrelly inside and wondering just what might happen, and if they could all tell what had happened between me and Dale just a few hours prior.

What I remember about the plane crash now is mostly color. The familiar vivid red and blue horizontal stripes visible through a vertical screen of blue-green Douglas Fir trees on a cold blue-green Oregon day. There is something truly disturbing about seeing a big airplane in a place where it shouldn’t be, resting against objects like houses, cars and trees. It looked as if it had gently shimmied its way down through the trees to come to rest largely intact on the forest floor (not unlike that first fuck?). There may have been a house or two under the plane. Was there a blanket of white snow under the white plane, sharpening the other-worldly contrast of giant red and blue stripes through the forest, or is that an embellishment of memory? We must have only just met then, Dale and I, which means that I was about to make the decision not to move to LA as had been offered by some random trick I had met a couple of months earlier. This had been the plan up until falling hard for Dale on our very first date, after meeting through a lengthy and complicated newspaper personal and letter writing ordeal, the kind of thing that today takes seconds, but lacks romance perhaps. Dale however, deserves his own chapter, which I’m not yet prepared to write as I have never really come to terms with his death.

In 1984 though, there was a new blond and a new infatuation that would never really go further than that, except for sex of course, and he was heading off to the U of O in the fall after a summer of carefree play and sexual adventures on the rooftop terrace outside my room in that old Laurelhurst brick pile.

I’d spent three years at three different colleges before the end of the ‘70s, though my transcripts would certainly not show them as three complete years’ worth of work. I was basically a drop-out in the making as soon as I started college—and I had started too young. I couldn’t wait to escape high school, even transferring to an “alternative” school that I knew would allow me to graduate after junior year at 16, which I did. However, some life needed to be lived back then and that’s the way I had approached school, and everything else. By that summer of ’84 I was starting to think seriously about school again. Some life had indeed been lived, and it was in fact hard. School seemed as much a refuge from reality as a course of serious future-building. I had always enjoyed school, the learning parts more so than the social bits. Exactly how I came to pursue what I did is a bit fuzzy though. On the farm I had always thought I wanted to be a veterinarian. I was comfortable vaccinating piglets and castrating calves, but in school science and math had never been made interesting to me and I was way more at home with art, though in my small town public school in the 60s and 70s art was offered in very limited fashion. My “artwork” was called out by teachers at a young age. I remember being called upon by my first grade teacher to draw orange volcanoes and blue lupines on the board with colored chalk in front of the class. Far from an empowering experience, I was mortified and doubtless socially scarred by that singling out. Art became more of an underground endeavor for years until I landed at John Adams High School and found encouragement under the mentorship of one Joan Janin, a remarkable art teacher among many remarkable teachers who were at Adams during its short life in the Portland public school system (1969-1981). Adams was an experiment devised by four Harvard School of Education alumni (hippies) that I became aware of because of my time at Menucha. The directors of Menucha had sent their own kids there, and I and two female friends set out to follow that same path. NE 42^nd and Killingsworth was then, and perhaps still is, a largely African-American neighborhood, making it even more of an exotic experience from the perspective of a small town white boy in very white Oregon. There I joined the “school within a school” called “Alpha School of CEX” (college exploration) because it was terribly fun to say, pronounced sex.

I had always drawn a lot as a young child, including fanciful floor plans for some imaginary mansion that I would one day build for myself. Rooms would connect to one another in labyrinthine fashion and objects placed in rooms would be called out with bizarre labels like “stuffed horse” and “pipe organ,” with lots of spelling errors that linger still. I kept drawing the fantasy mansion and it evolved as I got older, even to the point of giving it a name: “Alchemy,” when I was 20 or so, no doubt after some PBS inspired English country house. Dale gave me a Cocker Spaniel puppy for Christmas that I named “Alchemy’s Lucky Lady” (Lucky for short) as a kind of get rich talisman, but a dog is a terrible gift for a 20 year old who can’t afford to keep the heat on and who doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing with their life, and I’m afraid most of hers was a sad one. Though I abandoned her to life in the country with my parents, she never forgot me or the tricks she would perform for love. I’m certain that the position of priority that our dog Ripley enjoys today is closely related to my deep guilt about abandoning Lucky 35 years ago.

I kept drawing houses and they gradually became more modern and less bizarre, though the idea of studying architecture scared me as I was convinced my work would never be original but only derivative. This seems now like a strange fear to have before even starting to study the subject. I had always enjoyed gardening as well on the farm as a child, and that combined with my experiences with the 1920s estate grounds at Menucha in my teens, lead to the less well-known possibility of Landscape Architecture. No that’s a lie. It’s perhaps why it makes sense now, but in actuality I had decided to apply to the architecture school at the U of O, falling into Landscape Architecture somewhat by accident.

