Oral History Program Larry Quinn Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 23 August-18 October 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Larry Quinn Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 23 August-18 October 2021 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Queering the Archives oral history project is a series of oral histories from the LGBTQ+ communities of Weber, Davis and Morgan Counties of Northern Utah. Each interview is a life interview, documenting the interviewee’s unique experiences growing up queer. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Quinn, Larry, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 23 August-18 October 2023, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA), Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Larry Quinn Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Larry Quinn conducted over five sessions from August 23-October 18, 2021 in his home in South Ogden, Utah by Lorrie Rands. Larry talks about growing up in Pennsylvania during the latter part of the depression and WWII. He shares his struggles with his sexuality and how the choices he made shaped his world. Finally, he talks about coming out in his eighties and the impact and change it has had on his life. Also present is Alexis Stokes, and Alyssa Kammerman is present for the final interview on October 18. LR: Today is August 23, 2021, we are in the home of Lawrence Quinn, goes by Larry, in South Ogden and we are conducting an oral history interview for the LGBTQ+ stories. I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview, and Alexis Stokes is here as well. So, Larry, thank you again for your willingness to share your story. I'm just going to start with, first of all, how do you identify relating to your gender and sexual orientation? LQ: I identify as male, gay. LR: Okay, thank you. And when and where were you born? LQ: I was born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, November 14, 1934. LR: Really, I would not have known that you were that old. You don't look it, that's all. LQ: Well, people say that all the time. I don't know what I'm supposed to look like. LR: That makes sense. So, Lansdale, Pennsylvania. Did you grow up in Lansdale? LQ: No, I lived in Lansdale for a short period of time. In 1937, my father opened a jewelry store in Spring City, Pennsylvania, and I lived there probably about five years or so. Then we moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania during World War Two, and that's really where I consider growing up. I moved there when I was in third grade, which would have made me nine. Before you pass through puberty, your life is pretty inconsequential, really, because it's totally controlled by your parents. Once 1 you go through puberty and start becoming your own individual and moving out on your own, I think that's when your real life begins. I lived there till I was 21. I got a B.S. from Franklin and Marshall College there in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Then I went to school at Michigan State: East Lansing, Michigan, and I got my Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry. Then I went and did a postdoc at UCLA and lived in Southern California until 2009. In 2009, I moved to South Ogden, Utah, and I've lived here ever since. LR: All right. I'm going to go all the way back. Do you have any memory of growing up during the Depression? I realize you were still young, but what is your memory of that? LQ: Well, I have memories of this store in Spring City and playing. We had a dog named Toby. The house was on a sloping hill and sloped down to the Schuylkill Canal. For example, in the winter, we would sled on that hill, and because it was on the side of a slope from the basement, you could walk out into the yard. But the first floor was at street level. I have a few pictures from back then. I had three sisters, no brothers. I can remember that I had a little pedal station wagon car that you could ride in. I remember that I have a ring that my father gave me when I was five and we had to cut off when I was eight. I kept it all these years. I had it fixed and I know where it is; this is my father's ring that I happened to have. I have five rings and I wear one each week in rotation. One of them is my wedding ring—my second wedding ring— but I wear it on my right hand, not my left. So I have a few memories from there, et cetera. Any other questions in that part of it? LR: No. LQ: I did have one sexual experience there. The little girl from somewhere close by wanted to show me how to put my hot dog in her bun and my mother caught us. Needless to say, I was severely chastised. I think that's one of the things that made 2 me repress my ability to interact with other people because I was interacting with her in a sexual way. Although, I mean, my God, I was what? I don't know, five, six, seven, so somewhere around there. I had no idea what a penis was for, but apparently, she did and she wasn't much older than me. She was just more experienced than me. But that's the only sexual experience that I can think of. LR: What are your memories of World War Two starting? LQ: Oh my, many. I was standing in front of my father's store. It was Sunday, December the 7th, which turns out to be an auspicious date later on in my life. I heard him say that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor. I'm yanking on his pants saying, “Dad, what's bombed?” because I don't know what a bomb is. That was in December, and we moved to Lancaster the following summer. I had first and second grade in Spring City. Third grade then was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That's of significance because later on I lived in Lancaster, California. Oddly enough, there are some recurring patterns in my life that are coincidental, but weird. At any rate, I can remember laying in front of the radio with my cousin, and her name was MG. The announcer was saying that the United States had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. At that time, that was 1945; I was 11, so I had a much better understanding of what was going on. But I remember looking at the paper and seeing the maps of our march through Europe, etc. I don't recall much from the Pacific Theater. Most of it seemed to be more from the German theater, but we were on the East Coast and that may have been the reason for that. I have my ration book. LR: Really? LQ: Yes, and my sister's ration books, they didn't want them. There was a coupon in 3 there for eggs and a coupon in there for a pound of meat and all that kind of stuff. I went through school, and I guess by the end of the war, then things pretty much settled down. What happened in Japan and Germany was of much less significant, although I remember things like the Marshall Plan, I remember the surrender on the Big Moe, the battleship Missouri and things like that. I have a number of memories and things that come from that time period. Incidentally, photographs of things like that could be made available, if they would be of any value. LR: They would be. We're always looking for photographs that we can scan. LQ: You know, I don't have photographs. We could take photographs of the ration book. LR: Oh, I got what you're saying. All right, so that brings us to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. What was elementary school like for you? LQ: Well, elementary, I remember Mrs. E. I was in love with her; she committed suicide the year after I had her over apparently a love affair. I had Mrs. B for sixth grade and I remember her standing outside the room with a paddle, smacking the paddle in her hand as we walked into the room. You didn't screw with this lady. But nothing sexual. I also sat in fifth grade behind BE and BE burst out crying when we started to memorize the poem: In Flanders Fields the poppies blow, between the crosses row and row, that mark our place; and in the sky, the larks still bravely singing fly, scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the dead short days ago, we lived, saw dawn, saw a sunset glow, loved and were loved and now we lie in Flanders fields, to you from failing hands, we throw the torch, be yours to hold it high. For if you break faith with we who die, we will not sleep in Flanders fields. She burst out crying. Her brother had been killed in Europe the week before and so whenever we worked on that poem, she got sent to the office to do some things. I think the things you remember most warmly---because let's face it, having lived 86 4 years, I can't remember every day of my life. There are many, many, even whole years that are almost blank. Apparently, there's a limit to the amount of memories that you can store. When you store some new ones, you erase some less consequential ones. It's the emotional ones, the ones that interact with you significantly emotionally that get locked in your memory. I'll never forget that, never forget the poem and never forget poor BE. LR: You say that was the fifth grade? LQ: I think that was fifth grade. Yes. LR: That's just amazing. So you said it was just your typical elementary. Nothing stands out in your mind. LQ: No. LR: So let's move on. Well, first of all, I keep forgetting, what were your parents' names? LQ: My father was LQ, but he had no middle name. When he was forced to have a middle name he used S for his mother's maiden name. My mother was ACT. LR: Thank you, I appreciate that. LQ: I claim a number of persona. I have a persona I portray to the neighbors who don't know I'm gay. I'm giving you my only real persona. There's only one other person who knows a portion of that, and that's the doctor I go to get PrEP. Are you familiar with PrEP, P-R-E-P? It's a HIV preventive. So I tell her what I have done sexually the last three months, and I never thought I would be describing to someone. That's part of what makes it possible for me to talk in detail and openly with you, because I've already been in a situation where it was beneficial for me to do that, because when she knows what I've done sexually, then she knows what to test for. She runs a battery of tests every time and they take three vials of blood every three months. I'm also in a COVID test where they take eight vials of blood every three months, but that's another whole story that we might get to later. 5 AS: Do you mind if I ask a question? I used to live near Lancaster, so I just want to know… LQ: Where? AS: Do you know where Lewisberry is? LQ: Lewisberry, Pennsylvania? AS: It's like thirty-five minutes outside of Harrisburg. LQ: Oh, which way out of Harrisburg? AS: West, over the river. LQ: Yeah. I used to go to Chambersburg because I dated a girl who was at Wilson College, but that's the furthest I got past Harrisburg. Most of my life was pretty much centered. When you're a young kid, it's what you can reach on your bicycle or where your relatives live. AS: Yeah. But what was the culture and climate like in Lancaster? Because it's very diverse there now. I'm wondering if it was kind of the same. LQ: Well it was diverse in the sense that there were the Mennonite, there were the Amish, both of which held a place in society like the Mormons do here. But they are not overwhelming in that area like the Mormons are here. When I went to church, I went to an evangelical and reformed church, and we might get into that later on. Who knows? I think the reason that when I left Michigan State, I didn't go back to Pennsylvania, I went on to California. I didn't want to go back there. The milieu there was very negative. “You don't play baseball? What kind of a boy are you?” How disastrous that is to a kid, and yet the man who said that to me gave me my first car. I believe he loved me, but I grew up in this area where it was constant put downs, negativism, terrible negativism. By going to the West Coast, I didn't know it at the time, but it turned out that I could take the advantage of the government 6 offering the courses in leadership and stuff, which allowed me to better understand myself and to get out of that mode and become the person I am today. When I first got married at 27, I was a nasty person because I was a reflection of the society I grew up in, so it was a negative. I was unaware of the antigay or anything like that, but I did know that the worst thing you could be called was a ‘homo’ or ‘queer’. Those were really nasty insults. Does that answer your question? It was not a good atmosphere. Another belief I have is that you create inside your mind a whole bank of information that then allows your brain to predict your behavior in certain situations. You take in data and it predicts behavior. That comes from a book I've read just recently. What was her name? Well, I have it on my phone, I can look it up. But at any rate, she points out that first of all, the brain is not for thinking. The brain is purely to control your body, to regulate the amount of salt in your blood, the amount of various other components, whether you're going to express flight or fight in certain situations. So it's all for that. Thinking just happened to come about. But even today, thinking is not the purpose of your brain. It's to regulate your body. That's her belief, and the way she presented it, I tend to agree with her. But to go back to what was the question again? AS: What the culture or climate was like back then. LQ: Yeah, okay. You have in you that culture and that climate, and you can change it, but it's hard, it's difficult. One of the things I use are affirmations. One of the affirmations I used was, “It's okay to kiss a man.” LR: Okay, thank you. I want to talk a little bit about your memories of junior high, and when you really first noticed maybe that you were different? It's not a really good question, but… LQ: I know what you mean. Yeah, I've looked for the proper word for it. 7 LR: I don't quite have it yet. I'm still learning how to verbalize the right questions. But that's the only thing that comes to mind, is when did you start noticing that you didn't fit in the way that everyone else did, that you were different? LQ: I understand what you mean. I think I was 10 when I first discovered that I had a penis that did different things from just peeing through. I actually masturbated before I could produce any fluids. I had a friend named BM and he had told me that when you ejaculate, it burned if you got it on your skin. I remember being in the bathtub playing with myself and I had an orgasm, but no fluid, and several weeks later I did the same thing. It was one of the few places where you could do anything with yourself, was in the bathroom because with six people living in a threebedroom house, things were crowded. But I remember when I first ejaculated and I got it on myself, it doesn't burn. A great eye opener. I can't believe I'm telling this to two women though. Somewhere in the seventh, eighth, ninth grades, all the guys were discovering girls—I discovered that I was looking at guys. We had a yearbook that we actually put out, we did it ourselves, and sometimes I would jerk off looking at pictures of some of the guys in my class, so at that point, I knew I was gay. Well, I didn't know what to call it or anything, but I knew that I didn't look at pictures of girls. I looked at pictures of guys. So that certainly made me different. I was terrible at sports. My father only ever went to eighth grade and he was not sports minded at all, so he never taught me to play baseball or anything like that. I was always the last kid to get picked for the team, so I was different in that way. What I did excel at was learning and I didn't always get A's. Getting out of high school, I think I had a 3.7 or something like that; not good enough to be a valedictorian or salutatorian or anything like that, but certainly not the lowest in the class, far from it. 8 For at least a year or more, I prayed to God to make me like everybody else. I would go to bed, I would lay in bed and I would ask, “Why did you make me different? Make me the same as everybody else,” and of course, nothing happened. Which is one of the reasons I'm an atheist today. It certainly was not the only factor, but it was a contributing factor, because if he's a loving God, why would he do something like this? Somewhere in that time frame, seventh, eighth, ninth, I realized that it was guys that were the object of my affection. I would go on a date and I'd be staring at the other guy rather than my girl or the other girl, and the only reason I dated is because that's what was expected. Society wanted that. My friends wanted that, my family wanted that. Everybody wanted that except me. It made for a miserable childhood, to be very honest, because I could not express what I wanted to express, I had to subdue it. I had to pretend that I liked girls. Even when I was in my 40s or 50s and we'd be on a business trip and they'd go off to… what the hell is the topless restaurant? I'll think of it in a minute, but they always wanted to go there and it was a waste of my time. I'd rather have gone to see the Australian guys. I forget what they were called. Hooters, they would go to Hooters because all the girls were bare chested. The other big thing that happened in that time frame was in ninth grade, before you enter ninth grade, you had to choose one of two paths; either college prep or junior business. My father said to me, “You better choose junior business. I can't afford to send you to college,” and I signed up for college prep. He never chastised me for it, he never told me that I did a bad thing or anything. He never made a comment on it. But he had expressed that I should take junior business, not college prep. From then on, that was a step towards running my life, because I defied my father in essence. I didn't tell him to his face, I didn't tell him what I was 9 going to do, I just did it. You know, the old adage, “Easier to ask forgiveness than to say I'm sorry.” So those were the two big things: the realization that I was different from everybody else, and the belief that there was no one I could go to to talk to. I was too stupid to realize that I could have gone back to D, the guy that I had my first sexual experience with, and rather I just internalized everything. It made for a miserable life because I was totally unhappy. I was forced into a path and a pattern that I didn't want, and it was primarily due to society. It's what society expected. Now there's another factor that comes to play. I talked about how your subconscious controls an awful lot of what you do without you realizing it. My mother's mother died when she was six, I think it was. She was born in 1903 and her mother died in 19… I’m not sure I'd have to look, but somewhere around six, seven, eight. She was raised by her grandmother. Now, her grandmother was born in around 1850, so you can imagine the upbringing my mother got. My mother's sexual advice from her grandmother was, “If you come home pregnant, you will leave the same day.” That was the sum total of growing up and having a period, interacting with guys, having sex, whatever. So my mother was extremely conservative. My father was not loving nor talkative. He was a good father, he put food on the table, he supported me, and I think he loved me to a large extent, but he never hugged me. He never told me he loved me, and all of that just builds into a life that is unbelievably negative because you don't have anybody saying, “I'm glad you're here.” You can get that from a woman, but now you're being incredibly unfair to the woman. I was unfair to two of them. I was unfair to one that gave me four kids. I even went so far as I've written several poems and I haven't finished them. I need to go back and write some more on them. But one of them is, “I can't cry enough tears to make up for what I've 10 done.” It was one of the lines in it, which is very, very true. The way I treated my first wife was absolutely abominable. I was abominable, but not because I was gay, because I was a shitty human being. But at any rate, the lack of love from my father, the very conservative nature of the household. My mother was a little more touchy-feely, but I don't recall her ever saying she loved me either. It just, you know, in that milieu, in that time frame, it just was not done. It's so different today. My neighbors put up a gay pride flag. I have a gay pride flag that I put up every so often. I was talking with her and I found out they have two boys. Her youngest boy is gay and he's down at Dixie and he's having problems being gay in this society, but that's another whole story. But it still goes on, my point is even today, it's not easy to be gay. LR: So during this time when you're really discovering that you're different, do you think your siblings knew? Did they ever talk to you or say anything? LQ: Well, my oldest sister was five years older than me. My next oldest sister was three years older than me and then my younger sister was four years younger than me, so I wasn't close to any of them. When you're growing up for the two older ones, I'm the ugly brother. “Stop hiding behind the couch and you should stop scaring us and stop doing this and that.” Nonetheless, I don't know that they knew and I don't believe my parents knew. Nothing was ever said. One telling thing about my mother and how she behaved: We, four kids, and my mother were at the dinner table, the kitchen table talking, and somebody said something about a French kiss. My mother said, “What's a French kiss?” I think it was my older sister said, “Well, that's where you stick your tongue in the other person's mouth.” My mother said, “Oh, that's disgusting.” So that gives you an idea where she was coming from. Incredibly conservative. 