Fighting in Southwest Louisiana

Sissy, I can remember Sissy, seems like bag, I'm sure of it, in queer of course, mostly queer, I think, queer or fine, but not many of them ever told me that. We're coming up over a mailbox up here that illustrates one of the country pastimes for young boys and it's called mailbox fashion and then in particular if they don't like someone, their mailbox gets bashed all the time, what they do is drive down the road with baseball bat and someone laying out the window and crash the mailbox. This is a teacher, Mrs. Jones is an English teacher in sulfur and from what I've heard she is one of the favorite ones

about the kids so her mailbox forever stays banged up. What is that? This here is all solid steel so when they drive through here and hit it with the baseball bat notice this gas here it just kind of bounces off. You want to know where my gay customers live so they have some gay customers here. Me and Randy used to work together at City Service in 1881, 7980 and I always thought so man, I knew that I knew for sure that I was being his now man tell you, see who gets cards and then see who he sends cards to and see who he gets, poor mayor from, and the straight people don't get the same poor mayor on that issue, he does. Some of it and some of his more

bold boyfriends will actually send him postcards and sign their name. Well where you've been here? I haven't seen you in weeks, yeah he's just seeing what what I do in the day. You want to see what it was like to be on the rural route. Lot of pretty girls. We haven't seen any today. Where they at? You keeping them here then on this side over there? So, like you man. I grew up on the bank of the Sabine River in the woods 10 miles north of Starks, which is in the middle of nowhere. We had a farm in my mother

sold milk and eggs and that's how she fed us. I didn't have a dad, he'd been dead for years. When did you first come out of the closet? Bob's probably 15, Dennis. The boy who was teaching me how to play around with other boys was the instigator. It was in General Assembly, our members first thing in the morning and had the whole school right there in the gym and we get into a shouting match and it ends up in the tussle that lands us on the floor in front of everybody and the shouting match continues and he calls me queer and starts naming names of other boys who had sucked off and so I started naming names back and calling dates sometimes in places and he wasn't happy until out in front of everybody that you were the one who taught me how to do all this and you told me about so and so and so and so and so and Dallas and so at lunch that day when I walked in I picked

up my tray and went through the line and I was like okay I'm gonna sit by myself because nobody's gonna sit by me and when I turned the end of the line to go toward the tables there were kids all over the room jumping up and hollering Danny, Danny comes sit with us, comes sit with us, comes sit with us and I nearly dropped my tray and one of the girls said we just want you to know that all over school they're talking I said I imagine she said and no one can believe you had guts enough to do that we admire you and respect you beyond all means and it was just like you could have you could have literally washed me out with the trash I was just amazed and and that changed the whole the whole scope of everything because after that no one ever ever acted the least bit derogatory to me through the next two years of school but I still had to face my family and I knew that so I went home and the first thing I did was I went in the kitchen and mom was always

in the kitchen so I said I think there's something I need to tell you before you hear it from someone else I told her what had happened the whole scope of it from the time we started through the fights and all that and she just looked at me and she said well I think it's a phase that all boys go through and I hope that that's all it is for you but if it's not it doesn't change anything I love you I'll stand behind you and I'll fight every battle with you I'll be right there for you and that changed everything when she said that it was just like the rest of the world could go to hell because the person who mattered most said it didn't matter I do since the time with my mother I've said that I am me and I tend to live my life and I haven't been out on the street screening that but I've

just done what I feel comfortable doing and I feel comfortable having another man to care about and to hold in my arms and to sleep with it night that's all I want I want to be left alone I want to be accepted for being me and I accept them for being them. Good morning, how are you? I'm glad to be out of school, what you're going to do, all best, huh? Swim every day, huh? Good for you, do it for me because I can play baseball, I'll ride, have a good day. I was hired by the Postal Service April 1st 1985 all employees have a 90 day probationary period and on my 80th day postmaster found out that I was gay so he fired me and I told him when he called me in and said what he