The blond boy had left for Eugene a year before me and I would visit from time to time, but it was clear no serious relationship was going to come of it. I was wildly attracted to him and sex was great fun, if too infrequent for my taste. I remained guarded, and he illusive. He was partying very hard then, his first time living away from home, and it was clear he was moving on. It was in that year of driving down to Eugene from time to time though that I firmed up my own plans to study architecture there. The year before, Blondie had played a part in precipitating a fight between me and my brick-pile landlord at the end of the summer of ’84—or as I like to call it: the summer of “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” a fitting title for my life at that time as well as  the year’s number one hit song. The spat was over some drunken late night comings and goings with Blondie and friends traipsing through the big house that were not up to the landlord’s Compari and soda standards, not to mention one being female. I believe “giggling twat” were his exact words. It wasn’t entirely untrue as she was Blondie’s fag hag and from my perspective a third wheel. I always knew Mr. Landlord had hoped from the beginning that I would become more than a tenant—and well yes we had had sex once or twice. I hated sex with older men at that age but it didn’t stop me from doing it. Oh how the young take advantage of their benefactors. After the falling out I moved out and back in with Dale and two other roommates in a big house on Maple Street in Ladd’s Circle owned by a PGE executive. I spent about a year there while I got ready to attend University in the coming fall. It was actually wonderful, rekindling a true friendship with Dale. We threw some great parties there—after all I had “graduated” from bar-tending school—and of course there’s no better sex than sex with an ex. We knew we would never again be a couple, but we also knew we would be friends for life—however short that would turn out to be. I kept on working part time at the Meier & Frank department store at Lloyd Center where I had met both Dale and Blondie—under very different circumstances from one another. I did some lawn-mowing and pruning on the side until the dashboard of my yellow ’67 Dodge pick-up caught fire one night and the headlights stopped working. Needless to say I was at an economic low point then and found myself walking everywhere, including the 2 bleak miles to and from Lloyds Center from SE Maple Street, often—of course—in the rain.

Meier & Frank keeps popping up in these stories as a kind of odd touchstone. Now alas it is completely gone as are most of the great old department stores—magical places though they were. My grandparents actually met while both working there in the 1930s. Lloyds Center was built the year I was born, 1959, with claims of being the first or the largest mall in America—I forget which. It was a mid-century open-air beauty with an ice-skating rink and “air-doors,” large open portals blasting air between ceiling and floor, somehow keeping outside air out and inside air in, year-round, without the need for actual doors. Alas, we will never see those again. I had also worked at the downtown store for a while right after meeting Dale and before my stint as a directory assistance operator for the phone company where I could look down from the ninth floor window while working nights to keep an eye on my favorite bar The Family Zoo. Watching the Zoo “animals” come and go helped pass the time, and of course helped me decide what or whom I wanted to do after work, on the nights that is, that I wasn’t screwing my very young boss, who also happened to be the first black man for me. That was one of the more bizarre jobs I’ve ever had (“what city?”) interesting for about the first two weeks, but it taught me to type so it wasn’t a complete waste—and well there was the horny boss. Finally I would return to Meier & Frank for three more years during school in Eugene, this time though the setting would be decidedly suburban, as Meier & Frank, like every other store, had abandoned downtown Eugene and fled to the mall.

Somehow, in 1985, after a year of preparing to go back to school, I managed to miss the application deadline for the architecture school. Rumor had it though, that the Landscape department had a later deadline, and that transferring at some point would be easy. So that’s what I did, and I got accepted. I packed my dad’s utility trailer with the few things I owned and headed south on I-5 for the 2 hour drive, alone in dad’s white diesel Chevy pickup. My first apartment in Eugene was a cute post-war studio with hardwood floors and open beam ceiling in a long two-story building wedged in behind a couple of sorority houses and a cemetery. College town neighborhoods are notorious for oddly wedged in buildings. The short end of the long narrow lot touched the street –I believe it was Onyx, the streets in this neighborhood being named for stones—while front doors opened onto a mid-block pathway. I had a front and a back door, which was nice, but odd for 200 square feet or so of space. My tiny kitchen and back door opened into the backyard of a sorority. Watching their outdoor antics was never a treat. The apartment was loud and cold and the walls paper thin. Eugene’s winters are damp in a way that I have never experienced anywhere else; trees are moss-covered and apartments grow mold. I managed to get through the first year with good grades and little drama. I am sort of dyslexic with time, if that’s a thing, and sometimes need events to trace my own whereabouts and even my own age in any given month and year. In this case I know I was in this apartment when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1986, watching on a small black and white set. I had collected as much weird free furniture as I could before moving. Somehow I thought that would contribute to this being my first “true” college experience; the weirder the better—Eugene is after all where “Animal House” was filmed, and in those days their actual house was still standing. It was hard not to think of the white horse collapsing in the president’s office while walking past that white-columned building, which is in fact the president’s office. The weirdest piece of furniture I’d procured was my grandmother’s free-standing patio swing with its 60s floral yellow vinyl seats and fringed canopy top. It soon proved to be a little too weird, not to mention squeaky and very heavy, and didn’t stay around long. For a few weeks though it was an extra bed for a houseguest in need. I can’t remember much about who he was. Maybe a friend of friends from Meier & Frank days; I can’t be sure except that I knew him from Portland. He was very young—as everyone around me seemed to be at that time—tall, geeky and cute. I knew him to be straight from whatever time we’d spent together in Portland, and suspect he is in fact, though there was a drunken late night offer or two to fool around that I turned down. Somehow it seemed like returning a favor in his mind. I’ve never been obsessed with straight boys, though I know it’s a thing. Ah to be so free at such a young age—even more than I had been. Now it just seems like a missed opportunity given that I knew exactly what I was missing out on from an awkward but impressive moment of “accidental” genital exhibitionism while sitting together on the deck at Blue Lake Park back in Portland the prior summer. These accidental “falling outs” are not at all uncommon in my experience around swimming pools and beaches among teenaged boys in bathing suits. I know these things; I was a lifeguard.