11 AS: What was the name of the high school you attended? LQ: John Piersol McCaskey High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. AS: So you got your Ph.D. in chemistry, right? Did you have any favorite classes in high school? LQ: Well, I liked chemistry class. I didn't like art class. I guess we didn't have art in high school, the last art I had was junior high. I generally liked most classes, I liked learning and I still like learning. I'm taking a class at Weber this fall. I take a class at Weber almost every year. If I don't take one at Weber, I take one at the University of Utah through the Osher program. You know that Osher owned World Savings in Los Angeles? He became a multi-millionaire. I don't think he was a billionaire, but he was like a hundred millionaire kind of person. He set up a program named after him called Osher. Every state has at least one Osher organization. Utah has only one. It's down at the U of U. I talked to the vice president up here about having an Osher program up here and they are not interested in doing it. You have to be 50 years of age to take an Osher program. It's six hour-and-a-half lectures and it can be on any topic. It can be bird watching. It can be the history on the eastern front of the European war. It can be philosophy, it can be weather. It costs thirty bucks to belong and then it usually costs one hundred bucks for the class, but it's nothing, and you mix with other people your age. The classes I've taken mostly are excellent and verging on outstanding. The one I took on weather, it was crappy and that's unfortunate, but you know, it's the same way in college. There are some teachers that just pour their soul out to you and teach you an incredible amount of information. There are others that couldn't teach a human being to eat a spoonful of sugar. AS: So I know you said your father wanted you to attend the business program. LQ: The business track, yes. 12 AS: What was that like going from high school to college for you? LQ: Well, first of all, since I went to a school in my own hometown, I was a townee, which made a difference, although I did join a fraternity, but I was still a townee. It's a different experience when you're away from home and living there. It's a really growth producing kind of a thing because to a large extent you're on your own. The only reason I got to go was I had a three-quarter scholarship based on the fact that my father's income was sufficiently low. So, if I had to raise the money for it, I could do it, and I worked summers to raise enough money to pay the last quarter. My neighbor up the street was the manager at Slaymaker Lock, and he hired me on and I worked from 5:30 till 10:00 at night and then would come home and sit in a chair, try to study and fall asleep. My father would come over, whack me on the shoulder and say, “Get up and go to bed.” I would sometimes fall asleep in class. I would open the window behind me in math class in February. It's really cold and that would help me stay awake. But it's such a growth-producing thing because you're literally on your own. You're deciding whether you go to class or not. I walked to college. It was a mile and twotenths or something like that, not far. Every once in a while, my father would pick me up after school if I was staying later or was at the fraternity or something. But it was a wonderful, wonderful experience. It was during college that another one of my beliefs… as a matter of fact, I'm putting together a story of my life for my kids because having grown up on the West Coast, they don't know any of my relatives from the East Coast. My mother only ever came out twice and we went back there once. One of the titles I thought of giving it was, “A Thousand Forks.” What I mean by that is almost every day you come to a fork in the path where you have to choose this path or that path. 13 I was working a summer for the Pennsylvania Manufacturing Confectioners Association with a guy whose name was BD, believe it or not. When you make hard candy, there's a thing called softball and hardball, and if you boil it to a certain extent, you'll boil enough of the water out that it will form a soft ball when you drop a lump of it in water. If you boil it further, it will form a hard ball. Well, that's a very subjective thing. So what we did was we boiled sugar solutions to certain temperatures and then measured their water content. I have a paper that we produced on that, and that's the first time that was ever done. So I was learning as well as getting a paper as well as doing things. Then I got an opportunity to do summer stock at the Mount Gretna Playhouse. I went up and I played the doctor in Tennessee Williams’ play Summer and Smoke, and I got asked to come back and do another play. The director liked what I was doing well enough. I was at a fork: do I continue on with that or do I stay and continue working in the lab? You know, today I might be pumping gas in Los Angeles because it's the only way I can stay alive. I obviously did not choose that route. Oddly enough, I didn't do a single play in college. But I did in high school. Other than the Summer and Smoke thing, I didn't do any of the college plays, but I did all the plays in high school. So that was one of the forks, and another fork was the day my daughter looked me in the eye and said, “Dad, are you gay?” And you know which path I took there. LR: I'm assuming you said no. LQ: I said yes. LR: Oh, good for you. LQ: That was December 7, 2018. I was in the closet for 70 years. LR: During your high school years, what was dating like? 14 LQ: Miserable, is probably the way I would put it. I'm doing something I don't want to do. I want to date this guy and I want to make out with him in the back seat and I want to grope his tits and his cock, etc., not her crotch and her breasts. So you're doing something you don't want to do because you feel you have to do it. How the hell can that be a good thing? There was nobody that could tell me it's okay to be gay, and now that's what we tell folks. “It's okay to be gay. It's okay to have a date with a guy. It's okay to hold hands, it's okay to kiss. It's okay to do anything you want to do, as long as you're not 19 and he's 17,” cuz there's that time period where you get in deep kimchi. LR: Yeah, this is true. AS: So what was dating like in college for you? Is it different? LQ: Same thing. The fraternity would have a big date. At the time I went, Franklin Marshall was all-male. It has since become coed. So we would import girls from another school like Wilson. They'd bus a busload of girls over and you would go ahead and date, not date, but dance, etc. with them. But I didn't want to do that. It was just another miserable thing you had to do. So it was not rich, it was not rewarding. If I had been heterosexual, I'd have been all over it the way I wanted to be with a guy, but could not be. LR: I have a question for you. I'm a little off topic, but why chemistry? LQ: I got a chemistry set for a Christmas gift, and I enjoyed it. In college prep, when you're in school, one of the things you usually take is some kind of a science class. I took chemistry and in the first exam I got a 98. When I got the paper back, it said: See me, Snavely. It was Fred Snavely, he was the guy who taught the class, and so he started grooming me. When I left Franklin Marshall, he arranged for me to work for CB at Michigan State. When I left Michigan State, CB groomed me to work for 15 Clifford Garner at UCLA as a postdoc. Then I went and got a job working as a chemist at the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base. LR: Wow. LQ: So why chemistry? Because somebody showed appreciation and interest in me. I don't understand myself to a large degree, because I never had people to talk to, but I suspect I craved attention and FS gave me attention. There were six guys who graduated in chemistry in 1956 at Franklin and Marshall, and some of us still stay in touch. There's one guy, won't talk to us. We don't know why. We got together and met with one of the profs a few years back, he was the next to last. He was the penultimate professor. Everyone else had passed away and he has since died. I don't know whether RVH is still alive or not. I'm so far away, I don't very often go back for a reunion or anything. But why chemistry? Because somebody showed interest in me. LR: I remember my question, you made me think of it. During this time, what would you do to take care of yourself? What was just for you? Does that make sense? LQ: I don't know what you mean. LR: I know, I'm not making any sense. LQ: Talk it out with me. LR: I’m trying to verbalize it. I was just thinking that. LQ: Are you talking sexually? LR: I'm just talking for fun, just in general, what you would do because you couldn't be yourself? How did you navigate this, and what would you do that was just yours, where you felt like maybe you could be yourself? Does that make a better question? LQ: Well, I collected stamps. I got interested in music. I bought a Thirty-Three and 1/3 album and I think it was Moonlight Sonata and to this day, I am up to here in 16 classical music. That doesn't mean I don't like rock and roll. I like 70s and 80s. I mean Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” my God. What a piece of music! LR: I agree. LQ: Hotel California: the music today to me is blah. There's no substance to it, it's all soft and cuddly, but nothing like some of the groups back there. I mean, at first when the Beatles came out, I hated the Beatles. But, my God, the music they turned out. I mean, four guys who were nobodies from Liverpool, England, and their music is still played today. You know, it's just magnificent. As a matter of fact, I read a lot of male romance and I just finished one called Beneath the Stain, which was a story about a young man and his brothers who form a band and become fairly successful. Outbreak Monkey was the band, but he falls in love with their lead guitarist, and the lead guitarist marries the girl because she's being pushed to date by his parents, because he thinks she's pregnant. She's not, but she tricked him into marrying her, so he splits and never goes back. But years later, he goes back and the guy is dying of cancer. So they spend a last week together before he dies, and then they take his ashes and do with them what he wanted and not what the parents wanted, because he got a lawyer and the lawyer saw to it that they got his ashes and not the parents. So it's a very touching, very moving book that I can associate with, because it's love lost. He finally falls in love with the band manager, so it comes out good at the end. We are not going to do this in two hours. LR: No, we're not. [To Alexis] Do you have another question right there at the top of your head or do you want me to just keep going? I didn't mean to put you on the spot, I'm sorry. I threw her into the deep end. LQ: Excuse me a minute. [To Alexis] How do you figure into this puzzle? 17 LR: Oh, I can answer that. She's an oral history assistant. We're not allowed to go on interviews alone. LQ: Well, that makes sense, of course, but she's asking questions and things as though she's trying to get a degree in oral history or something. LR: No, this is really her first interview that she's asked questions on, so I'm giving her that opportunity to do that. But I also realize that I'm throwing her into the deep end and I don't want you to feel uncomfortable. LQ: Tell me your name again. AS: I'm Alexis. LQ: Alexis Stokes, okay. LR: I have questions, so I'll just keep going. So you get your degree and your B.S. in chemistry, you get your Ph.D. at Michigan State. Explain how you got to UCLA? LQ: I drove 66. LR: Did you? LQ: Yes. You could still do it back then. I broke down on Tucumcari, New Mexico and everything I owned was in the car. The car was my aunt's car that this uncle who put me down a lot gave me. He wanted me to come back for my aunt's funeral and I had a big test coming up. I said, “I can't do it. I got to study for this,” so at Christmas, he asked me to come down and help him. He had a garage and a gas station and lived in the house next door. He had my aunt's car there and he asked me to go out and wash and wax it and clean it inside and out. I did that and it took me probably five, six hours. I went and I said, “Okay, all done.” “Well,” he says, “what do you think?” 18 I said, “What do you mean, ‘What do you think?’ I cleaned the car, that's what I think.” He said, “Were there some papers on the dash?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Did you look at them?” I said, “No.” He said, “Go look at the papers.” They were the registration for the car in my name. Caught me completely off guard, so I have to conclude he loved me, but there again. Now, he took me on vacation with him because my family didn't go on vacation, we couldn't afford to. So for two years, I went up to the Pocono Mountains with he and his family. He had a son and a daughter. I was friends with the daughter who was my cousin until she passed away. The son, D, died at 16. He had spina bifida. Because of that, he was both physically and mentally deficient. For example, he called me ‘Latter Day,’ was the best he could do for Larry. When we would go down there, my uncle would show 8mm cartoons, and D always got to pick the cartoons, which pissed me off because I never got to pick a cartoon. I ended up being a pallbearer for him when he died at 16. I think I was kind of a pseudo-son for him. Somebody that he could do normal things with. LR: That makes sense. So while you're getting your degrees, where are you working? LQ: Which one? LR: Yeah, all of them. LQ: Well, the first one I worked summers for a dollar an hour. I cut hedge. This family had a city block with their house in between a five-car garage and a chauffeur. I dated the chauffeur's daughter for a number of years. Another interesting story about her later on. But at any rate, I got a job there and it was never-ending. By the 19 time I got back to the beginning, it needed cut again, so you just kept cutting around. Every day I would go and cut hedge. It was an area called Schoolhouse Hill or School Lane or something like that, and it was where the nicer folks lived. JM lived there. JM was a friend of mine; I think he was gay. He never married and I never saw any evidence of a significant other. I visited him once in New York City, probably 20 years ago, and no evidence that he was there. He was a lawyer for the theatrical industry and he had a house overlooking Central Park, not a house, an apartment. His grand piano was in the living room. You couldn't get to the stove if the door to the dishwasher was opened. You know, typical. But, I think JM was gay and JM and I had play dates together before he left. He went to… what was the school up in New Hampshire or somewhere? Exeter Academy. But I would go to his house and they had a cook and there was a little button on the floor underneath the rug. When we're ready for the next course, his mother would push the button and she would come in and clear the dishes and bring it. 1412 Ridge Road, that was one of the addresses to have. His father's office was a hell of a lot bigger and nicer than mine will ever be. I often wondered, did JM just do overnight kind of a thing, you know, hookups, etc. or did he have a significant other? One year, when I sent him a Christmas card, it came back with very crabbed writing, so I figured he was beginning to deteriorate. The next year, I got a letter in March from a lawyer who said that JM had passed that year. He didn't make it nearly as long as I did. He was the same age I was. My sister dated his brother P, who later became a judge. But my sister didn't end up marrying him, which would have been a very good thing. LR: So that was what you were doing? 20 LQ: Well, that was one job. The other one was the empty lots that were unsold. They would mow because with 40 inches of rain, etc., weeds grew very tall. He would go in with a tractor and a cutter bar and he would cut, but you can't cut in the corners and stuff or along the stream bank, so I would go in with the side and I would mow down the weeds that he couldn't get with the mechanical devices. I had this job at Slaymaker Lock one time, so that was how I raised my money. My mother gave me the money for my dues at the fraternity, but I paid my quarter of tuition, which was a lot less in those days. LR: Right. What about at Michigan State? LQ: Michigan State. When you go to Michigan State, as a graduate student, you go there as a lab person. So I taught labs, et cetera, other duties as assigned. When a speaker came to talk, I got to run the slide machine, things like that. I can remember one day I was working for another guy with an unusual name. He was English. I don't remember his first name. But I'm showing slides, and I had a very good friend there who was quite a joker, and he had slipped an extra slide in that I didn't know about. The guy said, “Now I would like to give credit for my graduate students who worked on this,” and I flipped the slide in and it turned out to be a picture of real Chinese railroad workers. There must have been a thousand guys up there. Of course, the audience just broke up over it, and I'm trying to figure out what the hell I did wrong. The next slide was the proper one, and then we went on without further problems. LR: That's hilarious. And I'm assuming when you were getting your postdoc, that you were working just in the school as well? Like you were at Michigan State? LQ: Yeah, I was a paid postdoc. I earned, I think it was ten thousand dollars a year, and then that got raised, I think, to 12 at some point. 21 LR: Ok. So how old were you when you finished your postdoc? LQ: That was 1961. I left on Labor Day weekend, so I would have been 27. LR: Okay. So all this time you're just dating? LQ: Yes. LR: When did you actually meet your first wife? LQ: I met her there. A girl I knew introduced me to CB. At the end of the month, I would look and see if I had enough money because I was getting paid two hundred dollars a month, and out of that, had to cover my room and board and that had to come first. Then if I had enough money left over, I would take her out on a date and we would do something cheap. Grilled cheese and coffee or soft drink. When I left there, I was living by myself in an apartment in Los Angeles, actually on Van Nuys Boulevard, out in the San Fernando Valley. I was fairly lonely. Nobody even called me on my birthday, imagine that? My mother didn't even call me on my birthday. My father had passed. He died in 1960, and this was the fall of 1961. WeHo was already there, West Hollywood or WeHo. There's a huge gay group of people. I didn't know how to find them. I didn't know where to go. There was no group at UCLA for gay folks. I had a friend that I had met in class, his name was DW, and at one point it was the lab round, about a quarter to six. I'm trying to teach them millimoles, and he raised his hand. I said “Yes, DW?” He says, “Millimoles, millischmoles, I'm hungry. Can I go home to get dinner?” God. Well, DW ended up being the best man at my wedding. He lived in Cleveland, which meant that he was not far from Kalamazoo. I decided to ask CB to marry me, but I couldn't afford to fly back and ask her in person, so I gave him the ring and asked him to go give it to her in my name, which he did. So I married CB that I had known from Michigan State. She was an undergraduate. LR: So you met her at Michigan State? 