was going to do I said you can't do that I just don't understand how you, he said well it doesn't matter what you think I'm going to do it you're still in your probation period so I can fire you and he did and more I thought that matter I got so I started making calls to see what I could do if there wasn't some way to fight it and a lot of them said no there wasn't much I could do but then I talked to the ACLU and they gave me the name of an attorney in New Orleans who worked with Lambda Legal Defense and the ACLU so the attorney called the post office to talk to the postmaster over the telephone the man told the attorney everything he wanted to know why he had fired me he felt like that a gay person wouldn't fit in there would have too much trouble working in that office

so he just couldn't have me working for him well in the end I was off four months and when it got to Baton Rouge and then to Washington what had happened the shit fell and it all fell on the postmaster and when they offered me my job back they asked their questions were what will it take to get you to just accept and get back to work what how much you want out of us told them I just ordered my job back then their next question was whose hand do you want the postmaster at that time they asked if I wanted him fired really because it screwed up and I could have pushed that issue and had him let go but I told them no way I wanted that man as my postmaster he would know it was by us after that he wouldn't

give me any shit the man and I worked together for four years after that the postmaster bless it was very old man very old cage and man and when he had to even ask me the simplest of questions he would come with sweat on his brown his hands shaking and very polite to me and very cordial and never a word about how to just apologize for what had happened and went on with our lives so that was a pretty big scandal for so far that it hurt me back I say if you hide and that's why you have something to hide if you have something to be ashamed of then they treat you like that but if you just act like hey I'm normal and this is how it is there's no big deal about it then even people in redneck southwest Louisiana can learn to accept that and basically respect you for just be in your cell

well we met in Houston at a country western bar and after we had been dating for I guess a couple months I just decided that I was going to move over here I was getting tired of living in the big city I was raised in a little town just about the same size it's been here it's about

3-4 thousand people just pretty much you know real similar situation I really think that Vinton has a strange mix of people middle-aged older people it's a sleepy little town a cage in mix there are a lot of French cages here but there's also a lot of people who have come in through no men's land and the Baptist Bible belt north of us there are people in Vinton who genuinely care there are people who probably hate us from a distance and there are people who fall in between that that just wave and go on by some of the local boys occasionally will pee on the porch but we laugh about that and the only active violence I think I can remember is they knocked out the slats

in the swing in the yard one time when I was away on vacation but it's real minor things like that of course some of the local boys pass in your bag occasionally but I think they do that in San Francisco so we're quite lucky that that's all they do is pass and yell at a speed of 40 miles an hour or greater when I first got that little traveling lawn sprinkler it was one of the brand new things didn't anybody have please have people stop just stop in their cars watching that sprinkler you know how it travels around the halls we have people just stop down the alley or somewhere watching it that's the latest thing now that he's everywhere so nobody thinks anything about it anymore but you know how it is of course I bring you at the east

oh several months back I guess last year actually and a friend was dropping by to pick up a video tape that he wanted to borrow and he had this other younger boy with him and when they pulled into the driveway the boy said oh gee it's true and our friend didn't know what stage it's like what do you mean oh it's true and he said oh well all the time during school everyone called this place the queer house and I just never know if it was true or not so it's it's very well known throughout throughout the town when Brady and I bought this house in 1980 it was condemned and it was kind of a town you might say a town pride that no one in town wanted to see it torn down because it was the last old gingerbread house in town and everybody had to look at it every day

so when we bought it and began restoring it every week it was on the front page of the paper and pictures of me or Brady or both doing I mean every wall we changed every room we painted got a picture made and put in the paper when Brady died there were rumors about this being the AIDS house and then if you came in here you get AIDS and Brady died of AIDS and blah blah blah but when he died there were a group of people here waiting for me to get here the neighbors brought over food there were cards from all sorts of people through town sit to me not to his family but to me there was a card from the city of Vinton from the employees of the city of Vinton and from a couple of the businesses downtown and from people in general throughout town the editor of the local newspaper and stuff and and I was so I was especially touched because they didn't say I don't know they weren't so general they didn't say we're sorry you lost your friend they said more