I enjoyed the University of Oregon as I had always enjoyed school before, though this time there was an end game. I resented a little bit that my previous time in college only knocked one year off a five year program, though now I’m glad that some additional undergraduate credit requirements allowed me to study things like Marxism, history, sculpture and photography. I had a special love for architectural history; it taught me that form and symbol in architecture have meaning that often evolves through time from very practical and humble beginnings, and I am very much at home in the back row of a big dark lecture hall watching slides—when they were still a thing. “History of Interiors” was a particular favorite, as there was no text book so that doing well on tests meant frantically sketching each slide into a sketchbook. It was an easy A and a great way to hone quick sketching skills never to be used again. It was taught by a big jolly man for whom the highlight of the year was demonstrating the “Shaker Dance,” from which Shakers got their name. Classes within the Landscape program were dry at first. Local geology was a series of endless fieldtrips to see basalt columns, both vertical and bent by tectonic forces. This seemed to be the only geological feature Eugene offered, but having grown up in the Columbia Gorge they were old hat. On the first such outing a very attractive guy in a red leather jacket (think a slightly older Ryan Gosling in “Murder by Numbers”) approached me and introduced himself, adding that we had “something in common” that set us apart from the rest of the students and therefore we should probably be friends. I of course thought this was a brash sexual come-on, but played it very cool while asking what he meant. Turns out he was referring to our age; we were both in our mid-twenties, while everyone around us was younger. Somewhat deflated by the mistaken reading on my part of his advance, we nevertheless did become buddies—for a time. He was not the sharpest tool in the shed, and I helped him study for plants tests by inventing little association stories like the one about “The Coyote and the Virgin” for Chionanthus virginicus, or one about the Chinese foo dog for Ulmus parvifolia (parvo/dog …get it?). We also bowled on the school league, cycled on Eugene’s awesome bike paths and played racquet ball. He had totally set off my gaydar when we met, but I had been wrong and it threw me. I got kind of closet-y around him and never discussed anything relationship or sex related. I thought I was completely “out” when I left Portland, but the fact is that I had only been hanging around other gay men. This was a sudden throwback to high school mode, and I was playing it straight. OK not really, but one theory of why gay men “act gay” is that coming out to every new acquaintance throughout one’s lifetime gets very tiresome. It’s one interesting theory anyway, along with the one that says it’s about quickly identifying each other, perhaps more a relique of Oscar Wilde’s time. I had dropped enough clues every day that I thought a complete moron would pick up on it, but he was a bit of a moron and never did. Finally one day he pinned me down with questions until I finally had to just blurt it out to my simpleton friend: “dude, I’m gay!” I don’t actually think I used the word dude back then, it was strictly for frat boys, along with other odd slang like “I’m hung” for hungover. That one used to really throw me when I’d hear it shouted from a frat house balcony as I walked to class in the morning, and I always wanted to shout back, “really? prove it.” Bobby’s reaction to my news was something I’ve never experienced before or since. We were in my car, and he just said “pull over and let me out,” and he meant it, so I did. We spent three more years together in the very small Landscape program—cordially.

I related more easily to my teachers as they were closer to my own age than many of the students—and of course most of them were also smarter. One favorite professor was David (something), a big bear of a man who also incorrectly set off my “gaydar”—or maybe not. He taught a wonderful drawing class at night that he started with relaxation and visualization exercises. I remember fondly, sitting on those high metal stools with closed eyes trying to visualize while David (something) spoke slowly like a hypnotist: “breathe in a goldfish…” “…breathe out fire.” Somehow it worked though at relaxing me into drawing quickly even in front of other people. I had taken Life Drawing classes before, but that was with aspiring artists, who would never cop to being uptight no matter whom you plopped naked in front of them, unlike these truly uptight Landscape Architecture students. David was quite inspirational, and had actual built work under his belt, which surprisingly does not seem to be a prerequisite for teaching then or now. He even told me what firm I should try to work for when I moved to San Francisco as I planned to do. I can’t be sure now if it was the best advice, though I did go to work there and stayed for 11 years. He disappeared suddenly in my final year—really, just disappeared—leaving only rumors in his place. In retrospect I suspect he was a seriously fucked up guy emotionally—too much inhaled fire and goldfish.