22 LQ: Yes. LR: Okay, so you dated her for a while then before you got married? LQ: Yes. LR: You said that when you were at college in Los Angeles that you didn't know how to find the gay community. But were you looking? LQ: I didn't know how to do anything, so no, I wasn't looking. I'm sure there were gay people in the chemistry building, but how do you find somebody? If you ask the wrong person, then the next thing you know, you don't have a postdoc anymore, so you have to be extremely careful. Remember that this was before Stonewall. Stonewall was 1969, and Stonewall was the beginning of the change for gays. There had been other things like the Mattachine Society and stuff like that, but there was just no way to interact with it or find other gay people. You could always, “For a good time, call…” you know, on the bathroom stall. But I was always too terrified. I was always scared of being found out that I was gay. LR: You mentioned that if it was found out that you would be asked to leave the program. LQ: That was my assumption. Nobody ever stated that, but it was not uncommon to get fired if somebody found out you were gay or had a date with another guy and spent the night or whatever. LR: Did you ever witness any of that discrimination happening back then? Did you ever see that? LQ: No. You read about it in the paper and stuff. I didn't read about the raids of bars in New York or I don't know if they did the same thing in California. I imagine so, and beating up gays was a popular occupation amongst—well, I shouldn't say religious conservatives, among conservatives. “Let's go out and find a couple of gays and beat them up. It's a fun thing to do.” It still is. Three years ago, two lawyers coming 23 out of a bar in Salt Lake got jumped by some guys and beaten up. So it has changed in the sense that it doesn't happen very often, but it still happens. Although, I'm not afraid anymore. I interact with the gay community. I run two groups here in Ogden for gay people and I'll probably expand that sometime this year to four different groups. I have a Tuesday night meeting with a support group which usually has 10 to 15 gay guys, most of them in Salt Lake. I have a Wednesday luncheon. I have a once a month dinner that I go to. I'm constantly asking people for dates. Unsuccessfully most of the time, even though I know they're gay. LR: What I want to do is finish up your postdoc, and then we'll call it for today and set up a time to come back and finish, if you're okay with that. LQ: If you think you could finish next time. I talk too much. LR: Well, there's hope. If we have to come back a third time, we will. I am learning these take a little longer and it's okay. So you finished your postdoc in 1961 and you got married in 1963. No, what year did you…? LQ: 1962. LR: Okay. Did you feel like, and this might not be a fair question, but... LQ: There is no such thing. LR: Looking back at it now, do you think you didn't have a choice, that you had to get married? LQ: Yeah. LR: It was just what you had to do? LQ: Yes. It's the only way I could survive. I didn't know how to find a gay lover and I was alone. I'm on the West Coast. I have no relatives out here, a few friends. What else could I do? An awful lot of that came from internalization, from my subconscious. A guy who was self-sufficient, well-organized, would have said, “There's a gay 24 community here, I need to find it. Now what the hell am I going to do to start this process?” I just sat back and let life go on and piss and moan because I didn't know how to find anybody. LR: You mentioned that you were just a miserable human being during that time. Do you think that a lot of that internal struggle was part of it? Does that make sense? LQ: I hated women. How do you think I treated my wife? I'm doing something I don't want to do with somebody I don't want to be with. Now, my second marriage was very different. I never should have married her either. She knew that I liked guys. I don't know if she knew that I was gay. I'm amazed that door is still on its hinges from when I came back on December 7 and I told L I was gay. She looked at me, got up, walked over and slammed that door so hard, I thought I was going to have to have the whole frame rebuilt. Now, that's December 7. On March 22 she moved out and moved to Denver, and on April 5, the divorce was final. She didn't waste any time. LR: That was quick. LQ: Now, I should tell you. I had sexual experiences while I was at Michigan State, and I sabotaged them just like I sabotaged the thing with D. See I'm internally torn. I want this, but my subconscious says you shouldn't be doing this. How the hell can you live in… I understand why people kill themselves. They can't stand the dissonance in their life. They're being torn apart. I'm amazed that I've made it. I'm amazed I never got AIDS. If I had come out when I was in high school, would I have made it through the AIDS crisis? Probably not. The ones who made it through the AIDS crisis were the ones who had a significant other and didn't do any sex outside the relationship. Again, a fork. LR: Yeah. That sounds like a place to stop, almost perfect. Part 2- September 20, 2021 25 LR: All right, it is September 20, 2021, and we are here again with Larry Quinn in his home in South Ogden. Alexis Stokes is here as well. So, Larry, when we ended last time, you had just gotten engaged to your wife. I don't believe we talked about the wedding. LQ: First or second? LR: First wife, and you explained how you had asked her to marry you, which I found rather interesting. You had mentioned how you were feeling, you were really angry over having to get married, like you had to do it, in a sense. LQ: Yes. LR: So why don't you just pick up from there and talk about getting married? Where did you guys live initially? I'm assuming you're still working in the Los Angeles area? LQ: Yeah. We got married in February, I think it was the 10th, and flew back to Los Angeles. I had gotten a new apartment. I had moved from the one in Santa Monica, which was in a less acceptable area, up into the San Fernando Valley. It never occurred to me that would upset her, but it did. We all have faults, but my wife had one which doomed us to failure in the long run, and that was she would never tell you how she felt or what she was thinking, because she had interacted with her sister, and her sister thwarted her at every step of the way. If she found out that she wanted something, then it was the sister's goal to see that she didn't get it. So whenever I had a problem or anything, you know, “What's wrong?” The answer was, “I don't know.” As we got on into the marriage, I was a terrible husband to begin with because I really didn't want to be married to a woman, and that's unfortunate. Of course, she didn't know that. It's a very cruel trick that society plays on gays—or religion, depending on what they're responding to. For example, when the Mormons force a kid into marriage, they're not just hurting the guy, they're hurting the woman 26 even more, because she's not getting somebody who can love her the way a woman ought to be loved. He's always going to be thinking about men and always going to be wanting to, “God, I wish I could have that guy or this guy.” It's a very cruel situation that religion or society or both force you into. So I made a lousy husband. We, of course, had our good times, and it lasted 17 years. She gave me four beautiful children, but nonetheless, it was doomed to failure from the start. Half of the gay folks that I know have been married at some point in their lives, and it always ends in divorce because it's just not destined to be. Ultimately, she sought out somebody that was masculine, and I'm not trying to say that I was feminine, but I am trying to say that she wanted a guy that could give her a loving response. She got involved with an alcoholic professor from the local community college, and he had anywheres from one to four women that floated in and out of his house during the day. During the week, and they would cook his meals and do his laundry. I don't think she was ever unfaithful to me, but I would come home and find a note would say, “We're over at…” God, I don't even remember his name. “Why don't you come on over?” Well, there was nothing in that for me, so I put up with that for a while. Then finally, the dysfunctionality came to a head, and she pushed me and I responded in a very negative way. I threw a glass of water on her, but the kids were present, so it was certainly not a healthy nor a good thing to do. Then she decided that she wanted me to leave, and she told me that. In 30 days, I hadn't left yet, so she reiterated that she wanted me to leave. I gathered up my crap and found a place to live. I moved in with a lieutenant and there was no relationship there. He simply rented a room out and I helped him pay for his house. After a month, I asked to get together with her and I said, “Okay, we're separated. What's the goal? What are we working for?” I got the, “I don't know,” answer, so I said, “I know I'm getting a 27 divorce. I have already talked to somebody and he will send you the papers on Monday.” We had even tried counseling, and we tried one of these things where you go through a weekend of trying to love each other, etc. and you're sponsored by another couple. At the end, the four of you are to come together. When we got to the end, I met with the other couple, we couldn't find her, she never showed up. So it was very clear that she was very unhappy with the thing, and it was very interesting when we did get some counseling because I said, “I can't satisfy any of her needs because I can't find out what her needs are.” The counselor turned to her and she said, “He should know what they are. How is he going to know if you don't tell him?” She never got the concept, she could never break through that. So that was a factor, it made it difficult for me to give her what she needed. Nonetheless, it was doomed from the start anyway, because I really wanted to be with a man and not with a woman. So we got divorced and the kids were all teenagers at the time. Some of them weathered it better than others. My one son who was very smart, should have been an engineer, responded by not doing any homework, and since homework was half of the grade, he started flunking classes. He's got a very good job now. They are giving him essentially engineering pay, even though he has an AA degree, not a B.S.. But I think he could have opened a lot more doors had he gone to college. To a large extent, that's my fault because in trying to take care of my needs, some of the kids lost their needs. Very unfortunate. But the whole thing, the way society drives gay folks into marriage, is a tragedy for everybody. It's not just the guy, it's not just the wife, it's the kids also and the families that are involved. That was in 1982 and I was single. I started dating around again because it was expected, and that's the point where I think I should have had the guts to say, “I'm going to come out,” but I had a clearance. I was working at a government 28 laboratory, and I was concerned about whether the coming out would have a negative effect on that. So instead of coming out, I played the same game again, much to my and another woman's detriment. LR: Okay, before we start talking about the next one, can we go back a little bit? What year did you get married? LQ: 1962. February 10. LR: So I just want to talk about some of the things that were happening historically during that time frame. Was it 1963 or 1962 that Kennedy was assassinated? LQ: I think it was 1963, because I took the job in January of 1964. When I interviewed out at the lab, I was sitting in the human resources office talking to a woman, and somebody burst in and said, “The president's been shot.” Of course, going home, on the radio, it was all about that and we didn't have a TV. There were three engineers that lived in the apartment next to us, and we went over and watched some of the things that were going on on their TV, and then I went out and bought as cheap a TV as I could get because I didn't have much money. I was making $12,000 a year at the time, which, I was not in poverty, but I was not flush either. We got married in February and I think it was April, I got her pregnant with our first boy. So that's the big thing that was going on there, was the funeral and all of that. Then of course, in 1969, there was the landing on the moon. I was still married at that time, of course, and the landing on the moon was just an incredible thing. LR: How so? I mean, for you, how was that an incredible thing? LQ: Well. It made me very proud. I was working in the rocket industry, and of course, it was rocketry that enabled the whole thing to happen. There were many other things that had to happen too. They had to train people. They had to figure out how to keep these people alive, do spacesuits, all that kind of stuff, but it was rocketry which took them there. I felt an alliance or a compatriot to the folks that were 29 working this, and as an American, I was also very proud because it was something no one else had even been trying to accomplish. The Russians built this huge rocket which ended up being a failure. They eventually, of course, did make it, but for a long while, we were the only ones that had the capability and the will. So that had meaning, and of course, we got very involved. When you have kids… We had one in 1963, and then it was three years till my daughter in 1966, then two years till my second daughter in 1968, and then one year till my son in 1969. I said to my wife, “If we don't stop this, the next thing is going to be twins.” They just kept getting closer and closer together, and I had to go get fixed, because for me, it's a more simple operation than it is for a woman. For a woman, it's a major operation. Looking back, I wish I hadn't, but hey, you make your choices and take your chances. LR: So during the job you got in 1963, you started in 1964. Where were you working? LQ: I was working at the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base. It's an isolated facility in the northeast of the base and was 40 miles from home. You drove 20 miles to get to the base and then you drove on the base for 20 miles to get to the lab. LR: Okay, so you mentioned that you had to have security clearance to work there? LQ: Yes. LR: Was it just because there are two levels of security? LQ: There's actually four. LR: Well, I'm familiar with two levels of security, let me put it like that. The bare minimum and then top secret. LQ: Oh, okay. Well, there's confidential, secret, top secret, and then there's secret code name. 30 LR: Okay, so I guess I'm familiar with the middle two. I don't know if you can even talk about what your level of security clearance was. LQ: I had one of the highest you can get, we'll just say that. LR: That's fine. I was married to it long enough to understand. You mentioned that one of the reasons that you started dating again was because you didn't want to lose your clearance. LQ: Yeah. LR: Was that common practice at the time? LQ: No, but it was always in the forefront, because every three to five years you had to refill the forms out. They asked you, “Have you had any contact with a man or person of the same sex?” and all this stuff. Now the reason for that is if you are gay and not out, then you can be blackmailed, so it becomes a very nervous thing. If you are gay and out, you can't be blackmailed. So since I was gay and not out, I was very nervous about the whole thing because if someone had made an accusation towards me—let's say I had done something with somebody, and then he made it public—I could have lost my clearance and I could have lost my job. So while there was no overt threat, there's always this underlying thing. Now, in other ways, there was never any problem, because I try very hard to lead a very exemplary life. I believe in… not “What would Jesus do,” but “What would a really good person do?” We were at Disneyland one time and I bought $17 worth of candy of different kinds, and she should have given me three bucks back. She gave me $17 back and I said, “Wait a minute. Look at what you've done.” Figure out, because this was before computers and everything, she had obviously made a mistake. But I called people on things like that. I could have walked away and gotten essentially the candy for free. But a reasonable man would not do that, and I want to be a reasonable man as much as I can. 31 Obviously, being gay and being hidden and being married to a woman, a reasonable man wouldn't do that. So you're leaving a life of conflict, and it's very unfortunate. Even today, I meet people who they've just come out or they're pondering whether they're going to come out and they're struggling with all these issues, and if it were completely open and aboveboard and everybody accepted it, they would all go away. But there are countries, churches, institutions, etc. that lay this burden on you and you have to deal with it somehow. It's no wonder that in Utah, the suicide rate of gays is twice the normal suicide rate other places. I have pondered suicide almost every week of my life. I would never do it because of the people that it would hurt; it might relieve some of my problems, but it would hurt so many other people, including my children and my siblings. So it's just a whole tough row to hoe. It's much, much better today because you can get married, you can be out. Many places are very accepting. You can't get fired from a job; sexual discrimination, or sexual proclivities, or whatever the proper word is, keep you from getting fired. But nonetheless, there's always some that will do it under another guise. They'll do it and blame it on something else when the real reason is they don't want a gay person working there. There are companies like Hobby Lobby, which actively support anti-gay measures. I don't know whether they still do. Cracker Barrel, which is a restaurant, if they found out you were gay and worked for them as a waiter, gone like that [snaps]. There are places, I get some literature which identifies companies that are not accepting, and I try to avoid going there to eat or to buy things from them because I want to pressure them. Being gay is not a choice, no matter how you carve it, but there are a lot of people who think it is, unfortunately. 32 LR: So you're working at Edwards Air Force Base, and what you were doing? How did that influence how you looked at the Vietnam War? LQ: I was strongly against the Vietnam War and strongly for the soldiers, because I thought they were trapped. So many people didn't like the war, and the government ended up just lying left and right about body counts and why we were there and what we were doing. It was a terrible, terrible situation. One of the things I say right now is that my country is an incredibly great country, but it has unbelievably bad faults. One of the faults is that we like wars. Wars make money. If it were up to me, if I had the power, I would cut the D.O.D. budget by 10 percent for several years until I got it back down to at least half of what it is. It should not be the biggest thing we spend money on. We should be spending money on poverty, on health care, all those kinds of things, which makes me a bleeding liberal and I'm living in a very conservative state. You can imagine, there are many things I don't discuss with people. Tomorrow I'm having lunch with my son. We do that every other week, and basically, he's a blue collar worker. He and I are kind of like that on a number of issues, so we have agreed not to discuss them, because he's got to come to his own realization of what's right for him. I can't change his mind, and he's certainly not going to change my mind. Two of my kids are liberal like me. He's moderateconservative, and then I have the daughter who's off the deep end anti-gay, antieverything that's liberal. LR: Okay, so that leads into a question. After you got divorced and were dating and contemplating getting married again, was one of the factors in not coming out how your children would react? LQ: No. LR: No? 33 LQ: No. LR: Okay, would you elaborate on that? I'm just curious what your thinking was. LQ: Well, when J turned 18… I had told my ex-wife that she could live in the house until he was 18, but then she had to sell the house and we had to settle things. My kids by that time had pretty well set their own paths. 