like we know you've lost someone you cared about and we share your loss I was with Brady when he died in May the following September would have been 11 years after Brady died we found a will a handwritten will the court declared it invalid the family came in and literally threw us out at 11 o'clock at night and wouldn't let us take anything except our the change of clothes for the next day they have tried to seize everything in the house from the paintings left to me personally and things I inherited from my mother and grandmother and father to things that been had just brought in a week before they broke the will we have reversed the judge twice on two occasions he's made a ruling the appeals court turned him over and sent it

back to him this has been going on for three years it could go on probably indefinitely because they're sure that I will die soon Brady was the first AIDS case most anybody in southwest Louisiana had in dealings with it was very quick from the time he was admitted to the hospital the date I was only six and six or seven weeks so they figured all along that I was sure to follow soon and it just hasn't come to pass for them and I've been to the doctor to again and my T-cells are real real low 20 and the ratio is down to 0.04 which the doctor always said the ratio is more important than the actual number of cells as long as everything stayed the same ratio wise and all that well now you know the ratio shot to shit and the cells are real low too so I'm going to go ahead and file from a medical retirement disability retirement have been getting figures

together and you know options and things like that about that for some time other than that life goes on still a push in I don't fear death it's the few weeks the few days or the few hours before death that I'm not looking forward to as I don't want the people that I care about to have to watch me because in many ways it hurts them so much more than it's hurting me I'd already pretty much sorted through my feelings about death in regards to Danny it's definitely not something I like to think about I have the the skills such as they are to be able to take care of him if if it got to that point

that that you know if if he got sick I could take care of him here in our home when I first moved here I got started working with people with AIDS at a hospice over an orange doing it any number of things from feed them cook for them clean them help them walk if they needed any help if they if they could walk at all it was difficult work but really it was a wonderful experience I can think of so many positive things about AIDS that I most of the time I get down and I'm depressed and I cry and I laugh but most of the time I can think of more positive things about it being negative because I've lived my life on the philosophy that all things happen

for good and if there's something good and everything that happens this the and probably the main positive thing that has come from having AIDS or being HIV positive or having HIV which ever scope you look at is the inner strength that I know it has given me and I think it's given a lot of people in that as I told him when you think about most normal people healthy people that you're they're going to live to get old so they don't bother facing death dealing with death what am I going to do how's it going to affect me and others being sick and dying so they don't deal with those things but then when you realize that you know you do somewhat when you have HIV and then when you get down to the point where you have HIV and fewer note T sales there's a whole different spectrum you you have to accept the fact that I can't look for my own age retirement

I'm not looking for retirement home and I don't plan on getting all of these things that people put off for 15-20 years but you face death you deal with it and then the inner strength that comes from conquering death dealing with it and then rising above it and saying okay so what I'm going to do today but I'm still living and I think that's a strength that normal healthy people never feel and it's a good feeling for you you know we sit down and say okay that'll happen so I'm gonna live today and I'm gonna do today what I want to do today and I'm going to hopefully make it better for me or make it better for somebody else to do this if I die oh well I'm still

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. I thought you had a letter in your hands. Okay. No problem. There you are. How you doing? I heard you've been sick. Good. Good. I got a heart condition. I guess I'll stay sick. Well, long as you have some pain. Well, long as you have some good periods in there too, that's good, well it's good to see you out. Take care. Vin and I've been looking at some property in Arkansas, there's 32 acres and a little hippie gingerbread house up there.

It's way, way out in the country, it's pretty awesome, maybe. I've always said that if five-inch of lemon make lemonade and basically when they started passing around AIDS, that's what it was doing, it was doing lots of us lemons. So I guess I'm going to take my older guys, Vin and I've talked about it and we agree that it's time to slow down. And retire and move up to Arkansas and plan a little garden out behind the house and clear off the cliff and make a place to sit and watch the sun come up and go down and just do something and never die, take life easy for a while, I hope. I do consider myself to be the luckiest human in the world from everything that we spoke

of, from a family they accepted me years ago to a lover, the first one, probably the first man that I really loved and cared for and it lasted and we thought and we built a life together and we're accepted and then to have him die in my arms and then to find someone else and through it all to have a family that accepted me and stood behind me and then to be given a second chance and another man to love and to love me back at a good job, I consider myself very lucky, very lucky, sorry about that, I know, I know.