I loved the Landscape History lectures, though by the time I graduated I hated that particular professor. He was a tenured, arrogant, sexist old bastard with a history of sexual harassment charges brought by young female students. I avoided him at all cost, right up until that day at the urinal in Lawrence Hall—but I have to set the stage here. The restrooms in Lawrence Hall were just plain weird. Most famously there were the unisex restrooms on two floors of open studio space that had only one restroom per floor. I don’t know when or exactly why they were designated as unisex. It was probably much more about practicality than a political statement, but I thought it was politically cool. The other memorable aspect of the restrooms in Lawrence Hall was the elbow-to-elbow urinals. They seemed comical, like some kind of Candid Camera social experiment. It was virtually impossible to stand next to another guy and pee without touching each other. These comedic restrooms were to be found only in the 1957 modernist wing which links at 90-degrees to the 1971 brutalist addition that together swallow up and shade smaller older buildings around a cold dark courtyard, beaten all winter by wind that gets accelerated through open breezeways. The courtyard is embellished with ridiculously diminutive Christopher Alexander (A Pattern Language) natural wood bay windows added during his tenure at the school, adding an even more comical character to the montage.  Standing at one of these urinals before the start of a final review, Mr. hated Professor saddled in beside me, unzipped, whipped it out and proclaimed “we haven’t spoken much this semester, do you have some problem with me?” For anyone who doesn’t know this already this is not in America a culturally acceptable place for conversing at all with anyone but a friend, let alone this kind of confrontation. For him it was pure intimidation and power trip—a tactic probably taught in leadership training for future CEOs of fortune 500 companies: “negotiating with your dick out.” However I was 28, not a child, and well versed in all types of urinal-based communications that he could not possibly fathom. It was only corroboration of how much of a creep he really was, and I was otherwise unmoved by this or anything else he ever had to say—oh and there was his fascination with the octagon, “the perfect shape,” perhaps why to this day I detest a 45 degree angle.

By far my favorite professor of all time was a kooky Canadian who arrived several days late for her first day winter term with a newly broken leg. She was escorted clumsily into the classroom by the department Chair with crutches partly concealed under a thrift store mink coat and her very red lipstick slightly askew. It was an uncommon entrance for Eugene, Oregon to say the least, and yes she did indeed look like Tallulah Bankhead in Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat.” I thought she was a breath of weird, fresh, foreign air. She had made a presentation to the student body the prior year as part of the “search” recruiting process for a new professor, and I thought then she was wonderful. Though I had understood nothing about her presentation, she was not boring. She was obsessed with vernacular landscapes, had been friends with J. B. Jackson, and designed sets for Pink Floyd. She is in fact the teacher who once proclaimed that “if you can’t write, you can’t think” which I found wonderfully absolutist and often quote to this day. I thought it odd that she had a hard definition for the word “yuppie,” which was thrown around in heavy rotation in those days. It involved an exact income threshold, a rule she applied most especially within the context of Eugene, which in her estimation had no such creatures. I don’t think she much liked Eugene, which of course made me like her even more. She would also utter a phrase that I’ve used many times professionally over the years, especially when working on public projects. She said quite simply that “people like stuff.” It may sound silly, and it did to me at first, but years later it became a handy way to relax about the selection of things like benches and light fixtures, those selections which are often left up to a “community process.” Most any community will choose something historicist, olden-timey or otherwise familiar in style. As I’ve always cared more about “big ideas” and a legible diagram in the landscape than about the style of furniture, this works out fine, and I realize that most people don’t give a damn about the diagram. So, as professor Bankhead used to say: “give the people their stuff” and they’ll leave your design alone. She never actually said that though, as I think in point of fact that she too “liked stuff.”  Years later I got news about her having attempted suicide—something I’m definitely not supposed to know. My first reaction was to think “Eugene could do that to anyone.” She moved.

That same winter is when I met a very unique grad student in the program who would become a dear friend. I’ll call her L. The L is not for lesbian, though she was the first one of those I was ever close to. She would become my buddy and dance partner for the rest of school and on and off beyond that to this day, with several bumps in the road, even as she left the lesbian part behind. She had a kind of sophisticated earthy style about her dress and a poised and elegant way of moving and holding herself that was instantly attractive—and she was smarter than the average U of O Landscape student. She may have dressed like a waif, but clearly hadn’t grown up in Seattle as one. She’s one of very few friends in my life that I actually sought out and pursued. She was living with an absurdly crazy woman at the time who would very soon accost me in a jealous fit of rage as I walked across the quad with L. Turns out she knew better than I what might be bubbling below the surface of my friendship with her lover, and then there was reading L’s diary, which helped her figure it out—something about her estranged father and me reminding her of him and well… they broke up. A custody arrangement was reached for the two dogs and L got the good one. She and I packed up all our things spring of 1988, including the better of the two dogs, and moved up to Seattle together for the summer. How this came about seems odd now, but it had something to do with her friends and their really great house in the U district with their really cheap rent and not wanting to give it up… or something along those lines. I think I remember them telling us they weren’t sure the landlord was even still alive, but the checks kept clearing and they didn’t want to give up the house.

