Ruby in the sixties, you just didn't tell anybody than you were gay, and I found out who my friends really are?

You find out?

Okay, I'm gonna do this.

From just beyond the lights of Los Angeles and Steve Palm Springs, California.

It's Mick Robert Bill.

Just say.

And this is similar lining with the old gay friends.

I have something to tell you, I'm gay?

Oh my, well, what else?

We must throw you a coming out party?

Just say.

There is probably no better way to kick off pride bun on the show than to talk about the moment or moment that had been part of our coming out of the closet, if you will.

And while coming out can look like many things, like an internal experience or a terrifying conversation with a loved one, the tides have changed a lot since the days when we were first discovering ourselves.

When we ask when did you come out, it makes it seem like you come out of the closet once and you're done, But oftentimes that's not the case.

You may experience coming out over and over and over again to various people throughout your life, and the experience of coming out is far from a monolith.

Before you come out to any of your friend's family, etc.

You have to come out to yourself.

So, boys, when and how did you realize you were gay?

Well, for me, it was but for grade school when I had this fascination with National geographic stories about Indians and different tribal cultures, and also Sears catalog underwear section, which I was fascinated with.

And you said, I'm gay because I like the men in the series Catalog.

No, I just knew that I had a strong interest in men as opposed to women.

What part of their bodies were you attracted to?

Robert Well, I picks were always nice.

What about the pouch in their briefs?

Those two You never see a big bulge in a Sears catalog let alone.

Well maybe a incline.

Yeah, Well, over time that has become more of a feature.

So you're a fan of Marky Marx.

Yeah, International Mail did too, they started teaching.

Oh yeah, yes, yes, I came out to myself, I think at the age of sixteen, even though I'd been with guys, I didn't know what to call it.

I just like men and I was happy.

Well, I came out to myself in nineteen fifty and I was six years old and a movie had just come out called The Kid from Texas, which was about Audie Murphy playing the part of Billy the Kid, and my parents decided to take me to the movie.

And at the end of course, Billy the Kid was shot, and as we were leaving the theater, my mother looked at me because I was crying, and she looked at my father and said, this gun stuff was too much.

But actually the reason why I was crying was because they killed Billy the Kid, that cute, cute guy.

And this rolled over also into the matinees at the theater on Saturday.

When I had crushes on hop Along Cassidy and Flash Gordon.

I was in college and I think it was my senior year and I had my junior year, junior year, and I had a crush on a football player and I was dating a girl.

And I used to watch this guy all the time.

I mean, he was six to football player, blonde blue eyes is studying to be a doctor, I mean, you know, and I found this incredible sexual fascination for him.

And I had had those before, and I had had sex with other guys before, but you know, I was dating a girl, and I thought, well, I'll probably marry her.

But it was such a strong, strong feeling, and it got to be so incredibly hard that I met a psychologist and I went to see him, and I saw him for a session and he explained some things about what it means to be gay and what it does not and I left there feeling like this gigantic burden had been lifted off my shoulder.

And then he invited me out to dinner and we had sex and it was great.

Yes, I had sex with my psychology at dinner.

No, after after dinner.

You were dinner, he was dessert.

Well, you know, I was twenty two at the time.

On the other hand, he was thirty, and so that you know that one were both days.

Yes, and so it was like this door had opened and I decided to walk through it and that changed my life.

Did it make a difference the fact he was older than you, No.

It's the fact that he had a big deck.

Well, shut my mouth.

He was very he was very handsome, very dark and handsome.

Harry.

My question to y'all, do you come out the first time you have sex with a guy, or do you come out later?

Well, I think it's in the explanation of the four is are you experienced coming out over and over and over?

Yes, And it's just it's it's a reinforcing experience.

Now, if you have a negative experience, that can send you right back in.

Well, in terms of announcing to the worlder group of friends, I never came out.

For me.

It was a gradual process and I was just who I was.

And when I look back, I realize that I exhibit a lot of the stereo typical characteristics of a young queer child.

I was artistic, I didn't like sports, I was good at school.

I had effeminate characteristics.

But nobody ever said anything to me.

I never had a negative experience.

I just was who I was, and fortunately I grew up in an environment that accepted me for who I was.

Well, I'm right along with Bob.

I never came out or told my family that I was gay.

To me, my coming out was when I first had sex with a man, and that was when I was sixteen years old and had just gotten my driver's license and drove down to Laguna Beach, plunked myself down and had sex with the guy at his place.

When did you come out to your family.

We've never had a discussion about it.

I moved to San Francisco when I was twenty one years old, and that got me away from all my father always trying to accuse me of being gay.

But if he had accused you of being gay and you said, yes, I'm gay, what would have happened?

Then?

I have no idea.

What do you think would have happened?