18, he's an adult, he's the youngest, so if they hate me, they hate me. That's always a problem with gay folks, some of the ones that I know: their kids won't talk to them because they're still in a church or a mindset that is unaccepting of the ‘gay lifestyle,’ or whatever you want to call it. I think ‘lifestyle’ is a bad word. It's not a lifestyle; that implies choice. But it's a gay life, I guess. Going back for one minute on the country: we're terribly racist, I think. We’re way too religious. If I look at the way the Scandinavian people deal with issues, they're much more open. They deal with poverty and things like that and health care. Many countries have better health care than we have. So as a nation, we have a batch of problems we need to work on. I think religion is a very negative influence on what goes on in this country. Now, if you're religious, you certainly will disagree with me on that and you're welcome to disagree. But I personally think that we need to get over this tribalism that exists in this country that keeps us from being able to accept people who don't fit in our tribe. I mean, we mistreat the Asians. We mistreat the gays. We mistreat the Indians, and Hispanics, and I think a lot of this comes from tribalism. The major tribe in this country has been the white AngloSaxon, and we're just about to become a minority. We're less than 51 percent of the country now, and with the influx in this country and the drop-off in birth rates among the white Anglo-Saxons, the Hispanics, et cetera, are going to become very significant and the country is going to change dramatically. I expect somebody being born now like my grandson, Ethan, who's 26, he's going to see unbelievable 34 changes occurring, just like I have seen some changes occurring. We've made significant strides forward during my lifetime, but we got a long way to go before I really believe that we are out of many, e pluribus unum. LR: Okay, so it's basically 1982-ish, you're dating? LQ: Yeah. LR: You're still working at Edwards. I'm trying to keep my thoughts straight. How long were you single? LQ: I don't know exactly. I think it was around 1985 that I got involved with N, and pretty quickly we became exclusive. I had dated one girl that was four inches taller than me; kissing her was always a problem. One of the secretaries won a cruise for one, and of course, they had to buy the other one if they wanted to go and they didn't want to do that, so she offered it to me because she knew I was single. I met a woman, oddly enough, from Salt Lake on this cruise and we did some dating, et cetera. Then N became enamored of me, and she started an effort to catch my eye. There were several incidents. I was running a group in the lab, which was designed to make people more open and make them feel like they actually were a part of the organization. They could make suggestions and we could take them up to management. After meeting for a period of months, I did a little survey to get their opinion to see whether what we were doing was worthwhile and there was a place you could write in any comment you wanted. I went through, and these were all anonymous, there were no names on them, and I was reading some of the comments. I read one, “Has great buns.” This is all guys but one person, and that happened to be N. Somebody said, “Well, I guess we know who wrote that one.” Somebody else in the group said, “Don't be too sure.” 35 Then on Christmas Eve, I was standing in line waiting for the bus. At that time they were running several buses out to the lab, and I was working in the head shed and that was where the bus stopped. When they let us go at two o'clock, I happened to walk out, so I was in the head of the line, and N was in one of the remote areas where they did testing. She rode a military bus up and then got on a different bus that took her down to the main base bus stop. She got off, she walked up, grabbed me by the lapels, laid a lip lock on me and said, “Merry Christmas,” got back on the bus and disappeared. “Maybe I better pay a little attention to this.” So I called her and it was Christmas, of course, so she was doing other things. It was three days before I got ahold of her, but that's how we started dating. It was very funny because she gave me a signal very quickly in her dating about a behavior habit she had that my kids really strongly disliked. While they put up with her, they did not like her, and I didn't find that out until after we got divorced. She was just being really nasty one time we were heading into Lancaster; she lived in Rosamond and it was like 11 miles to Lancaster and we were driving there. I pulled over to the side of the road and I said, “Look, we can either go into town, have a nice dinner, go to a movie, or I can take you back to Rosamond. What would you like to do?” What that did was that caused her to recognize that she could not play the game with me, so she always treated me well. But she had a quirk that offended people and it offended all of my kids, because she was treating me differently. I never picked up on it. I've always been kind of stupid, uneducated, whatever in interpersonal relationships, so I never picked up because she was always using a different persona on me than she used on others. I think I've mentioned to you earlier, I believe everybody has half a dozen or a dozen personas. 36 So at any rate, we got started. We moved in in 1989 and got married in 1990. We moved in together… I should say she joined me in my condo. LR: All right, so you're still living in the L.A. area then? LQ: No. When I took the job at Edwards, well, I guess you could call it the L.A. area, I was living in Lancaster, Palmdale. In 1964, when I took the job, we moved up to Lancaster and I rented a house, figuring I needed to get familiar with the area before I bought a house in someplace I didn't want to be in. So I'm living in a house, and I sent a rent check in June and it came back, marked ‘Moved’, left no forwarding address—and that was the owner of the house. So I sent a check again in July, figuring this is my proof that I'm paying, et cetera. Near the middle of July, I got a phone call from a guy, says, “How come you're not paying your rent?” I said, “Who are you and why should I pay you rent?” He gave me a name different from the owner. He said, “Well, I own the trailer sales here in town, and the guy came over and signed his mortgage over to me. I gave him a thousand dollars on a trailer, and he took the trailer and left, and I have no idea where he went.” Apparently, he left no forwarding address. So I said to him, “What have I got to do?” He said, “All I want to do is get my thousand bucks out of it. If you pay me a thousand dollars, I'll sign the house over to you.” I said, “You're on,” so I bought my first house for a thousand dollars, plus the existing mortgage. I mean, talk about falling into it and coming out smelling like a rose. LR: No kidding. Wow. LQ: We lived there from 1964 to 1971. LR: Okay. So did you end up moving into a new home in the area? 37 LQ: In 1971, we bought a house. That first house was 1400 square feet, and had three bedrooms. When we left by 1971, I had four kids, so we had the kids stacked up: two girls in one, two boys in another. We bought a 2600 square foot house in a much nicer area, and we kept that till the divorce. Then I lived with the lieutenant for a year, and then he sold the house. He told the new owners that I went with the house. They accepted me for a year and after two years of living there, I bought a condo. Then with N, we bought a house, several houses on the way. LR: And all in the same... LQ: All in the same area, except when I retired from the government, we moved to Palmdale, which was nine miles from Lancaster. LR: Yeah, that makes sense. So because you're working in the rocket industry, how did the Challenger disaster, how did that affect what you did, or your feelings about it? LQ: Well, remember that Challenger was a NASA rocket and I was Air Force. We considered it a total disaster, it was very unfortunate, but we worked with and knew a guy named AMD, and he worked for Thiokol out here at Promontory. When they asked him about flying, he said, “You don't want to do it. We've not tested it under those conditions and so we can't guarantee that it will work.” Well of course it didn't work, and it didn't work because they were outside of the specification area. Schedule ruled, they wanted to keep to the schedule, so they flew anyway and cost nine people their lives, plus many millions of dollars. So it was a tragedy, but it was not a personal tragedy since we were in the development, the research end of the business. That's in the engineering application and. LR: Did the aftermath change in the way that you approached your creation of how you went about... LQ: No, no, not that I know of. It just made us more aware. When you're working in research and development, you are going to have failures. As a matter of fact, 38 failures are important because you begin to understand what you can do and what you can't do. You can learn from failures, but you want to avoid as many failures as you can. When you plan, you want to say, “Okay, in what ways can this fail, and what can we do to prevent that?” So it changes a little bit of the attitude and how you approach your job. LR: Okay. I'm continuing to try to move on. So you got married in 1989. When did you retire from Edwards? LQ: I think August 31, 2008. LR: So out of curiosity, was Edwards ever slated within the BRAC commission to close? LQ: No, way too important. LR: Okay. I wasn't sure. LQ: There were various attacks made on closing the research lab, propulsion lab. There was one guy sent there to close us. The leader of the lab was usually a military person. They would have a military person and then a civilian deputy, because the civilian deputy gave continuity, whereas the military man would come in and be there for two years, three years and leave. When he came in, he had no idea. Many times, the people were completely unfamiliar with how R&D operates. Running R&D in an operational organization is very difficult because in an operational organization, everything goes by the book. You can't do R&D by the book. R&D, by its very nature, is free flowing, and a guy gets an idea and he goes off and does that. You can't do that. It's not in the book. LR: Okay, that makes sense. LQ: So, the guy was unsuccessful in closing the lab. The lab ultimately consolidated; at one point the Air Force had, I think, 13 labs and we were one of them. We were the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Lab, and then in trying to broaden our mission a little, we evolved into the Air Force Astronautics Laboratory. Then they went down to four 39 labs and we became part of what was called Phillips Laboratory. It had jet propulsion and rocket propulsion, a couple of other things, and then they finally condensed down into a single lab and we became a division, and it still exists as a division. AS: Do you mind if I ask a question? LR: No, please. AS: I may be jumping around a little bit, but what do you remember about Stonewall? LQ: You know, at the time, Stonewall didn't mean much to me, but Stonewall is the apex of change occurring in the gay community. I look back now and I think of those guys fighting for three days, beating the crap out of the cops and just standing up and saying, “We're not going to take this shit anymore.” It was the beginning of what I think was the final acceptance of gays that ended up with gay marriage. Now, gay acceptance is different from gay marriage. There are many people in this community who still think being gay is a choice. God, I wish it were, because I never would have been gay if I had a choice. It brought a lot of misery into my life. Looking back, those guys ought to be canonized. They were saints because they really stood up and began the change. Stonewall was 51 years ago. It was 1969, so next July it'll be 53 years. It was phenomenal. But at the time I didn't recognize it because not much changed for the next 10 years. You had to be in the gay community, in a large city to see changes occurring. But for the average gay guy in some town somewhere, not much changed, and certainly people's minds weren't changing. Churches weren't more accepting. I had a gay Episcopal priest come to our booth Saturday, and I chatted with him for about 10 or 15 minutes. Now, that's change, because in 1969 or 1979 or 1989, you never would have had a gay priest or a gay minister admit that he was gay. 40 LR: I am completely drawing a blank. I know what Stonewall is, but I can't remember where it was. LQ: New York City; as a matter of fact, it's a historical place these days. People just want to go by and see it. I mean, I stood on a little dock where Stonewall Jackson stood, or was it Andrew Jackson? LQ: They were both. I don't know if it was Andrew... LR: Who was the president? LQ: Andrew Jackson. LR: Okay, well, he was a war hero. I think he was Stonewall. LQ: Yeah, I think you're right. LR: I would have to check that, I would have to open my encyclopedia [holds up phone]. LQ: But he stood there, or you went down to Monticello, or you go to George Washington's home, etc. and think, “The first president stood here. This is where he changed his clothes, took a bath, etc.” To be going to Stonewall, it's like going to Mecca for a Muslim, it's the same kind of a thing. “This is where it happened.” I'm sure as time goes on, we'll become more and more venerated, because at some point, maybe a hundred years from now, you won't have to come out. It won't make any difference; people won't ask you. You're just another person, another human, and they'll go back and see this, just like I've gone back and, “Oh, here's where the Continental Congress met.” AS: Do you remember any thoughts or opinions that you had when that was happening? LQ: It was inconsequential to me at the time. I had no idea of the significance of what was happening because I've got four kids, I've got a job, and those things are your day-to-day, overwhelming things. In 1969, I was still married so the bigger thing was, “Where are we going to go? Who are we going to visit on vacation?” and stuff like that. I read about it, but I didn't see the impact of it like I saw the impact of John 41 Fitzgerald Kennedy's assassination. I mean, what a loss to this country. Then some idiot takes out Bobby Kennedy, too, and then an idiot kills the guy who shot Kennedy. I mean, talk about a comedy of errors. Keystone Cops. What was that guy doing there with a gun anyway? So I just... it had no impact. Things that had much more impact: the vote on Proposition 8 in California. We had put in black electrical tape on a white garage door, “No On 8,” and somebody came by and tore the tape off. So it just said “No On.” It turned out that the whole Mormon community here put up a lot of money. A friend gave me that and wanted me to watch it. But those things had much more significance to me. We even had a Mormon guy come by and talk to us, trying to convince us to vote for Proposition 8. We got into a vigorous debate with him, and he left in a huff when he realized that we were going to vote against Proposition 8, because he was supporting the church. So things like that had much more significance to me because they were closer; they're in my realm of operation, whereas Stonewall was foreign, completely across the country, and I don't know if these guys are going to have any effect or whatever. I hate to say it, but it was just another event that you read about in the paper. LR: So as you're as you're married to, living with, N, you're still working. That leads into another historical event. Desert Storm occurred in 1991. I don't know if that had any impact on your work specifically, but will you just talk about that for a second? LQ: Yeah. I have a little notebook where I keep things that I want to write down, or if I move into a group, I list all their names there so I can go back and after a meeting and refresh my memory on the names. One of the pithy sayings that I wrote down was, “The GOP fights wars. The Democrats sponsor peace.” I think that's an interesting observation. I'm not going to say it's a truism or anything like that, but it's an interesting observation. It just seems that we got out of World War Two in 1945. 42 In 1952, it was the Korean War, and then it was the Vietnam War. Then it was in the Middle East, it was Afghanistan and then Desert Storm. It just goes on and on and on. I think for the sake of this country, we need to stop that attitude that we are going to help everybody and we're going to make all the world a democracy, because it ain't going to happen. I think the best thing you can do is become this shining city on the hill. The good example. That's one of the things I try to do with my life is be the good example and tell the waitress, “You didn't put my soft drink on the bill.” 9 times out of 10, she said, “Don't worry about it,” but the point is, at least I'm making them aware and I'm happy to pay for the soft drink. Set the example, because I can't make any of my kids behave in whatever manner they're going to want to. But I can set the example, and maybe one day they'll say, “Well, Dad wouldn't do that.” Who knows? LR: What you just said made me think of a question. As you're in your second marriage and your kids don't live with you---or do they? LQ: No. LR: Because they're all older? LQ: Yes. Well, when I moved into the condo, my son moved in with me for a short period of time. He was 18 and my wife had to sell the house, so he lived with me for a while before he got an apartment. He was very enamored of a young lady at that time, and she happens to be living with him now. After all these years, they've gotten back together. She's been married. He's been married. They're both divorced. Now they're living together. LR: Interesting. LQ: You never know what's going to happen. 43 LR: No, you don't. So as you're in this new relationship, you've talked a lot about just being a good person. As you look back, not being honest with yourself and who you were, how do you think that affected your relationships: with your children, with your spouse? LQ: “Practice what you preach,” and I don't and I didn't. I've been involved in a number of groups where we've done what's called ‘philosophy’. For a while, I was going to a meeting with a philosophy group down at the U of U. A friend of mine started a philosophy group of 10 people. We get together once a month, and we're talking the first Thursday in October. We're going to discuss economic dissent and… what's the word, separation? The fact that some people are poor, and the rich are one percent of the people and 99 percent of the wealth. LR: Disparity? LQ: Disparity, thank you. Economic disparity. I've read this book by Amy Barrett Feldman, in which she talks about how our brains operate. I've come to the belief that as we grow up, we are bombarded with stuff from our church, stuff from our parents, stuff from our friends, and all of this is going in there. If you want to talk about free will, we have free will to some extent, but I was so imbued with the idea that being gay was bad that after my first gay experience, when my friend came by and picked me up in the car, and we're driving and he reaches over and puts his hand on my leg. I went like this [puts hand up] with my left hand. That wasn't me thinking, that was my subconscious responding, because there's also this fastbrain/slow-brain idea where the fast brain is the stuff that’s sealed in your brain. It almost becomes intuition, and you behave in a rapid response based on what's there. Slow brain is when you stop and think about things. If I had stopped and thought about it, I would have taken his hand and done this [moves hand] because I wanted to have a sexual relationship, but my brain worked against me. 44 The struggle I'm having now is working against 70 years of crap that has been instilled in my brain. It's been a struggle and I'm getting freer and freer with every experience I have of all different kinds, because you can change what's there, it's just a struggle. It's hard. I think I mentioned I use little cards in which I've written things like “Being with a man is okay.” I want to get that thought buried in here. LR: Okay, like affirmations. LQ: Thank you. That's the word I was hunting for, and at my age, I have trouble finding the words I want. AS: I have a question. LR: Please. AS: Again, I might be jumping back. But what do you remember about the AIDS epidemic? LQ: Oh my god. The AIDS epidemic had me terrified. I had a very few, but I had a few interactions. One of the things was night sweats. So here I am, single, living by myself, and I wake up sweaty and I think, “Oh my God.” So I had to go get tested, but for about a week, I was terrified that I might have AIDS. I'm currently on a drug called Descovy, and Descovy is a drug to keep you from getting AIDS. It's not an inoculation, but by taking this drug, if you do happen to be exposed, it greatly decreases the ability of the virus to lock into your body. What do I remember about it? Unbelievable fear, because it hit so many young, beautiful people and because they were gay, there were people who said, “Well, it's God's retribution for them being gay,” and it was no such thing as that. It was a disease that got transmitted. Unfortunately, a lot of gays practiced certain behaviors that make them prone to share the virus. There are women who get it, and in some countries, it's as prevalent in women as it is among men. So I've been very conscious of it. 45 Soon after I came out, I have a friend that I bought knives and hike with. His lady friend works for the Utah Department of Health, so I told her, “If you can point me to somebody,” because I didn't know who the hell to go to. I suspect my everyday doctor is a Mormon, so if I tell him I'm gay, is that going to affect how he deals with me? I didn't want to approach him and ask. She talked around and somebody gave her a name, and he wrote me a note and said, “If you go down to the U of U Infectious Diseases Department, they'll be able to deal with you.” So I did that. I go there every four months, three times a year—it's either three months or four months—and they take blood. They check for all the diseases. She asks me about what kind of sexual relations I've had with whom. Not names, but what did I do, and did I use appropriate practices to stay clean, and so on? Then based on that, she dictates the tests they run. For the most part, she usually runs a test for every sexual disease, and of course, they check for AIDS. They put me on Descovy and found a way that I don't have to pay for. It costs about 600 bucks a month, which is not much compared to what some people get saddled with. But I take Descovy every day, and I have done that now for probably a year and a half, maybe two years. I'm very conscious of AIDS, and I try to be careful. LR: So when it first became known, it really wasn't called AIDS. It was called GRID. I can't think of what the acronym for GRID is. But as it was first coming out, because you were divorced at the time when it was really becoming known, do you think that you might have been more prepared to come out if it hadn't been for AIDS? LQ: I don't think AIDS affected my coming out. Coming out really wasn't in my mind at that time. All I can say is, looking back, that would have been the ideal time for me to come out because I wouldn't have ruined another woman's life. You know the old thing, “Help me change the things I can change, help me accept the things I can’t change, and give me the wisdom to know the difference.” If I did come out and they 46 wanted to fire me, screw it and get another job. I mean, I had enough credits at that time, so to speak, that I don't think I would have starved to death. It's just a matter of being strong enough to accept it. I was not. I was too weak, and you know I did what I thought was best at the time. I tried to survive. I tried to accept who I was, and if I have to look back and give myself a grade, I probably give myself a flunking grade on being human. But there's a lot of extenuating circumstances over which I had no control. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking with it. LR: I think that's a good place to stop for now. Are you okay with that? LQ: Yeah. Did you want to meet one more time? I'm willing to meet with you as many times as you want till we get done with this. I'm sorry I'm so wordy. LR: No, it is not you. Part 3- October 4, 2021 LR: It is October 4, 2021, and we are doing part three with Larry Quinn in his home. So when we left off, we were talking about the AIDS crisis and your fears and worries associated with that. I'm confused on this and I wanted to get clarification: you made it sound as though you've had a few interactions with men. LQ: Very few. But yes, a few. LR: Okay. That was what I was confused about, because I was under the impression, and this was my assumption, that you didn't have any of those interactions until after you came out. LQ: No, I had some interactions while I was married. Primarily with one individual, and it was very rare that we would get together, maybe once every year, every two years, something like that. Then of course, I was single from 1982 probably till 1985, and then I was pretty heavily dating my second ex-wife. So during that period of time, I had some interaction too. But when the AIDS crisis really came on… I guess the AIDS crisis was more in the 1970s. 47 LR: Well, it was really in the early 1980s. LQ: Yeah, and that was the period of time where, like I said, I was terrified that I might have picked it up because you never know. So little was known about it at that time. So does that give you enough data? LR: So let me just ask you this then. Through those few interactions, was it hard to continue to live in the closet, or was it more of a safety thing that you were... LQ: It was hard to live in the closet all the time, and getting a little taste of what my life should have been like only made it more difficult, but not that much more. You're in a situation and instead of looking at and admiring and loving your wife, you're watching the guy at the next table in the restaurant or the waiter or whatever. It's not fun. It's a terrible place to be. LR: Okay. I really appreciate your willingness to talk about that; it was something I was thinking about, so I appreciate it. So we've literally got to where you are getting married again… LQ: Yes. LR: …to your second wife, and you're still working at Edwards Air Force Base. LQ: Yes. LR: The interesting thing about these interviews is in trying to understand if you have more questions, and yet you don't quite know how to ask the questions, if that makes sense. LQ: Yeah, but do the best you can and we can refine or modify or go along. LR: Okay. I'm curious as to, knowing that in your heart, you really don't want to be with women, is it society that is saying “Get married again” or was it a safety thing? It's hard to comprehend. LQ: The way I view it is in your brain, as you grow up, you begin storing data, and that data comes from your parents; it comes from your schoolmates; it comes from 48 society, neighbors, friends; it comes from television or radio in the early days of life. So you build up in your mind a series of affirmations, I guess you could call them. The primary affirmation in my life was that I could not express my love for males. I had to express females. If I wanted any kind of relationship and not be lonely, then it required a female. Let's face it: as they say, bad breath is better than no breath at all. Dating a woman is better than not having any interaction with another human being at all. My subconscious, and the limit on my free will, is buried in my brain and it comes from multiple sources. One of the difficulties I've had once I came out was I had to go back in and reaffirm some of the ideas planted in my mind. I wrote affirmations like, “It's okay to love a guy, it's okay to kiss a male,” things like that because in my brain there was guilt that came from the affirmation. “You only have sex with a woman.” So I've been out now for three years in December, and during that period of time, I have managed to reaffirm and not be actually shaking when I'm doing something with a male; not being scared, frightened, worried about getting caught. So I think all of this comes from the fact that when you are growing up, you gather a whole series of affirmations that tell you how to live. You're not supposed to walk across the grass, you walk on the sidewalks, you stop at stop signs. You don't drive when you're drinking. There's literally tens, if not hundreds of thousands of affirmations that are situated in your mind, some stronger than others; I mean, walking across the grass, I can do that if I want, but I generally don't, because one of the things I was taught was you can play on the grass, but you don't make additional paths on the grass. So you've got this collection of affirmations about who you interact with and how you interact with them. There are some people who only have missionary-style sex and would never think of anything else: my mother, for example, who was raised by her Victorian- 49 moraled grandmother, and she didn't even know what French kissing was. I don't know how you feel about sticking your tongue in someone else's mouth, but it's quite commonly done, and yet you might have an affirmation that says, like my mother did, “That's a disgusting thing,” and you don't do that. The struggle is with yourself, primarily. Let's face it, when I came out, if you subtract 15 years from my age, I had 70 years of living with one set of affirmations, and I had to begin to try to change those. So, why did I marry a second time? For the same damn reason I married the first time. It was what you did. Looking back, that would have been the ideal time to come out. My concern about clearances and that was much lessened because there are many gays who aren't out of the closet, but they're practicing gays. They may even live with another man. They may have another man who lives a few doors away. I could have done that, and could have done it successfully. You learn to be a wonderful actor because you act like you're heterosexual. As a matter of fact, I've had at least one friend of N's who said to us, “I would hope that I could find a love like yours someday.” That's how skilled I was. LR: Hmm. That's impressive. So by 1990, when you married, are you saying it was more commonplace for men to be more out? I don't mean just men, but for gays in general; that sounds terrible. LQ: No, go ahead. LR: For gays in general to be out? LQ: Well, it was becoming more acceptable. I mean, in 1969, the reformation began with Stonewall, so by 1990, there were people who were gay, a few people were coming out. No sports stars had come out. Even now, it's rare when a sports star comes out. I have to believe that if you have a team of 50 people, there's probably five gays on that team. It might be two, it might be 10, but a number to pick would 50 be five. They're well closeted because it's not masculine, it's not macho to be gay. The same thing is true at work. When you're dealing with people, it was and still is not macho, but nonetheless, I think it could have worked at that time, and it would have changed my life dramatically. LR: Okay. You also mentioned last time that your kids and your second wife really didn't get along well. LQ: I didn't find that out until afterwards. LR: Okay, so she was a good actress as well. LQ: Well, it's very funny. I think it was our second or third date, and I might have told you this; she lived in Rosamond, which was 11 miles north of Lancaster, and I would drive up there, pick her up. We'd go back down to Lancaster because that's where the restaurants and the movies and things were. I'm driving her down and she's being a total bitch and just being nasty. I pulled the car over and I said, “Look.” LR: You did, I remembered now. LQ: So she began to recognize that she could not be that way with me. She and I got along reasonably well, but she was acting, too. My son told me he spent a good bit of the morning baking bread for us, for a dinner we were having at his house. I think she said something, “Oh, you burned it on the bottom.” Not, “God, it smells delicious. I can't wait to taste it,” or something. “Oh, you burned it on the bottom.” It pissed him off so much he never, ever thought of making bread for her again. But it was that kind of a thing. I didn't pick up on that. I didn't realize until after I came out and whoosh, she disappeared, that there was a strong dislike from my kids. LR: Did they come around a lot, because they were all older? 51 LQ: Well, we had reasonable visits, yes. There was one woman I dated that we got to a point, she said, “Well where are we going with this relationship? Are we going to get married or are we just going to date? Are we going to stop? What's the deal?” I said, “Well, I think we're going to stop.” The reason was she actively disliked children; not just my kids, any kids. I figured if I carried on a relationship with her, I'd have a very difficult time seeing my kids. At least with N, I could get together with my kids, but they were not keen about it. LR: You retired, and I think you said 2008. 2002? LQ: From the government, right, and then worked six more years and retired in 2008 from the second. I worked for a contractor from 2002 to 2008. LR: Okay, so you had more than 20 years with Edwards. LQ: I had 38 years with Edwards, and six more with Aerojet. LR: Let's see. In 2002, you still had your security clearance then? LQ: Oh, yes. LR: You were working with Aerojet. LQ: Yes. LR: Okay, I know I'm jumping ahead. I'm forgetting all about the 90s. Is there any moment, any particular time in the 90s that stands out in your mind as a memory, or as something that even was, “I should come out now,” or “Why am I doing this?” Does my question make sense? LQ: Yes. I understand your question, and the answer is no. Even in 2018, I had not anticipated coming out. I had tried to come to some agreement with my wife where I would do something like go to Vegas, have a sexual interaction with a male, say, four times a year, but remain married to her. I've always treated her well; we went on some incredible vacations. I took care of her through all her knee replacements and broken leg and all the health problems that she had. One of the most difficult 52 times I had was trying to push a wheelchair over cobblestones in England. Not easy. So while I mentioned a couple of the gifts that she gave me—and she always gave me nice gifts, [points to clock] she gave me that clock, for example. That was a birthday present. I tried to be a high-quality husband, and to some extent, I succeeded because that one lady said that she would like to have a love relationship like N and I had, but it was acting to some extent. I can't say I didn't love N. I loved her at some level, but not the level at which I think a woman should be loved because I don't love women. I love men. I'm sorry, not much I could do about it. LR: Did you actually have an agreement with N that you would go to Vegas four times? LQ: No, no, no. That was an option I raised, so we could stay together. LR: Oh, so this was after you came out? LQ: Well, actually it was in the last year or two. It was very clear that if I was going to ever have any relationship with a male, it had to be soon, because time's running out. When am I going to die: another five years, 10 years? I have no idea, but I know it's going to be much sooner than her. She was 15 years younger than me, so I was trying to work out something whereby we could maintain the relationship; we could keep traveling and doing things we loved to go out and eat. We went to concerts and movies and we could keep doing all of these things and I could show her some level of appreciation, love, whatever you want to call it. But it was clear that the relationship was starting to break down in the last, say, three, four years. That's probably why when my daughter looked me in the eye and said, “Dad, are you gay?” I said yes just immediately. No hesitation. LR: Before we get there, let's rewind. One thing that I have asked everyone that we've interviewed for this is how they felt on 9/11, and how that affected them, so I'm going to ask you the same question. 53 LQ: I was in a hotel in Tokyo, Japan and it was midnight for us of 9/12. LR: Okay. Yeah, it would have been the next day. LQ: Yeah, and I'm sleeping in this Japanese hotel room and unless you pay a lot of money are very small. I'm in there sleeping because eight o'clock here was midnight there and I had gone to bed. I don't know, 10 o'clock, probably, and there's a pounding on my door, so I get up. This guy bursts into my room—I knew him, of course—and rushed to the TV, turned the TV on, picked the right channel and here's 9/11 occurring. There was not much that I could do, and I had a meeting with the Japanese cohort. We had a joint program with them at eight o'clock the next morning, so I had to get some sleep, so I turned the TV off after watching for 15 minutes or so and went back to sleep. The Japanese contacted me the next morning and said, “Do you still want to go ahead with the meeting?” I said, “Yes, that's why we're here. There is no reason that I can see why we should not continue working. That's a problem back there. I can have no influence on it one way or another. Even if I were back here, I could have no influence on it. It's just something that all I can do is watch it unfold.” And so we went ahead. We had the meeting and of course, we were supposed to fly out the day after that, so I guess it would have been 9/13 and we couldn't fly out. There were no planes allowed to enter U.S. airspace, so I had three extra days in Tokyo. No meetings with the Japanese or anything, so we just wandered around Tokyo and saw this, that, and the other thing. Finally got on a plane, landed at LAX and LAX was empty. I've never seen LAX that it wasn't up to their ears in people. It was just our plane, load of people going through customs, et cetera, and renting a car. I don't remember whether I rented a car or whether I had parked my car down there; 54 usually parked my car, so probably did that. Went on home and then went to work the next day. I tend to be more of a Stoic than many people, so you can hit me with something that many people would get very emotional over, and while I might actually feel the need to shed a few tears, after that's over, the question is, “What are we going to do?” The answer is, “I can't do anything. Life's going to go on just normally for me,” so I did not get totally wrapped up in an emotional response to the attacks. I had to say that was a masterful stroke, a genius stroke by Bin Laden and his followers; it was incredible because it caught us with our pants down. We had apparently no idea it was coming and they were going to attack four places: two towers, the Pentagon, and then we don't know where the fourth plane was going. Probably the White House or the Capitol, something like that. Who knows? I was very interested, but for me, it was not an emotional thing. It was, “How are we going to deal with this? How are we going to retaliate? How are we going to keep something from happening again?” I view it more analytically and logically than I viewed it emotionally. Some people were enraged; they wanted to grab a Middle Eastern person and rip them to pieces, sic their dog on them, whatever, shoot them. I don't respond to things that way. Does that answer your question? LR: Did your job at all change as a result of the... LQ: The content of the job, no. Getting on base became more difficult; there were many things like that that changed. Trying to have meetings, you had to regulate people who came into the meeting. We always had to show clearances and stuff to go to classified meetings, but it just became much more closeted and much more difficult to get groups of people together, as you'd might expect. Because where else had 55 they infiltrated, were they going to do other things, and where are they going to set off bombs? So I go down to Los Angeles. What the heck was it called… Space Command, I guess. You go down there and very highly regulated, getting in, because that would be an ideal place for them to infiltrate and set off a bomb or whatever. So now your briefcases were getting examined and all this kind of stuff, but nothing that changed the content of the job. LR: Okay. When you retired in 2002, did you already have the contractor job lined up, so it was just a smooth transition over? LQ: My intent was to work for the maximum number of years. Every year you worked you got a percentage more in retirement income, and my intent was to max that out. One of the guys there that knew me said, “You really need to call Aerojet and talk to them. They're looking for somebody.” I kind of just blew that off, and a couple of months later, he said, “Have you talked to Aerojet yet?” I said, “No.” He said, “You really need to.” So I called Aerojet and they invited me up for an interview and I interviewed and they made me a job offer that I couldn't refuse. Now I'm getting this very nice salary, plus very nice retirement, so we're up to our yin-yang in money. We could afford very nice trips, and we built a new house and moved to Palmdale during that period of time. So what was your question again? LR: I honestly don't remember. I was so busy listening to you. I think you answered it. LQ: You asked about my retiring. LR: Oh yes, right. The transitioning over to Aerojet. LQ: Yeah, so I retired and one week later was working for Aerojet out of my home. I had an office in my home. I was their Southern California representative, primarily 56 dealing with the lab. I would go out to the lab and find out what proposals they were going to ask for, what contracts they were going to try to get that Aerojet might be interested in, and feed that information back. I would try to advise Aerojet on, “Here's how you need to respond to this,” because I understood the lab and I was getting to understand the Aerojet intentions. So it was a very quick switch from retiring to beginning at Aerojet. LR: So you work for them for six years? LQ: Yes. LR: 2008 is the housing crisis and the financial crises that happened. So as you are retiring, all of this is happening economically. How did that affect you? LQ: Oh, that had a rather dramatic effect. When I bought the house, I paid $100 a square foot. Before the housing crash, it was like something like $220 a square foot. After the crash, it was $80 a square foot now in 2009. 