L and I and the dog had a great summer together. I got to know her mother who reminded me of my grandmother—passive aggressive to say the least. She got us work though doing gardening for her friends in tawny Madison Park and adjacent lakeside neighborhoods. We also took care of her own garden, which was nice as she had a swimming pool. It wasn’t hard work, mostly deadheading Rhododendrons and the like, and we only had L’s VW Beetle so we didn’t even haul anything. It seemed to me like we overcharged people, but these were not the people I had grown up around, so who was I to say? We talked a lot about sex while weeding away in rich housewives’ yards so in a way we may have offered a bonus of sorts if their minds were prurient and they cared to listen in. We drank a lot of coffee as one would expect, and ate breakfast at a different funky café nearly every day. It wasn’t a warm summer, but we managed to spend a lot of time on or in Lake Washington, mostly at Denny Blaine Park, a strange little grassy slope wedged between expensive stone-walled estates on the western shore of Lake Washington. For whatever reason this park had become a topless and largely lesbian beach, and at lunchtime laborers would sit along the stone wall above to eat lunch and leer. This was not well received by all, and sometime that summer someone spread tar and broken glass along the top of the wall. I thought they should lighten up, as the dikes always outnumbered the mostly small, mostly Latino leerers, but as a man I can’t pretend to understand the dynamic.

Memories of that summer swim around my head in water and music. I used to dance around the house with the dog on her hind legs to “Put Your Hands on Me” by Sinead O’Conner, which seemed an appropriate theme for a dog (“put ‘em on, put ‘em on, put ‘em on me…”). We went to see Brian Ferry at the gorgeously restored Oriental Theater, and we danced to Kool Moe Dee at our favorite bar in Belltown, also known as the “Denny Regrade” for a mountain that had been torn down in the 19^th century because it was too steep for horses. L got me hooked on Grace Jones, on whom for some reason I wasn’t yet. I’ll never forget hearing The Sugarcubes’ “Birthday” for the first time at Tower Records on University Ave. (which is how I know it was 1988).  I ran to the counter to find out what was playing, with near religious fervor. Does that still happen? Maybe it would be something on Twitter.

L’s mom owned a cabin on Orcus Island next door to the Nordstrom Estate, and we got to go out there a couple of times that summer and during the next school year. Getting there is a day-long adventure: first drive north through tulip fields to the ferry landing, spend a few hours on the ferry with a couple of other island stops en-route then climb into the old Land Rover left parked behind the 1904 Orcus Hotel to drive (sans power anything) on to the cabin, which stood alone at the head of “Massacre Bay” with its big front windows facing out to “Skull Island.” Really, I couldn’t/wouldn’t make that up. We would paddle the canoe out to Skull Island for a picnic in the sun with the dog swimming along behind and sea lions popping their heads up—much too close for comfort—to check her out. She was a braver dog than I. At night we would invite the old caretaker from next door in to play cards, and we’d have to watch him as he had a habit of tipping his chair back after too many drinks. Years later I saw him by chance at the Orcas Hotel being treated to a big birthday bash (100?) by a group of well-dressed women. He was something of a ladies man and a local celebrity for living so long—then he died.

L managed to organize a gathering of several school friends, mostly from architecture, at the cabin one long weekend during school, including her butch dike suitor and my unattainable blonde. There was a lot of reading aloud from Anne Rice in those days for whatever reason. Needless to say a certain creepy mood had been set. The cabin hadn’t been used in some time, and when we opened it up there was a stench of rodent urine. Later we found a large mouse nest behind the water heater where it couldn’t be reached—thus began what would become known as the “Night of Carnage on Massacre Bay.” After a long day of digging clams and drinking, we set as many mousetraps as were kept in the house and all went to bed. The sounds of mice being killed or maimed by traps can be a terrible thing, and we were soon all awake and aware that all the traps had been sprung—some less efficiently than others as the continuing scuffling and shrieking attested. I volunteered to take first duty—I’d killed before. It was a nastier business than usual as we had to reuse the traps, whereas I would normally toss the whole thing, and then there were those unclean kills that had to be finished off under a boot heal. It was utter brutality. This went on all through the night reaching maybe 30 kills with the traps coated in drying blood—which incidentally does not dissuade the next victim, but rather seems an added attraction. My friends were disgusted with me that I could do this horrendous deed, and by early morning I was disgusted with myself as well and a bit sick to my stomach. We called a unilateral cease-fire with no further carnage that weekend—but the mice were still there—and if they came it would be for me.

Other summers would be lonely and less interesting, spent in Eugene either working or in summer school. I call one of those the summer of “blackberries and classics” for the two main sources of nourishment that sustained me at the end of summer until the next year’s student loans came through. I swam every day in the “old pool” before picking my berries. It was a bit short for laps but had a whole lot of charm, and the occasional fantasy did come true in the locker room. I know I read a lot of Sir Walter Scott that summer, and Dracula, and…? The rest is forgotten to malnourished brain cells. Too bad I didn’t have a better reading list; it would be much better now. I should plan another such summer, and I could use the blackberry cleanse diet, though then I was much too skinny. Starved for entertainment, L and I drove up to Portland to watch the implosion of the downtown Corbett building one weekend morning. We had to leave frightfully early as they wouldn’t announce an actual time for the blast. It turned out to be a very weird very telling experience for me. We watched from the pedestrian bridge of the Galleria building a couple of blocks uphill from the building being demolished. The first thoughts at seeing it standing there waiting were all about why? What did it do to deserve this? It seemed a perfectly fine early 20^th century edifice. When it finally blew and fell violently into its own dust cloud, shaking all of Portland’s tiny downtown, I felt it was somehow all wrong and I teared up. It was in fact an act of violence, something I have abhorred all my life, whether it takes the form of a cattle prod on the farm, the geek getting a beating at school, or war. Maybe I should have been a Quaker.