Yeah, what do you think would have happened?

They just sent me to a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills.

Oh that's a fun experience, and they spent money for it.

That's how parents destroyed children, you know.

Yeah, yeah, Okay, Bob, you never came out.

You never said I'm gay.

No, I.

It was not until I was in my twenties in the business world that I ever really league kind of announced to the world that.

I was day But okay, so you were in a business situation in the Bay Area.

No, this was in Saint Louis.

Okay, Okay.

So you've told me before in Times and we've discussed it that Saint Louis at that time was pretty homophobic.

Oh yeah, the gay life was very much undercover.

You had to really seek it out know where it is.

And in the nineteen seventies, along with my first lover and friend, we had bought real estate that we were operating, and I became provoked by an incident in which I started running ads local newspapers that responsible tenants welcome, regardless of race, beliefs, or orientation.

And that really was the first public gesture I ever made.

Okay, I'm gonna dig, We're gonna go get.

This is juicy.

And what happened when you did that.

Well, the president of a bank that we were doing a lot of business with came up to me and told me that, you know, there are a lot of people in this community that are very concerned about your policies.

You might want to give consideration to changing them.

Otherwise, we'd hate to see you lose everything you built up to this point in time.

So they threatened to with whole It must have been a banker, yeah, okay, So he threatened to withhold funds from you because you were renting out to homosexuals publicly renting.

Okay, is that what drove you out of Saint Louis and why you decided to move to San Francisco.

It was one of the factors.

There were also personal issues relating to the breakup of my second lover.

Okay, I'm not going there.

Good, Okay, just say what's your biggest surprise about coming out to people?

The biggest surprise was those who asked.

I always told them yes, and I never lost a friend.

You won't and you won't lose your friends because they know you as your individual self, religiously or not.

That's where I was in that wonderful world of church where you're supposed to love everybody, but they got the hate going on.

But it was scary.

The hardest one was coming out to my mom, simply because I loved her and didn't want to hurt her.

But I hurt her by not saying anything, because she just says, you know, baby, I could have been there for you.

I says, I had to do it on my own.

Mom.

I says I came out at the right time because she kept asking when I'm getting married and I was already in a relationship.

My dad, on the other hand, thank god he was deceased, because he truly would have killed me because he threatened to do that if I was a queer.

Yeah, I think it's much easier now because there are so many public role models that young people can look to, and just seeing and knowing that there are a lot of people like you makes it a lot easier.

I think in the sixties, you just didn't tell anybody that you were gay.

I mean, it would have would have been the end of me in high school.

But when I moved to San Francisco and in the seventies, there was kind of a push for people to come out of the closet.

And I don't know if that worked or not, but all of a sudden, there was a lot of people that came out.

Yeah, since I basically came of age in the nineteen seventies, and one of the first things that if you were to attend a meeting of gay rights activist is that they stress the fact that you need to come out to your family, that love begins in the family, and that's where acceptance is going to start.

I think also we have to look at the effect of the HIV AIDS epidemic and the fact that at least in this country and at that time, people were showing a lot more empathy for gay people because of what they were going through.

And it also had to do with families who were losing their gay children, even those who rejected their children.

Can you imagine the guilt that they must feel now that they have dead children not helping them just because they wouldn't accept their sexuality.

Think about that.

Yeah, and it still is going on.

It's hard because of those kids or adults who are in small towns that still have to play the game.

Yeah.

And one of the saddest things that I remember happening, and it is still happening, is if you had a pardner and the partner died, the family would step in and literally push you out of the way, and that was.

Very, very sad and take your money.

Yeah, that's why PaperWorks for me.

Yeah.

You know, when I was still with my partner, we created interlocking trusts and the first thing we did was disinherit our families.

And that's because the lawyer said, you know, when a person dies, people get a little funny.

They think they're entitled to something that they are really not.

A lot of people I remember who their partners died, and because there's no marriage contract, because that relationship was not recognized by law, the family of the deceased could sweep in and take everything, and I think that is morally repulsive.

It is now that I've got off my soapbox.

When we think about the evolution of the gay rights movement, changing the landscape for coming out, many efforts laid the groundwork.

Thanks to the efforts of the civil rights movement.

The road was being paved for LGBTQ plus rights.

Yes, yes, you all agree with that.

I absolutely, And there was a noticeable societal change taking place in the late seventies early eighties that you had the feeling that things were loosening up.

Well, I kind of look it back.

You know, the first gay rights demonstrations that I saw were in New York City really in the late sixties.

It coincided with the women's rights movement and also with the civil rights movement, and a lot of the tactics were the same.

That's what I think is important, because there were a lot of people in the civil rights movements were not supportive of gay rights.

Isn't that when Stonewall happened.