2008 we made the decision to move up here, and we would come up here every month and look at houses. A friend of my daughter's was a real estate person and he would take us around. He had five or six places to look at it. The standard house was not what we were used to. We had an unbelievably huge bedroom in the house in Palmdale. It was twice the size of this room. Then we had three other bedrooms, and I had an office downstairs, and we had a living room, a formal dining room, a kitchen and then an exercise room. It was a large house. When we came up here, we finally decided the only way we would get what we wanted, anything close, was to build it. So we started building this and then we were coming up here once every month to check on what was going on with the building. The decision had to be made on what to do about the house in Palmdale. I would have lost about $100,000 if I had sold it. In other words, I had paid $100,000 more for the house than I could get in 2009, so we decided not to sell, and we 57 rented that house with one guy not too successfully. He didn't do a very good job. We finally replaced him and rented it out, and we didn't sell it, I think, until 2016 or ‘17? We're going to say 2016; I would have to actually look up and see. The market finally recovered and got to a point where I could break even, and by the time I sold it, I actually made a little bit of money on it. But we had all the struggles with being an absentee landlord. I get a phone call that the garbage disposal went out and I have to call a plumber and get a plumber over there, and it's not easy when you live in the same town, it's more difficult when you're four hundred miles away. But we did that and went through with it, and we finally sold it as is. No changes, didn't have to replace carpeting, anything. They really wanted the house and frankly, it was the best of all. We had five or six houses over the duration of my marriage and many of those were with N. That was the nicest one. This is an okay one, but not as nice as the one in Palmdale. We finally got rid of that and banked a little bit of extra money, but we were glad to sell it to somebody who wanted it without having to do anything, and it made it very easy. We had a very good real estate agent there too. LR: Why Utah? What brought you guys here? LQ: My daughter lives over in Shadow Valley. She never got to know her grandfather. My father died in 1960 before I married anybody, so she didn't know her grandfather. Her other grandfather was back in Michigan, so we got to see them once a year, once every two years, that kind of thing. She wanted her kids to know her grandfather because her grandfather back there had passed away while I was married to CB, so she's pressuring me to move up here. N, god knows why, she was pressuring me to move up here, and with two women beating on you… Basically, I didn't have strong ties. We had friends there, which we didn't care to 58 give up, but all our kids had moved away. We decided to move up here, responding primarily to my daughter's clarion call of, “I want my kids to know their grandfather.” I have a very good relationship with the boys. I meet every other Tuesday and have lunch with my son. We were going down to his house for dinner every other week before COVID and his boys would be there, and he would also invite L's boys, so sometimes there was half a family reunion going on. There'd be one of the kids and half of the grandkids. I still meet with him. We have a Zoom call every two weeks with my son in Boise and my daughter in Chandler. They kept the house up on Mohawk off of Shadow Valley, and they're going to refurbish the house. They want to enlarge the kitchen, more cupboards and do all kinds of things, so they asked me if they could move in here with me while that's being done. That will speed up the process because then the basement and the first floor can be done simultaneously, where if they're living in the basement while the first floor is being done and then vice versa, it slows things down. I said, “Of course, why not?” This probably won't happen until sometime after January. It could be March or whatever, but they would move in the basement and live there, and then we would share the kitchen. My daughter is still going to be working, so she would have an office just like I had an office down there. They would bring some of their furniture because CB took the guest room furniture with her when she left. So she's talking about that, and it'll be nice having somebody, even if it's only for six months. On the other hand, if I am having a relationship, it will make that more difficult, so we'll see how it plays out. At this point, I don't have a relationship. I am dating. I usually interact with somebody about once a week, but most of those aren't going anywhere. I haven't met a guy that I think, “Man, I could really live with this guy.” That has not happened yet, but I view it as simply a matter of probability. If you're not much past college 59 age and you're on campus, there's thousands of young men there, half of which at Weber are married. Nonetheless, there's a huge field for you to pick from. I don't know, maybe you're married already. You are? Okay, but it's a different situation for somebody when you're in college because, literally thousands of people to choose from, whereas I have to struggle to find somebody who is free and who does not have health problems out the ying-yang. I'm still active, I hike, I go to concerts, I've been kayaking a couple of times recently. I want somebody who can do those kinds of things too. Although if I found the right guy, I would go ahead and accept somebody who has lesser physical capabilities because I wouldn't want to throw away the opportunity. But I view it as simply a matter of probability. If I meet enough guys somewhere along the line, I may find one that I can have a relationship with, who the hell knows? LR: So moving here, and you've always lived here since you moved here? LQ: We built this house and moved into it. I've been here ever since. LR: So moving here to Utah. It's quite a different culture than- LQ: Oh my God. It's cheaper. LR: Yes, it is cheaper. LQ: Coming from Southern California, it's much cheaper, which makes my retirement very comfortable for me. Even with the amount that I have to share with N, I have three sources of income. Two of them, she gets nothing from; one of them, she gets about a quarter of it. So I do have to share that, but I still have a reasonable income. LR: Okay. So there's the living difference. What other cultural differences did you notice when you moved here? LQ: Well, you know, the immediate thing is the neighbors start to feel you out. They come in the front door, they look for the picture of Joseph Smith or the picture of the 60 temple, and you don't find those in my house, so they very rapidly find out that I am not Mormon and I'm not interested in being Mormon. There's cultural differences, and to find people that I'm comparable with, I'm comfortable with. I play cards with the couple across the street and the guy next door. None of them are very religious. The people next door this way have two boys, one of whom happens to be gay, which surprised me. I only found that out when they put a gay pride flag out during Gay Pride Week back in June, but most of the other neighbors, I put a gay pride flag out about once a month and nobody has torn it down or set it on fire or anything. But the culture is different. I found a group that meets probably one to three on Sundays. We call it Unday School, and it's all atheists or agnostics and I have formed a lot of relationships from that. I met one young man who was trying to make a living by playing the violin. He's a very accomplished violinist. Not good enough to play for the Utah Symphony, but pretty darn good. I am still friends with him. As a matter of fact, he got married after I met him. We've done some hiking together. I hiked with him earlier this year, he and his wife, and I'm going to their baby shower later this month. He is not Mormon, although a lot of his relatives are. I met a cop and he was Catholic, but he's not religious anymore, so I've met a number of people that way. Right now, I'm not going to that because I'm so tied up with this class I'm taking at Weber. I have a paper due tomorrow that I've got to work on today, but I've met a group of people there and then through them, I have met other folks. Once I came out, I got associated with the Utah Pride Center. I went down there and met a guy and he and I have interacted. Not a lot, but maybe once a month, once every two months, something like that, we still get together. I need to call him and ask when he's coming up again. I just haven't gotten around to it because I've been so busy with other stuff. But I got into the Utah Pride Center and 61 through them, now I'm running a SAGE group up here and we're having a picnic this Saturday, for example. It's going to be kind of cool, it’ll be in the 50s, I think. I've started a walking group and I started a movie group, so I've been very active with the Pride Center, and they love the fact that I was willing to try to get some things started here. I went up and ran a booth at the Logan Pride Festival because they're trying to get a SAGE group started there. SAGE is something like Support and Advocacy for Gay Elders. Many of the people that I have interacted with through SAGE, through the Pride Center, through people I've met through different groups there that I've been with, their partners have died and they're alone. There are a number of them, live with another family member. Several I know live in the basement and their sisters live upstairs, and their sister may be married or may not be married. One guy, his sister is gay also, so they're just by themselves, but they have a meal together now and then and interact. So I've gotten to know quite a few more people in the gay community now, but it's taken me a while to adjust. First of all, I had to redo stuff up here [points to head] and I've made great strides in that. A lot of gays want to hook up and they go on to something like Grindr and they get together with the guy for an hour, take care of things, and that's it. I'm not interested in that. I'm looking for somebody that I can go to movies, go to shows. As a matter of fact, Saturday night, a gay couple that I know, I met the guy through the Unday School, they came up on the train. We went to see Shang-Chi and then got some ice cream and they went home. They're talking about getting together and going to the Eccles to see Book of Mormon, and there's another movie coming out, I don't remember what it was, but getting together on a more regular basis. I'm really much more firmly fixed in the gay community now. 62 I just don't tell people if they don't need to know, like the neighbors next door. She wrote me a note and said, “Thank you for all you do for the gay community,” but I think she thinks I'm an ally. I don't think she recognizes that I'm gay. I'll probably tell her someday because I know she can handle it, since she has a gay son and they spend a lot of time with their gay son. He's in school down… what's it called now? Utah Technological College or something. Used to be Dixie State. It's the new name for Dixie State, whatever that is. So they go down there at least once a month and stay over the weekend and interact with him, which I think is wonderful, because I remember what it was like when I was young and his age and in college, how difficult it was. So that's great. We had a little meet and greet, the HOA or somebody provided ice cream, and we all got together in the little park down here that you passed coming in. There's probably 30, 40 people there, different neighbors, and we got to chat with them. Most of the people don't know I'm gay, and there's no reason for them to need to know. Someday, it won't make any difference. But it still makes a difference. LR: Okay, you spent almost 10 years… well, not quite, because you moved here in 2009, right? LQ: Yes. That'll be 12 years at the end of this month. LR: You mentioned that your daughter one day, point blank, asked you. LQ: Yes. LR: Was there something leading up to that? LQ: Well, my son and daughter and I were having a once-a-month luncheon down in Salt Lake because she worked in Salt Lake. She still works for the same company, but she works from home in Chandler because her husband got an opportunity with his company to work there for three years. But he's retiring, so they're all coming 63 back here. But she and my son, J and I were having luncheons together. So we're at this lunch at the… what's the red-something Mexican restaurant? LR: Red Iguana? LQ: Yeah, it's the Blue Iguana. LR: Oh, the blue one. Okay, they're both good. LQ: Yeah, the Blue Iguana is right downtown; the Red Iguana, it's a little bit west. So we're sitting there and we're eating, and suddenly she just looks me straight in the eye and says, “Dad, are you gay?” I took a breath and said, “Yes, what prompted that?” She said, “Well, we saw something on your computer.” Now, for years, I have watched porn; N knew I watched gay porn. That's why her emotional response to my coming out, frankly, surprised me, because knowing before we got married that I had a male inclination and then walking in on me while I'm watching porn, why was my coming out a surprise to her? She's far from being a Stoic. If I was heterosexual and I was still a Stoic and my son said, “Dad, I'm gay,” I would have said, “Okay, well, do we need to talk about it or what?” Because I wouldn't get emotional over it. She just… it was like a volcano going off, and she slammed that door so hard I thought it was going to come right through the frame. That was December 7. March 22 she was gone. April 5 I was divorced. It was that fast and it was totally emotional on her part. She never sat down and said, “Okay, what does this mean? Do we want to maintain our relationship?” No, at that point, when I told her that, it was over. Like I said, I don't get emotional over things because you never solve problems emotionally. You only solve problems logically. I've had many people challenge me on that and I still have the same comment. When you can bring me 64 an incident where you solved a problem emotionally, then I will change what I'm saying, but I said I have yet to find anybody who can give me an instance of solving a problem emotionally. Usually, an emotional thing creates more problems rather than solving any. As far as I know, she took the whole thing totally emotionally. Our last interaction she never even responded to, so we really have no reason to contact each other anymore. We had a box of papers for her cousin, M, that we took care of until she passed away when she lost her partner. She was gay, but if you call her a lesbian, she ripped you a new one. Nonetheless, I went through and was throwing out stuff, because M has been dead for five years now, and I came about some birth certificates and some stuff that I don't think should be destroyed; it ought to be passed down in the family. So I had talked to N, and she said, yes, she wanted those. So I packaged them up, sent them to her. Never even got a thank you or anything from her. I finally wrote a note the other day and said, “Did you ever get that package of stuff from M?” She said, “Yes, thank you.” So, we're even at the point now where there's no reason to communicate anymore. LR: So you have this interaction with your children. Obviously, your daughter, L, is the one who asked you correct? LQ: Yes. LR: She was all okay with it, or was she the one that…? LQ: No. She's okay, J is okay. J walked in the Pride Parade with me. We were having dinner down at his house, his kids were there and he looked up at me, he was cutting the meat or something, he looked up at me and said, “Would you like me to walk with you?” I said, “Yeah, that would be nice.” 65 My grandson turned to his father and said, “You realize they'll think you're a couple.” My son said, “Yeah, so?” So he doesn't have a problem with it. My son in Boise… Well, let me preface that L has a Christmas here one year, and Christmas over at her husband's family the next year, and then back here again. This is a year when L is going to be over there, and it's unknown what I'm going to do. My son from Boise invited me to come up there for a few days. Now they're still working, he and his wife. He retired from the fire department, and he now works at the same place where his wife works. He said, “Why don't you come up for three days or so,” because they're not going to take off any additional time. They're just going to have those three days and they'll have their son down. They have only one child. He also knows, and the grandchildren of three of my kids know, but he's okay with it. All the grandkids of those three are okay with it. My other two are okay with it. The daughter that lives in Georgia, she married a Southern Baptist and they went to the Southern Baptist Church for a long time. Now they go to what I call a Bible church. It's kind of an independent church, but they believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. So shortly after all this folderol with coming out, I sat at the table here and told my son-in-law that I was gay and he never even batted an eye. Nothing in my relationships with my children or their spouses has changed. They're all very reasonable, open, accepting, etc. Before I said anything to my daughter, because she's always given me hints that she's anti-gay, etc., I said to her, “Tell me a little bit about your church, tell me what the precepts are that you go by.” She said, “Well, first of all, we don't accept gays.” I said, “Oh, okay.” 66 Then she said, “We believe in the inerrancy of the Bible.” So based on that, I have not said anything to her. She will, of course, at some point find out, even if it's only when they're up here divvying up what's left of the material goods I have. I'm sure it will become abundantly clear, and she'll have to deal with it then. LR: So she's your only child that you haven't come out to? LQ: Correct. LR: And it is more for her benefit or is that... LQ: I'm afraid if I come out to her, she will break off the relationship. LR: Oh, okay. So it's kind of a mutual thing. LQ: Well, I would prefer to keep up the relationship. Now she's estranged from all her siblings. They don't talk. They don't interact. They don't visit because she's deeply religious and she stuffed it down their throat. “J, if you don't change the way you're acting, you're going to go to hell.” J says, “Why do I want to have somebody to my house who is going to give me all this crap about my lifestyle?” There's nothing wrong with J’s lifestyle, except that it does not involve religion. None of my kids go to church or are religious. They might be spiritual, I don't know. I've never exercised that with them, but they are so tired of her. She has two faults that really grind. One is, any time you talk with her, at least 50 percent of the discussion will be about her physical capabilities and her medicines and her ills and her doctors and her pills and all this kind of stuff, because she had a problem when she was born. The other one is religion. So when she and I talk, we don't talk religion; we don't talk politics. I believe she's a Trump supporter. If she starts discussing anything in either of those fields, I'll say, “I don't want to discuss that. Let's just drop that,” and she will, because I want to keep up 67 the relationship with her. She's still my daughter, and I'm afraid if I tell her, that'll be the last time she'll ever talk to me or be willing to have me come visit. LR: That makes sense. LQ: Yeah. The last time I was down there was for her daughter's wedding. That was three years ago. They were supposed to come here last year, but COVID cut that off, and we haven't done anything this year. LR: So before we wrap up for today, because it's already almost been an hour and a half, I wanted to ask, when was this lunch with your children, when you came out to them? How soon after that did you then come out to your wife, and why did you choose to do that? LQ: I came out the same day. LR: Okay, and that was December 7th? LQ: Yes. I said to her, “L asked me if I was gay today and I told her yes.” She got up from the table. I think we were sitting at the table, went through and slammed the door. LR: So you never talked about it? LQ: There was no discussion. It was over instantaneously at that point. LR: So you have no idea what her thought process was? LQ: [Shakes head] Like I said, it was an emotional response. LR: Very much so. [To Alexis] Do you have any questions? AS: I definitely do, yeah. I'm kind of interested in how you keep saying that you are a stoic person, that for you, you kind of keep your emotions… you don’t have emotional responses, basically. Do you feel like that's a product of having to be in the closet for so many years? LQ: Ah, now that's a very interesting question. When I go back and look at my life, it's dominated by a couple of factors. One of the factors is being gay and in the closet. 