Dating came few and far between in Eugene. It was clear Blondie wasn’t going to happen. I’d focused on that aspect almost entirely up until then and at 26 my focus was elsewhere. It was also the second half of the 80s and AIDS was more than just a thing. It wasn’t that I was particularly afraid of it back then, I had yet to know anyone with a diagnosis in those early days, and well… I was in Oregon. Of course I actually did know several guys with the virus, I just didn’t know it then and neither did they. Then out of nowhere I was aggressively befriended by a Jewish female architecture student cum matchmaker (read it right). I’m not sure which role she took more seriously, but I remember being surprised by how friendly she was, introducing herself to me and inviting me to take part in social things with her group of architecty friends. It’s not unheard of to have some amount of intermingling between architecture and landscape students, but neither is it all that common. We did share the same building, but the social pecking order is pretty clear as it is in the real world, except I don’t remember where Interiors fits exactly, except that threw the best parties. I wouldn’t harp on this issue of social hierarchy, frankly the landscape students were a bit dull in comparison. My new determined friend was a short funny butch dike who it turned out was really only interested, very interested, in my friend L and intended to get to her through me by presenting me with her male friend in exchange—or so It seemed. It worked—sort of—and when I moved to San Francisco I even roomed with her for a year or two. She hooked me up with her architect friend, my part of the deal, I’ll call him JK. It sounds very convoluted and devious now. It may have been much simpler than all that. At any rate I did end up dating JK for a time. I had certainly noticed him before. He was very tall and very skinny, and had a sort of 70s cloney way of dressing that seemed oddly out of place in the second half of the 80s in Hippyland Oregon. He wore cologne and pressed button-down oxford shirts tucked into skin-tight Levi’s 501s, emphasizing a package that no one could ignore or even believe. I didn’t really find him attractive back then, though I certainly would now, but as soon as I caught a look at his hard cock in my kitchen—stretching far above the 501’s waistband against his skinny soft tummy—I put away romantic ideals in favor of pure physical pleasure—at least for a few months. It’s funny how the definitions of beauty and forces of attraction change through one’s lifetime. Even the thought of his cologne I now find exiting, though I’ve otherwise always hated the stuff. He looked like he’d been made up of equal parts Eddie Redmayne and the porn star Michael Brandon, though he was much taller than either. You can decide how the various body parts fit together, but I’ll just say the face is Redmayne and leave it at that. He’s one of several gay identical twins with straight brothers that I’ve known—and always wondered how that happened. We actually had a lot of fun together, always involving sex. I remember one dress up date night to the symphony where I convinced JK to go without underwear and spent much of the evening with my hand in the pocket of his baggy trousers. This proved both very fun for me and very embarrassing to him as he was a pre-cum gusher. I walked in front as we exited the concert hall. He was more of a fuck-buddy than a boyfriend really, which is not a bad thing to have while at school. He was the first guy I dated to ever open the subject of HIV and safe sex. It’s easy to forget how weird those early years of the epidemic actually were, and how little anyone actually knew. AIDS was a thing, but HIV wasn’t identified as its cause until 1986. We’d all asked. We’d asked various health care providers, free clinics and community leaders, it was not for lack of wanting to know that we all knew so little. I’d been tested for HTLV-III the year before I left Portland, though even at the clinic that did the test they weren’t convinced that there was much point. JK knew a little more though. He had lived in San Francisco before architecture school. I don’t remember exactly how that conversation went or what we did about it—got tested I supposed—I know condoms only came into in the picture later. Now when infection rates go up and people get all bent out of shape about it, like how could this happen when everyone knows the facts, knows exactly how the virus is transmitted, I think to myself: I wonder how well each new generation is being educated? Sadly I suspect no better than we were.

Most of what I recall about JK is sexual, involving body fluids of various kinds. He even had a very wet mouth; the kind that affects speech, though not in a bad way (remember the mouth is Eddie Redmayne territory). I broke it off after several months, though now that seems dumb as neither of us was going anywhere—stuck there in Eugene—but I had gotten bored. It sounds callus, but he just wasn’t smart enough in the right ways. He was an overachiever in school. Not in a good way, but the guy who fills up the largest chunk of wall space with his wall section details at a pin-up. He went back to San Francisco where he took a job at the perfect firm for his personality, SOM, and I only saw him one more time. He was standing on the sidewalk shirtless at the Pride parade, having clearly spent much of the two years since I’d last seen him in a gym, and looking fine.