Well that was nineteen sixty nine, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay.

This is something that I thought was an interesting subject.

Code switching.

It's not always safe to come out.

Unfortunately, we may need to slide back into the closet from time to time, and not just for another fabulous outfit to wear.

Has there ever been a time when you've had to stay in the closet to stay safe?

Now, just to define what code switching is, the practice of changing how you expressed yourself to fit in with a given social context.

Oh, yes, I had to.

I had to decisify.

I know it's hard for you to believe.

When I was younger, you know, dating dating a wonderful woman, I had to kind of machow.

It up a little.

It was hard too, but I had to do it to protect myself until and I didn't want anybody to know because I hadn't come out to my mom yet.

You know, I never had the problem of having to butcher it up at work or stay in the closet because almost all of my bosses were gay.

So I had a lot of freedom just to be myself.

And I thought of myself first of all as a person and secondly as someone gay.

And during this time that you lived in San Francisco, did you ever visit your family?

Oh?

Yeah, And did you change your behavior to fit that situation?

No, I was always Bill I've always been myself.

Okay, you just never admitted to your family that you were gay.

I'd like to put a different way.

It was it was never discussed in my family.

Well, yeah, but your relationship with their father, yes it was.

It was poor.

But did he ever accuse you of being gay?

No, he never accused me.

He was always trying to prove that I was gay.

It's probably the same it is.

I do not ever recall pretending I was straight.

Okay, it was impossible.

Well, in that vein, I responded to this whole section here by asking a question, when has staying in the closet has ever been safe?

You live with the fear of being outed, either by a circumstance or someone else, and means that you don't have control.

Of your life.

If you're sitting in the closet and you're afraid that somebody is going to out you, you don't have control of your life.

Think of all those people in Uganda or Nigeria, who if they say anything about being gay, they will be still yes, and that's happening in Russia.

Okay, So code switching to me is the opposite of being authentic.

It's really an excuse to lie.

And I will say lying is a big problem for us because we learned to lie at a very early age and that was impressed upon us.

And that is a problem when you deal with other issues such as alcoholism, substance abuse, or gambling.

And so that's my take on that that's very serious.

But that's how I feel.

Yeah, And I think in today's or that young people as well as everyone are getting so many negative signals, and my fear is that this is going to shape future generations in a very negative way.

I remember coming out after I came out in college.

Of course, I was in the theater department, and so I came out to two people who I suspected might be and they came out to me, and for once, you know, I thought that, Wow, I have company in this.

And not to say that the things were easy, because there were a lot of people in the theater department who were very much against this.

In fact, later on I was told by an agent that if I was going to continue to have an open relationship with my lover, I could just give up show business because no one was going to hire me.

Yeah.

They had to hide a lot more back then.

Yeah, and you know, it's different now, it's really different now.

Yeah.

And it's because of us, yes, yeah, which I feel good about.

Yes I do.

Shit.

We'll be right back after a quick break.

Welcome back to Silver Linings with the old Gays.

We've been talking about the idea of coming out as it pertains to sexual orientation, but we often have to come out as many identities throughout our lives, if we differ from social norms, our interests, our religious beliefs, our backgrounds, disabilities, preferences, etc.

What's something else that has driven you to come out.

I'll start on my I have a very rare autoimmune condition called chronic inflammatory DMI leniating polynurritis, and what that means is that the white blood cells are attacking the coating that's around the nerves and the result is a numbness, tingling, pain, fatigue, early death.

Uh.

You know, if it wasn't for the drugs that I have been prescribed, and that especially this new compound that I've been prescribed, I would not be here.

So that's the story of HIV during the eighties and early nineties is that you found yourself being afflicted with a disease that had no known cure and really no treatment, and so we all grew up in that world.

Yeah, I think that was the motivation for a lot of people to come out, you know, if you're sick.

I know of a lot of people, though, who were very sick, who never admitted they were gay.

They never admitted how they became infected, and that was part of the problem, and it's still part of the problem now because if you're in denial about your sexuality and you're going out to the baths or going out to the local park, or you're hooking up with somebody on grinder, and yet you don't really know who you are, you're going to get yourself in trouble.

I also think that the anger so many people had during the nineteen eighties about the non existence of any effort to try to combat or deal with the disease, that so many people felt like, well, if I'm gonna die from this disease, then I don't need to fear being killed because people know I'm gay.

So that forced them out into the streets in large numbers, and it brought on the wave that has happened in the later eighties and nineties.

Yeah, I remember one of the first marches I participated in and was for support of the Ryan White Care Act, which was in Congress at time, and it was a march down Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood all the way to the Federal Building.

And I have never seen so many hot looking guys.

Of course a lot of them are gone now, but I never seen so many hot looking guys in my life.