68 Another factor is having a science background. You probably don't know, but I have a doctorate in chemistry, so a lot of science. I tend to view everything logically, and I didn't realize that I was a Stoic until one day I ran across something and I thought, “Holy cow, that's a description of me.” Now I get a Stoic blessing comment or something every day. I have bought into their four precepts and things like that, but I had most of them before I realized I was a Stoic. I think being a scientist, viewing problems logically, I would come home and either of my wives would be very distraught over this, that, or the other thing. “There's a leak under the sink. The furnace isn't working, the pipe broke, whatever.” I would say “It's just a problem, calm down, relax. We'll figure it out. We'll address it and deal with it.” I've always done that because that's the way you deal in science. You have a problem, how are you going to deal with it? Well, first of all, you try to decide what the problem is, and then if I know what the problem is, what are all the different facets of it? You just start working through it methodically. When you lead that kind of a life, you end up being a Stoic and I had never realized it. So it came to me as a surprise. So what was your question again? AS: Yeah. I was just wondering if being a Stoic is also partly a reaction to having been in the closet for most of your life? LQ: No, I don't think that. I think it's a product of my being a scientist or having a science background because I'll go to Unday School and we have one guy there who listens to a lot of podcasts, watches a lot of things, and he'll make a statement. “50 percent of the people do this.” I'll say, “What data do you have?” He will say, “Well, somebody on this show…” I said, “No, no, no, no, no. Not what somebody said. What data do you have? Is there a poll? Did some social scientist write a paper? What's the data?” It tends to 69 piss him off, but the point is, that's how I view life. I watch a lot of CNN because I think CNN gives a reasonably rational view. Yes, it's to the left of center to some extent, but I think it does a good job. They'll have a Republican congressman on and talk with him and at the same time, a Democratic congressman. So you kind of get a little bit of both sides. But I'm interested in what the data is. What do the polls say? It was very clear when the election was held that Biden won. It just kept coming up that way again and again and again. How could you say that, “Well, it was rigged.” Where's the data? They've never, ever produced any data. They had 50 lawsuits. All of them got thrown out of court because there was no data. They couldn't back any of their accusations up. So I tend to run my whole life that way. I don't think it was being in the closet. Being in the closet has its problems, but the biggest problem is an internal problem of, “Why can't I be me? Why do I have to get an Oscar for pretending, for behavior, for acting out heterosexuality?” LR: So the last question for today is when you finally came out to the majority of your family, how did you feel? LQ: Scared at first, even though I think I know my kids. These are issues you don't ordinarily discuss. The assumptions made, everyone is heterosexual. That's a social assumption. Like it or not, that's the assumption everybody that meets you, assumes you are heterosexual. When they start learning things about you, they may begin to change their mind. There's a lot of people that you meet that run the full gamut from flaming homosexuality to, “Oh my god, I can't believe he's gay,” so you have that whole thing in between. I was on the far right side in the persona that I presented, but it's painful because I don't want to be there. I want to be over here. I don't want to be a flaming homosexual, but I want to be somewhere in the middle, and I want to be able to date a guy and interact with the guy and hopefully love a 70 guy. Seventy years of closet. Almost unbelievable. I was damn good at it. I'm sure some people suspected, but you can fool most of them. LR: I think this is a good place to stop for today. LQ: Okay. Part 4- October 18, 2021 LR: So today is the 18th of October and we are again with Larry in his home in South Ogden. We're just going to pick up where we left off. I just thought of this question this morning as I was getting ready, but you mentioned that your wife never said a word to you about your declaration of being gay? LQ: Yeah, we never discussed it. LR: You never discussed it. LQ: There was no attempt at conciliation or negotiation or anything like that. It was a step function in, “I'm out of here.” LR: My question is, how do you think in retrospect—because I know you really can't honestly know. But do you think things could have been more amicable, or even more friendly, if you'd have been able to talk with her and explain your side? LQ: That's a really good question. We had actually been doing some discussions. I think I mentioned that I was looking for a way to give me more freedom, but stay in the marriage by going to Vegas and spending a weekend with one or more guys a few times a year. We had done a little bit of discussion of this, and that may have set the stage for her, because she never gave me any hint that she was willing to cut any slack whatsoever. She was not willing to compromise or negotiate, and I tend to be insensitive to what's going on in other people's minds. There are people I know that pick up on other people's moods and things like that much better than I do. That's probably one of the things that's tucked in my subconscious that I ought to get work on, improve my ability to communicate and interact with other people. 71 I think that when I came home and told her that I had told L I was gay, that was like the last straw on the camel's back. There was no opportunity whatsoever to change anything from that point on. Her mind was made up. If there was an opportunity earlier to do any compromise or negotiation, I was not successful in drawing that out of her. So I think all along, she saw this coming, and she had already made up her mind. LR: Okay. That actually makes a little bit more sense. Thank you for the context. AK: I'm just curious, would you have wanted to stay in the marriage, knowing that you were gay? LQ: That's a good question. Life occurs one step at a time. My next step would have been to try and stay in the marriage and have some gay interactions, but that's fraught with problems. What happens if I meet a guy that I then become enamored of or deeply interested in and want to date a lot? Now I've got another step to take. So what I wanted to try to do was take one step and see where that would lead, but I never had that opportunity. LR: So technically, she knew you were gay, but she was angry that you came out? Is that kind of what had happened? LQ: You know, I don't know exactly how she felt. I have talked to my kids and she was okay with me being gay as long as I was closeted. But once I came out, she apparently took that as a reflection on her, and so she could not deal with being married to someone who was out and gay. I mean, what do you do in parties or social gatherings or what have you? If a guy shows up at the door and says, “I met you at such and such, and I was hoping I could get to talk with you a little bit?” There's all kinds of trauma that you could dream up that might occur. I think she took my being out as a reflection on her choice, and she was unwilling to deal with it. Well, no that's not true. She dealt with it by cleaving the relationship. 72 LR: You mentioned that this happened in December, and by… is it March or April? LQ: March she left, April I got divorced. She left on March 22, and April 5, so that's five and eight; 13. That's two weeks. LR: Okay, I thought she left in December when you initially told her. LQ: No, she immediately started the process. She found a divorce planner, not a lawyer. The divorce planner, you go to him, you identify all your assets, and he finds a reasonable way to split these up so that everybody gets the ratio you've assumed. Our ratio was 50/50, so he came up with the plan. “Here's what to do.” All we had to do then was hire a lawyer to draw up the divorce papers using that model that he had given us. Then the lawyer takes that to the judge, the judge rubber stamps it— assuming it's not unreasonable, illegal, immoral or fattening, is an expression I like to use. It was none of those, so he approved it, and that happened. His approval was on the fifth. LR: Wow, that's really quick. LQ: Yes. LR: So obviously, you kept your home. LQ: Well, I had to buy her share of the home. That was, that's one of the things that the divorce planner does. He says, “Okay, you want to buy her share in the home.” I figure her share is $200,000, let's say, so then you'll have to give up $200,000 of the stocks and bonds that we have to equal things, because you're getting $200,000 worth it. He goes through all this stuff and comes up with a plan. Basically, the plan says I will give her a check for $200,000, and she will sign off on the house to me. I had to remortgage it because otherwise, if her name is on the mortgage, she still has a claim. Then we had to go to our financial advisor and split the stocks and bonds, the life insurance; she gave me all the furniture in the house valued at cost, which turned out to be a very negative thing because I can't get 73 anything close to cost. The dining room set that used to be here was worth $15,000. A table, six chairs, a China cabinet and an armoire. I'll be lucky if I get $2,000 out of that, so that turned out to be an unfair settlement on my part. But it's what I agreed to, so I screwed myself. Did I answer your question? LR: Yes. I don't remember what my question was now, though, which is sad. I don't have it written down, so it was just one of those at the top of my head. I'm curious, now that you're single, you're out, I can't imagine you just all of a sudden went, “Okay, I'm free,” because you've never been out before, and you're eighty-three-ish at the time. LQ: Four, probably. LR: Eighty-four. So now you're looking at a life that you've always wanted, but never dared even contemplate. The question is, how did you move forward? What was your next step? LQ: Well, I had suddenly been thrust into a world that I knew nothing about. I have come to learn that gays operate in a number of different modes. One mode is, all you do is have as many sexual interactions as you can and you don't look for a partner. If a partner happens, that's fine. I talked to one guy and I said, “How many men do you think you've been with? You know, several hundred? A thousand?” “What? Oh, no. Not that few. I have no real accounting, but I would guess between six and eight thousand.” I actually sat down and looked at the number of people that I've had a sexual interaction with throughout my life, and it comes out to be fifteen. I just can't imagine what it's like having, say, seven thousand sexual partners. Maybe it's only ten minutes at a time, but still. Other people go out, they date, they find somebody, they form a monogamous relationship, etc. and I've run into both kinds. 74 So one of the questions is, “What do I want to be? How do I want to behave? What do I want to try and accomplish?” My goal would be to find a partner, if I can at my age. If I'm lucky, I got fifteen years left, maybe? I'll be eighty-seven in the next month, so maybe thirteen years would make me one hundred, and let's face it, the pot of available people is shrinking every day as people die off. Many of them are people that I would have difficulty forming a relationship with, because they're seriously ill in many ways. Many of the people I'm running into are overweight and diabetic, which probably comes because of lifestyle and age. So the first step was to figure out what I wanted to do. I'm standing here and there's an ocean in front of me, and I stick my foot out and test the water. So where do I go? How do I protect myself? Because first of all, if I get mixed up with a young guy and he's after money, I can be taken advantage of, maybe not even realizing it, so I worried about that. I worried about physical injury. People still get beaten up for being gay or killed. Matthew Shepard, for example. And there were two lawyers that were, I believe, partners; came out of a gay bar down in Salt Lake two or three years ago, and they got jumped by several other guys and got beaten up rather badly. So I've been very cautious. The first thing I did was, I have a friend who works in the State Department of Health and I said, “Who do I go to? What do I need to do to try and find out how I can protect myself from a health standpoint?” And after several interactions, I got directed to infectious diseases down at the University of Utah Hospital, and they put me on a medicine called PrEP. PrEP is two drugs, and what it does is it keeps the HIV virus from getting a hold in your body, so it's like a vaccination. But it's not a vaccination; I have to take a pill every day and it costs about six hundred bucks a month. Luckily, I found a way to get the insurance company to pay for it, so that gave me partial recognition. 75 I interacted with a guy this weekend and I said, “I don't know you, I need to see your driver's license so I know who I'm interacting with. If there's any problems or anything, it would give me recourse, and make you less likely to do anything if I know who you are.” He got very upset about that because again, he's kind of a onenighter kind of a guy, but he has contacts here in Ogden. He went to Weber State and was on the football team, and this was Homecoming weekend, so he had come back here. Maybe 10 or so of those football players get together every year back here. But that's not what I'm looking for. My first level of contentment would be somebody who calls up and says, “What are you doing Friday night?” “Oh well, I don't have any plans.” “You want to go to a movie? The symphony is playing down in Salt Lake. You want to go to that?” Somebody to do things with. That's the first step. I'd be tickled to death if I found somebody that over a period of six months to a year, we decided we wanted to live together. But I recognize that's not likely, not at this point in my life, and in this milieu that we live in and exist in. So that was one thing I did was the Utah Pride Center, which primarily caters to young people but does have a SAGE group that I've gotten very involved with, and now I have started a SAGE group here in Ogden. We do Wednesday Walkers once a week, and tonight we're doing our gay movie. We have a once-a-month movie, Monday movies, and so we're doing that tonight. I'm using a movie called Love is Strange. I've made two very good friends who don't live together. I don't think they're sexually involved, but they do everything together and they come up here for the movies. This guy must have, I don't know, five hundred, a thousand DVDs, so he gives me a half dozen DVDs and I review it, and if it seems that it's 76 reasonable, I go ahead and schedule it. We do it in the library, downtown. The last showing last month, we had nine people. Wednesday Walkers last Wednesday, we had eight people, but I'm now suffering with the problem. It's going to be dark at six o'clock in the evening after November the 7th, so I'm trying to find a place where we can still walk. We could probably do it in the mall, but most mall-walking occurs before it's open because they don't want people interfering with their customers, so I have not approached them. I approached the LGBTQ Community at Weber and said, “I'm sure there's tracks around here. It might be lighted and cleaned off. I know there's an indoor track, I found that out, can you help me get to use that as a community thing?” They suggested the community approach, because it's there for the Weber State students, it's not there for guys like… well, I happen to be a student. But the rest of the group are not students. So I'm hoping that something will come of that. There are two other avenues that we're looking into. One is having a game night, but I don't anticipate you would have a game night once a week. That's more like a once-a-month kind of thing. The other one would be doing potluck meals. They would come here, everybody would bring something to eat and we would socialize and eat together. I no longer have a good capability. I can drag up chairs from the basement; I have four Costco folding chairs, I have another four here, and I have three of them in the office, in the botany room, so I could handle up to 11. I have a huge island to put the food on, and I was thinking I would just turn this around and move it forward so we would have a bigger dining area, then we could form some kind of a circle. I'm sure there's some way to work it. So we're looking into those two things as a winter replacement for Wednesday Walkers. We'll start that up again, probably April. It'll still be cold and maybe even a little slushy, but at least it will be way light enough. 77 So I got involved with them and I went to this big fundraiser they have, and at the fundraiser, I met a guy. He came and sat down and we talked for, I don't know, maybe 15 minutes, and then I started going, “How do I get to meet gay folks?” Here I am, I don't know another gay… well, that's not true. I know a gay couple. I met this guy through Unday School. I think I've mentioned that to you before. He was dating one guy, and then he ended up dating another guy and marrying him. So I know those guys, and when I came out, I talked to him. I took him out for lunch, bought him lunch and said, “Okay, what the hell do I do? Where do I go?” So he gave me a few suggestions. But the Utah Pride Center at that time had a SAGE dinner once a month run by a lesbian lady, so I started going to those. Lo and behold, this guy I had talked to at the fundraiser was going to those. So I finally got up enough guts, and after one of them, after it ended and people were getting up and leaving, I walked over and I said, “I was wondering if you'd like to get together and do something, see a movie or go to dinner.” He and I still have a relationship, but we both recognize that it's never going to be more than just a very simple relationship because we're too different. The second guy I met, I met down at the Pride Center at an event. I like opera. He hates opera, and just so we had one lunch together. But that's why you date, is to feel people out and see if there's a way that you can find somebody that has enough similar interests that you can build some kind of a relationship. Through the Pride Center, I met the SAGE director. They actually have a woman that runs SAGE, and she had groups in Tooele and Logan. I got together with her and agreed to try to set up a walking group. Of course, this was a long lapse of time when I'm not doing much, I'm not meeting people, COVID hit. We had our first meeting of the Ogden SAGE before everything closed down, so that was in 78 the spring of 2019. Now what do I do? Now I'm really greatly restricted in trying to meet people, but the SAGE group runs a couple of things that they then put online. They had a brown bag lunch. You bring your lunch to the Pride Center and eat together with other gay elders. They have a gay support group, which is usually run by an intern. People come and intern at the Pride Center, and they are usually skilled in psychology or something along that kind of a line, social behavior or social interaction, so I got in with those. I've asked a couple of those guys for a date and been turned down in such a way that it was obvious they weren't interested. So then I went on a thing called SilverDaddies, which is a website you go on and you post some kind of a description of who you are and what you're looking for. LR: Like online dating? LQ: Yes. I'm also on another online dating thing, but that one has not been very fruitful at all. They come up with one or two people, and I'm not religious, and they'll come up with somebody that's a dyed-in-the-wool, Bible, church attendee. It's possible to form a relationship with somebody like that, but not likely. Let's face it, I need to meet people that are not. I also go to a group called Unday School, and I came out to these folks. I've met a number of people through that group, but I met one guy and we're still friends. I met a cop, he's heterosexual; last Sunday, a week ago, I went to lunch with him. We still interact, and there are four of us that all went to that at one time or another, and we have a monthly Zoom of our own that we get into. So I've been intermixing, but I haven't been finding many people that I can date. Things are starting to open up now a little bit. I fly a pride flag about every once a month or so. I fly an American flag, I fly an Irish flag because of my background, I fly a George Washington battle flag, which was given to me by the cop for example. I have a Black Lives Matter flag, and they're lined up in the corner over there, and I pick the one in the corner and fly it 79 and then put it at the far end. So I'm rotating through those, because I think they're all worthy and I try to put one out every Friday or one of the days of the weekend. Friday, Saturday or Sunday, hoping that somebody will say, “Well, I noticed you had a pride flag out.” Things like that. But frankly, I'm just not having much luck finding other people, but I figure that it's purely probability. It's just like if I meet 10 people, 10 guys, the probability is that one of them is going to be gay, and he may be well-closeted and totally uninterested in anything. This guy from this weekend that I was talking about, he's married. He just likes to, he says he's bisexual. I have a feeling his wife doesn't know anything about what's going on. I've been told there's a lot of Mormon guys that are married that like to get out and have interactions because they don't feel they can come out. The Mormon family wraps you in a cocoon, that like going from a caterpillar to a butterfly, breaking out of that cocoon is very, very difficult. So many people, they just do what society wants. They marry, and then they see what they can hook up with once in a while on the side. So I'm still looking. I've gotten very active. August 1, Ogden Pride had a festival, and I set up a SAGE group booth there. We doubled our number of people on our mailing list. Well, it's a digital mailing list, but it went from 24, it's now up to 50, so a little bit more, tiny fraction more than doubling. I met another whole batch of people through that. A couple of the guys in the walking group wanted to have a picnic before fall ended. We had a picnic on the ninth of October. We had twenty people. I was tickled to death. I met a guy, I don't know whether he's older than I am, but I think he is. I think he's probably cracking ninety or something. He and his partner were there. I meet all these people that have partners, it pisses me off. I want to meet single guys. But he knows a lot. He was at Stonewall the day before the riot started, 80 so he has a lot of history. As a matter of fact, he would be somebody for you to interview. LR: Love to. LQ: I guess I didn't think of that until just now. I'll have to see if I can get a hold of him. I think I have his email. If he's on my list, then he would get that notice I'll send out. LR: That would be amazing. LQ: But somebody in the walking group suggested we set up a dinner and have him, and ask him to just talk about some of his experiences because when you're ninety, you're not going to last an awful lot longer, and you've seen one hell of a change occur in the gay community over that period of time. So here I am now, where things are breaking up from COVID, we're starting to get together in groups. I went up and set up a booth at Logan Pride, the idea being they're trying to get a Logan group started and the lady they have unfortunately, was terribly tied up with other stuff. While I had the booth there and some people worked the booth with me, she had arranged for that, she only came. I think she was there for about a total of twenty minutes, or maybe half an hour, and I was there from 9:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night. But now I got a call from them and they said, “Why don't you come on up?” We have a Sunday gathering of gay folks over 12:00 to 1:00 up in our Pride Center. Now they have a building, a pride center. We do not have a building yet. We have a pride group in Ogden and they're hoping to get a building this year. But until they get a building, that limits some of the things that I can do. That would be a lovely place to go and have our game night, for example. Plus, some younger guys might see us and say, “Hey, can I join in?” Then they interact, they get to know people. They get to find out how to live in the gay world. 