The final blond in this chapter appeared one night as a vision, crowned by his own yellow halo of luminous hair and disco lights, on the dance floor at Perry’s, the only gay club in Eugene, aptly located in the basement of the Greyhound bus station—and now gone—as are all other gay bars in Eugene. L and I used to go out dancing there as much as we could, even on school nights, and I’d seen him there several times before. His beauty was impossible to miss, luminous and youthful, and he was very young. He had a fake ID. “Barely Legal” comes to mind. I’d see him on campus from time to time, and there was a brief cruising and flirting encounter between us strangers in the AAA Library (stands for architecture and allied arts). Was there a bit of footsy under the reading table, a note passed? Honestly I don’t remember the encounter in detail just the heat of it. He was, and is a fantastic dancer and our actual meeting when it finally came was on that dance floor at Perry’s—or Club Arena or whatever it was called then—is also a fuzzy memory. However, for certain it was super awkward. He danced up very close to me one night and said something that I didn’t catch, something about the behavior of a straight couple on the dance floor that night. He was clearly counting on some kind of reaction, but I honestly hadn’t heard him. Later I would learn that he and his friend, who I’d always assumed was his boyfriend because they always came to the club together, had always thought I was straight because I was always there with my friend L. Whatever it is that he said was meant as some kind of test, and I know now that it had been carefully rehearsed and he was embarrassed by the misfire. Somehow though, through the fog and lasers of miscommunication and embarrassment, and Salt N Pepa’s “Push It,” a connection was made that night, numbers were exchanged and a very nice romance started the next day at the coffee house that lasted until my graduation. It was all very charming and sweet, he was clearly very young, though just how young would come as a big surprise to me later. I think he was 19 to my 29 and represented a generation that had only known sex with condoms—a thing that I’ve always maintained is more profound than it sounds. When a straight man wears one it’s an indication of health and virility, for gay men it’s the suggestion of the opposite. Wear them we did, and he swam and rowed on crew, which is about the sexiest thing a gay boy can do short of diving. Between his age and his beauty he was admittedly a bit of a trophy boyfriend to the wise old man I fancied myself, and he was outgoing and at ease in social situations. You could say he was the Tom Daley to my Dustin Lance Black.

I’ve had a fascination with astrology since childhood, which became more pronounced in my early 20s at about the same time I was reading everything Ayn Rand ever wrote (yes I think there is something to be read into that coincidence). The middle-aged psychic that was for a time my landlord in Portland in that big brick house in Laurelhurst was also into the subject and even had a friend who had written a “text book” on it—whatever that means. As I learned then this latest blond was a classic Aries, the sign that rules the head, not the brain mind you but the head (I didn’t make that up, it’s what the textbook says) and they’re known for pronounced physicality (dancing?) and, as a fire sign, a volatile temper. This is the only man to ever punch me—right in the chest—enough to knock the wind out of me. This happened years later when were roommates in San Francisco and I have no idea why he did it, though I suspect it was deserved. My reaction was even stranger though, I laughed. It just seemed so ludicrous. Laughing did not however do anything to deescalate his anger. Before leaving Eugene I had the misfortune to meet his father who had come to deliver a beloved classic car to his son, an MG I think. He was an imposing military man who was left briefly alone in the apartment with me for some reason through a long chilly silence. I was painfully aware at that moment of the age difference between myself and his son but I wasn’t sure how much he knew if anything about what his son and I got up to. Father and son eventually went off together for some time that afternoon. Was this a coming out? Whatever it was, my sweet golden dancer returned alone, emotional and MG-less. His father died quite young and the artist—he was/is an artist—created a powerful portrait of the man who he clearly both loved and hated deeply.

Eugene is a sad little town with a man’s first name because Eugene Skinner’s wife couldn’t stand the idea of a town called Skinner—or so the story goes. There’s very little to do in Eugene, either of an urban nature or in nature, contrary to local boosterism. At least nothing to compare with Portland and the Columbia Gorge with which I’d already become bored. This makes it a perfect town in which to study, practically distraction free.  Its downtown was almost completely dead, having been converted into a pedestrian mall in the 70s no doubt by some well-intentioned UofO urban design “expert” however bad the results always are in practice of separating retail from cars. There was a very funky little hippy mall in a converted warehouse that was at least unique, campus itself with its single block of shops, cafes and bars on 13^th all resting quietly on the flat southwest bank of the Willamette River surrounded by perfect little conical “buttes” that for whatever reason were highly revered by locals and the landscape department. Across the river to the north were some sprawling burbs and the mall that killed downtown, where I would work part time—once again—at the Meier & Frank store. Dead flat and perfect for cycling, it was really the only mode of transport needed, except for those panic-driven escapes out of town whenever possible. The good stuff is pretty far though in either direction; coast to the west, Cascades to the east. Cougar Hot Springs was my initiation into coed naked soaking, very different of course from the Rooster Rock naked gay experiences from my time with Dale. Waldo Lake was cool for being incredibly deep and clear. The coast is very “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or maybe more “Sometimes a Great Notion” but either way a bit of a trek. My 1975 tan Dodge Coronet once broke down along the shoulderless road from Coos Bay and I spent the night alone in it, feeling the car rock in the wake of each passing car or truck as I sleeplessly waited for the battery to recharge itself enough to get somewhere to buy a new one, which of course wasn’t the real problem.