And just demanding that mister Reagan acknowledges that AIDS exist and support this bill.

That was very important, and I think that's the first time we understood that we had not just power in numbers, but we had a moral cause.

We all share the experience of coming out during a time when it was incredibly dangerous.

Unfortunately, we're living during the time when there's been increasing backlash against the LGBTQ plus community, especially our queer youth.

What's your advice for a young LGBTQ plus person who maybe the leant they're stuck in the closet.

My first advice to that is, don't force yourself to come out.

Wait until you're comfortable.

And the main thing is if you have a peer that you can talk to and if they can just build up a rapport with someone it's going to make a lot easier for them to come out, And so wait until you're ready to come out, and don't force it.

Yeah, I have some advice.

You are not alone.

You are not alone.

You have four friends right here rooting for you.

So go online if you have a computer, or look for a community resource, because there are a lot more now than there were when we were growing up.

A lot.

But most of all, you must have courage.

You must have courage to define who you are.

Otherwise someone else or an unplanned at will do it for you.

I know it'll be hard, because it was hard for all of us, but you will open a door to a new path in life.

It's not going to be roses.

It may not even be better.

You know.

I thought when I first came out there, oh, we're all gay people and we all love each other too.

But you were on the way to being who you are.

So that's what I say to you.

I would like to add that I believe that when you're trying to teach to others the world where you're coming from, try not to provoke people because by provoking, you're going to elicit a negative response, and it is better to lead by example and by doing good and by being gentle as you can and what you have to say, that it'll be more likely that people will listen to you and will be gentle with you.

Okay.

I found it hard coming out to our gay community because of the racism that's still in here.

There's racism in our gay community where we don't support each other.

And there were doors that were shut in my face because as an African American black gay man, they didn't want me.

You didn't want me in your bars, you didn't want me anywhere around you.

And we need to be a team and fight together because we're all in this thing together and it still goes on.

Is just different now, Yeah, I've seen that.

And black men, I mean, our community is rough and we should get it.

You know, from our history.

We should be there for each other, and a lot of times we're not.

We can't unite.

Yeah, and now it's becoming even worse because Hispanics are being demonized globally.

I just, yeah, those who are being maligned, we've got to stick together.

Okay.

So that brings up the final question.

Clearly, a lot has changed since we were first peeking out of the closet.

We talked about ASTAT that recently found that over twenty five percent of gen s identify as queer.

With this increased visibility, it begs the question, do we live in a post coming out world?

No?

Yeah, no, And I'll say this, we are always going to live in a coming out world because there are always going to be forces as they are now to push back.

Look, if you apply for a passport or you get a new passport, you either have to identify as a male or female, okay, not anything else.

And I think that is wrong and I think we will pay for that because you are excluding a group of people.

And when you do that, you go down a very slippery slope and before you know it, you don't have any freedoms in this country.

That's a canary in the mind, it is.

And so is it still necessary to celebrate the idea of coming out?

Yes?

Yeah.

My response was what and give up parade for real?

I'm thinking about a big party.

Yeah, I was thinking of gay pride parades.

Those are times when we meet as a community and that you know, we do show unity, and so it's very important to attend a parade, attend a gay Pride festival, because it shouldn't be a gay pride festival.

It's a queer ride festival, you know, just as you know we no longer have leather parties.

We have fetish parties.

Ooh, all right, boys, we're reaching the end of the day's episode.

Since the show is called silver linings, think back on our conversation, what is the silver lining you took from coming out of the closet.

My silver lining is that I never had to go through coming out to my family, and then I started bringing boyfriends home and there was actually no comments at all.

The silver lining that I took is that I took the road to being authentic.

I took the road to being my true self and that means the good and the bad and everything in between.

And I've been the better man for it.

And I've found out who my friends really are.

You find out, and luckily I've been blessed if not lose any Not.

Only do you find out, but the bond you have with the people you know who are your friends are stronger.

Yes, and they realize that it's just not I don't know why people think we have sex twenty four to seven.

Yeah, it's like I'm too tired, but some do.

Oh.

I wish there was a time things would be so much better in the world.

What love pleaseies, That's all for today on Silver Linings with the Old Gays.

Silver Linings is a production of Iheart's Ruby Studio and The Outspoken Network.

We're your hosts Bill Lyon, Jesse Martin, Mick Petersontin, and Robert Breeze.

Our executive producer is Sierra Kaiser.

The episode was written by Ryan Amador with post production by Eric Zeiler.

Our theme music was composed by Max Herschanow, with audio direction and design by Matt Stillo.

And if you're having fun with us, please subscribe to follow along and don't forget to rate and review the show wherever you get your podcast.

Thanks for listening.

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Not achieved divas status yet.

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What the hell is it?

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