My final project in Landscape Architecture school in Eugene (my “comp” project) was the design of an AIDS Memorial in San Francisco. AIDS then was a simmering pot that was beginning to boil over into rage for many queers, and I wanted to explore if landscape really could have any real power to deal with current issues. Was it too soon for a memorial? Was a memorial too accepting of the virus’ inevitability and the political climate into which it was born? I didn’t expect to find the answers, but I did know the design process and research would at least become a bridge to moving to San Francisco, which I did literally days after presenting it. Maybe it was even a bit of a middle finger from me to Eugene and the UofO. The site I chose was Corona Heights topped by its outcrop of orange-pink rocks at the apex of the rocky pyramidal hill overlooking The Castro, one of very few “native” landscapes left untouched by the city. The rest of the hill though was pulverized, blasted and dug for the brick factory that once sat on its southern slope, destroyed by the earthquake and fire in 1906, and scandalized by its inferior bricks, business practices and the murder of its owner. Ravaged yet pristine, and perched as it is with a direct view to the Castro Theater marquis, there was never any question but that this would be my hypothetical project site. However what I wanted was to capture the anger and uncertainty swirling around the epidemic here and channel it through a built place toward action. I had no idea if that was even possible. Years later I would finally visit the Holocaust Memorial in DC followed just hours later by an unlikely dinner with the PR Director of the museum who was a friend of a friend. I really hoped not to be asked what I had thought of my visit, because frankly I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to offend her, but she asked. I had found it extremely moving I told her, and in spite of giggling school children on a field trip, I had cried most of the way through it. However, I thought the museum failed to give me a “next step,” something that could channel all that emotion and history lesson into positive action. After all bad stuff still happens every day, and I remember exiting the museum into bright sunlight and thinking: “what am I supposed to do now?” As it turned out I was relieved to have the right answer to her question. She was new to the museum and told me that was exactly what she was working on, though I haven’t been back since. In the end it turned out that the activism in my AIDS Memorial project wasn’t in the design at all, but in the presentation to my design jury and student body. Even in 1989 in polite academic society in Eugene Oregon AIDS wasn’t a topic of discussion and at the very least I broke through that barrier for a couple of hours in what I hope was a “teachable moment.” I think even my old pal, the one who had fled from my car at the news that I was gay, was there listening.

During my research for this project I had become enamored with ACTUP and their direct action tactics for calling attention to the epidemic. I couldn’t reconcile Larry Kramer’s role with the group in my mind, having only read his “Faggots,” but that was as much an East Coast/West Coast cultural thing that really had little impact on how the group functioned in San Francisco where it had already existed under another name anyway. Just don’t try to tell a New Yorker that—or anything? There was a Portland chapter though, and I wanted to see one of their meetings, so I drove up to Portland for their regular weekly meeting with L and the new boyfriend, both more socially apt than I. There’s a certain amount of suspicion inherent in groups like ACTUP of new faces, after all what the meetings are for is often the planning of illegal stuff. The group dynamic there was fascinating to me, big personalities in an egalitarian structure. Perhaps the biggest in personality and size was a woman with greasy hair wearing scrubs who had just come off duty as a resident at whatever hospital. She was very impressive in her wit and humor and scared me a little. After the meeting she orchestrated some rouse to keep my friend L behind to talk, while my boyfriend and I waited in the car for the long drive home. Thus began L’s new relationship, which would ultimately include two children, and make it harder for L and I to maintain a friendship. Friends and lovers so often don’t get along, and lovers always win. I moved to San Francisco on “Pink Saturday” the night before the Pride Parade, it may have been the first. The event is now struggling to survive as an annual party in the wake of “bridge-and-tunnel” violence that’s been plaguing it for years. The very next week I attended my first meeting of ACTUP SF. It was a much larger meeting than I’d expected, held in the MCC Church on Eureka, now slated for demolition to make way for more super expensive residential development, perhaps with baby-stroller parking (forgive me hetero friends and baby-making homos). An ACTUP meeting always started with introductions that were really just a way to flush out undercover cops. An elfin man with red hair stood that night and said shyly: “Hi I’m Jimmy from ACTooP London.” It was Jimmy Somerville of Bronski Beat who had written and performed perhaps the ultimate gay anthem of the 80s “Small Town Boy.” “Mother will never understand why you had to leave, for the answer you seek will never be found at home, the love that you need will never be found at home.” I felt home.

Years later an old friend and onetime roommate  from Portland days visited Rikk and I here in San Francisco. I hadn’t spoken to her in some time, and all she wanted to do was reminisce non-stop about our good times back in Portland during my brief stint as a bartender in 1981 at a live theater in NW Portland, and her much longer stint as a groupie and wannabe actress. Each story she told about the many actors I’d dated had a worse ending than the one before until I couldn’t take any more. One boy that I was particularly enamored with, as was she, and the hardest story ending to hear, had starred in “P.S. Your Cat is Dead.” As the captured burglar, he spent the entire run of the play tied up naked each night over a kitchen sink, where from the bar I had a clear view of his quite large swinging dick. I found he, and it, beautiful, though he had never spoken to me, including the entire evening of the closing night party where we were seated next to each other in a tight restaurant booth. That is until the party finally broke up and he turned to me and said without hesitation or pretense: “you can take me home now.” We spent the whole night drunkenly rimming and sucking until we fell asleep. We went out one other time and made up for the lack of fucking on that first date.

I’m no expert on epidemiology but am absolutely certain that if I had been anywhere other than school in Eugene between 1985 and 1989 that I would be dead. The way I know this is simple: all of the men I had relationships with in Portland from the late 70s through 1985 are in fact dead—all of them. In some weird way I think Eugene saved my life.