81 I'm still struggling how to live in the gay world. I went to one gay bar. I took a class and there were three gay guys in the class, one of whom wanted to get me and some of the heterosexual guys and all of us go down to the gay bar. It ended up only he and I went. The heterosexuals had no interest. I understand that, but I haven't made a habit out of that. Maybe that's something I ought to do, but I'm afraid that a lot of that is a place to meet and pick up somebody. Like I said, I'm restricting myself, but I don't want to do that, and so that makes it much more difficult for me. So I think that's a long-winded answer to your question. LR: I don't know if it's long-winded, but it definitely answers the question very well. So you've talked about what you've done. You've talked about the groups you've helped organize… LQ: But there's malice aforethought in doing that. LR: Well, yes, there is, and I'm what I'm trying to get at is, you've hinted at this before, that you're very logical. You approach the world in a very logical way, and that is very obvious in how you've approached even answering the question. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that. But to add to that, if you're comfortable, how has it felt to be out? LQ: Oh my God, it's such a relief. I don't have to hide anymore. If somebody would ask me, “Are you gay?” my answer would depend on what kind of a relationship I had with that individual. Some, I would say yes right away. Others, I would feel, don't need to know, and so I would avoid answering the question. I wouldn't say no. I wouldn't lie. But, you know, politicians are masters at not answering questions, and I would pick up a little on that. I have had to make accommodations in my subconscious. I have come to believe from books I've read recently, books I've listened to from Audible, and in the book, Fast Thinking, Slow Thinking, fast thinking is stuff that comes right out of your 82 subconscious. I was interacting with a guy recently; I had gone to breakfast with him, and I met him through the internet. After breakfast, he said to me, “Would you like to come back to the house?” [Snaps] Answered like that. It was obviously my subconscious answering for me. Now, two years ago, that was not in my subconscious, so that's part of the change that I have made. I think it was Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, so I've decided that’s what I need to do. One of the things I need to do to continue to grow and to make myself more available is I need to write down what I think is in my subconscious. Statements. A good example might be, “Am I willing to have a sexual interaction with another male?” Because the first thing I did when I had my first sex interaction at age, I think, 17, was a week after that he came by the house and wanted for me to go for a ride, see his new car, etc. I'm sitting there like this—this is before seatbelts—and so he reaches over and puts his hand on my leg. I lifted my hand, which pulled his hand off my leg. We never had another interaction. My subconscious sabotaged me. If I had taken that hand and placed it somewhere else so that I indicated to him that I was interested, my life might be completely different. This guy that I met a long time ago at the fundraiser that I still have a relationship with, he says I'm a fuss. He says, “You have to have everything neat and organized.” I said, “Yeah.” He says, “Relax a little bit. Just throw your clothes on the floor for a change. Don't hang them up.” Things like that. That's all stuff in my subconscious. So I have struggled with affirmations. I have an affirmation that says it's okay to kiss a man. By going through this—I go through the affirmations and put a different one up every day when I remember to—the idea is to try to change my subconscious. For 70 years, it wasn't okay to kiss a man. Now, suddenly, it is, and I 83 have to convince my subconscious to relax. “It's okay to have sex with a man. It's okay to do this.” They all have to be positive. You don't say negative kinds of things. I have regular lunch with a couple that I have come out to who want me to come out to the group that we're in, where we talk philosophy and stuff. Once a month, we have a subject and there are readings and we get together. I came out to them because I wanted them to know and I felt they could handle it, and they have. We just met last Saturday and we'll meet again, I think the tenth of November or something. Once a month we just get together and we talk. He wants me to come out to the group because he thinks the group can handle it. I said, “I'm not ready yet for that, but let me think about that.” I need to write down what I think my subconscious is, which is the sum total of my religious beliefs, my parents’ beliefs that they've given me, my experiential beliefs, what I've learned from taking classes at universities and other places. I took every advantage of every course the government offered me when I worked for them. I am trying to change my behavior so that when somebody says, “Would you like to come by the house?” I say, “Well, maybe next time.” I should be able to say, “Yeah, I think I'd like that,” because I can still control what's going on. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do; I can always get up and leave. I need to get in a frame where my subconscious acknowledges that I'm gay and out, whereas before, my subconscious knew I was gay, but closeted. So I need to change those things. The slow thinking is when a guy says, “I'd like to do something with you one of these days, are you interested in that?” I think, “Well, let me think about it a little bit.” Then we get into slow thinking and you look at the pros and the cons and all this kind of stuff. There are many things I run into. “Somebody wants you to start up a group in Ogden of SAGE folks.” “Well, let me think about that a little bit.” 84 “My kids want me to get a dog. Let me think about that.” I've decided, “No, I'm not ready to have a dog at this time.” They wanted me to have some company. So there's all this kind of stuff that I'm working on to try and create an open and willing behavior that won't turn people off, that I won't take the guy's hand off my knee. That guy with seven or eight thousand put his hand on my knee one night, and I put my hand on top of his hand. Well, he took that as rejection and he apologized. I said, “I didn't mean that as rejection, I meant that it's affirmation.” I don't know where it would go or where it would lead or what I would do, but it's simple little things like that. These people I deal with who have been gay and out most of their lives, they've come out in their 20s or their 30s or whatever. They've had all these accommodations that I've missed out on, and I now have to try to get in on that. When you're younger, it's a hell of a lot easier to interact with people your own age. I don't find it very easy to meet people these days, but that's why I do these things. I will go up to Logan. This guy called me yesterday and invited me to come to Logan for that luncheon thing. I will go up there just to meet a couple of folks and see. What the heck? It's better than meeting somebody from Southern California. I mean, how do you have any kind of a relationship when it's that long distance? He has a job and doesn't want to leave that job and what-have-you. So I'm trying to meet people primarily in Salt Lake, Ogden, and Logan, because that's where you can get together relatively easily. But I'm trying to change myself, become more open, more accepting. I'm trying to meet as many as I can, and it's a long walk. LR: Sounds like it. All right. So I'm at the point where I'm going to ask your two last questions. You've answered all my questions, and I want to get them right, so I have them written down. To start with, I realized that since you've been out, you've really only lived here in northern Utah. But the question is, how does your 85 experience here in northern Utah, being out, compare with where you grew up or other areas you have lived in, in regards to the LGBTQ+ community and the acceptance? LQ: Well, I've had four major locations. I lived in Lancaster, PA from, let's see, from nine through 21. I lived in Michigan from 21 to 27. I lived in Southern California from 27 to late 70s, and then I've lived here since 2009. The trouble with trying to answer that question is that, that was a different milieu in Pennsylvania. It was different from living in a college town. The five years I was there, I had people trying to pick me up all the time. I would guess there were something like ten opportunities that I didn't take advantage of because I was so closeted. My subconscious just hindered me and kept me from being out. Many of them were opportunities where I didn't have to come out. I would go to a bar and I would leave the bar and somebody would approach me on my way to the car and say, “Hi, can I talk to you for a minute?” obviously trying to pick me up. Or I would leave the bar in the car and somebody would follow me. When I got to the place where I lived and parked the car, he would park the car, roll the window down and said, “Can I ask you a question?” Stuff like that, and I was ignoring all these things. Part of my answer is that there were opportunities there, but I was so closeted I couldn't take advantage of them. Once I turned this one guy off back in Pennsylvania, he told all his gay friends that I was unapproachable, unavailable, so I had next to nothing there. In Southern California, I'm married. I have kids, you don't get approached. But see, I didn't know there were a half a dozen or dozen gay bars down in NoHo, North Hollywood. If I had a way to find out and had started going to those again, my life would have been very different. 86 Then coming up here, it's Mormon territory. Being gay is not a good thing in Mormon eyes. You're an abomination, so very difficult to do anything. Does that answer the question? LR: I think so. My last question is what advice would you give to the young people in the LGBTQ+ community about just how to live? LQ: Well, I think the first thing I would say is find a way to come out. It may be very costly. You might want to delay it till you're eighteen, because it might cost you your family. It might cost you your friends; it might cost you your religion. But sit down, think about it, plan on when and how you're going to come out, because being closeted is no solution to the problem of being gay. That's the first thing I would say. Secondly, there are almost innumerable resources. Schools have gaystraight alliances and things like that. Get involved in that. You can go to one of those and pretend you're an ally and not gay, but it's a step in the process. So take advantage of all these resources. Go to the Utah Pride Center, start interacting. Bars are not the place to find a partner. That's unfortunately all people had when I was growing up; you went to a gay bar, you picked somebody up and you had an interaction, and maybe you were lucky enough to find a partner, but, you'd have to have an awful lot of interactions before. Generally speaking, it's not a good place to find them. Don't be afraid to take advantage of health resources, because AIDS is still here. Yes, these days, it can be controlled, but back in the 80s, it killed thousands of young beautiful human beings that didn't deserve to die, but doctors wouldn't treat. People wouldn't do research, because of the very negative viewpoint in this country towards AIDS. Now there are two things. There's a doctor here that got on board and started to deal with AIDS, and she's got a documentary that somebody has made, and I haven't managed to get a copy of it yet, but I need to. And there's another one. Are you familiar with Anita Bryant? 87 LR: You know, the name's familiar. LQ: She was a very outspoken, I think she lived in Florida, very outspoken anti-gay person. And there's a DVD that I have now, called A Letter to Anita, and it's about this guy dealing with Anita's negative influence on society because she's out, everybody's listening to her. She's commanding the news, and she's very negative and clearly doesn't understand, “Why would anybody choose this life? There's just no reason for it.” But a lot of people don't understand and didn't understand that it's genetic. Given my druthers, well, as I mentioned to you, for two years in the middle room on 623 Southwest End Avenue, I would go to bed at night and I would pray to God to make me like everybody else. God didn't give a shit. Pardon my language. That's how he made me, if you believe in God, and that's what I've had to deal with. So I would find, say utilizing the resources, find some compatriots and find a way to come out and be yourself, because you deserve to live a life like anybody else that's heterosexual, where you're out and open and you date and you love. You just really need to do all those things. I regret having been closeted for 70 years, but that's partially my own stupidity, partially society's dealings. Life is life. You deal with it as best you can. A young person has a much more fruitful way to deal with it than I ever had. I would say, be out, be gay, be proud and use all those wonderful resources that are there. If you have to give up your parents, give them up. I'm sorry, I'm getting emotional. That's an awful thing to say, but what are you going to do when your father believes you're an abomination? Now, you need to be smart about it. You don't want to do it until you can support yourself somehow, because you don't want to end up on the street as a homeless gay person. There's all kinds of resources now. If I had it to do over, I probably should have come out while I was in college. If you come out before you go to college, you may lose the opportunity to 88 go, so maybe you have to come out after graduation and say, “Hey Dad, I got something to tell you, now that you've paid for my college education.” But it'll be different for each person. Some kids have parents like you who are totally accepting and supportive. I don't know how my parents would have reacted; I really don't. We never talked about it. LR: Now, I'm all emotional. LQ: Well, emotions are good things. LR: Yes, they are. LQ: You just have to make sure that your response to emotions are deliberate and not from your subconscious. Because they may do some bad things to you. When you emotionally get into a fight or a verbal argument that doesn't serve you well, you'll never solve any problems that way. But there's nothing wrong with the emotion: being upset, being angry, it's how you respond to the emotion that makes the difference. LR: Right. I want to thank you for your willingness to share your story with us, for trusting us with your story. It means a lot to me. LQ: I hope you will treat it. The way I offer it: if it helps people understand, if it helps youngsters who are faced with difficult problems, if it allows people to go back and understand why the world was the way it was and what choices there were, then it's a good thing. I'm a very open person. I'd be happy to tell everybody here that I'm gay if I knew how they would respond. But I don't want somebody to rip down my flags, throw crap at the house; people can get very emotional over it and respond inappropriately, so I'm still in the closet to a large number of people and will be for probably till the day I die. I am so thankful that my first wife and I managed to raise our kids in a way that allowed them to be accepting. 89 There comes a time in your life when you are doing something, you suddenly realize, “My God, I am my father,” or “My God, I am my mother,” and that's in your subconscious. You have to ask yourself, is everything my parents planted there good and that I want to retain? Or are there some things they planted that I need to get rid of? Parents teach their kids how to be racist, how to be bullies, and those things are acceptable. I saw that when I lived in the South for a year. I saw how a boy could be a bully to his sister, and it was okay to his father, so that kid grows up and he's probably going to be a bully for quite a bit of his life. He'll tone it down as he gets older, when he finds out that there are times you bully people that are going to come back and bite you. So he'll probably be less of a bully, but he'll probably be a bully for a good part of his life, and that's a shame. There's a big argument that goes on with free will, and for a while I maintained I had free will, I could choose what I wanted to do. Then one day I suddenly realized that my subconscious, it's not free will. It's ideas that are planted there and that I respond to [snaps] like that. So where my subconscious is involved, where fast thinking is involved, I don't have free will, but if I can take an issue and think about it, look for data, there in that kind of a world, I have free will. So I've now chosen the idea that we have free will with a lot of exceptions, and it's more a case of, “How are you going to respond?” There's many situations in which the worst possible response is a fast, subconscious response, and what you want to do in those things is back off. The Stoics say you don't take anything personally. My son and I were having a discussion, and he said something, he said, “Oh, you make me mad.” I said, “E, I can't make you mad.” He says, “Yes, you can.” 90 I said, “Well, you can't make me mad. Go ahead, if you think that, make me mad.” He looks at me, he says, “You're short.” I said, “Yeah.” I'm shorter than him by about six inches. I think he's 5’11” or something like that. I said, “I lived through the Depression. I come from a family of short people.” He said, “This is stupid.” I said, “What do you mean, this is stupid?” He said, “Well, you don't want to be mad.” I said, “My point precisely. I can choose to be mad or not.” That's the Stoic approach, you don't take things personally. That's very hard to do sometimes, many times. I stopped going to the support group after I had a bad interaction. We went on a train ride. There were seven of us. Two were this couple that I know, and so they're always going to be together as a couple and I interacted with them. Then that left five, and taking me out, that left four people to interact with. Then the intern sat down with one of the other guys and monopolized him for the whole length of the Heber Creeper, so now we're down to two guys. I tried to start up a conversation with each of those and got rebuffed, so I said, “Fuck it. Being a part of this group is not valuable to me.” I stopped going, and I've had several people say, “How come you aren't coming down anymore?” It's not the group's fault, it's my fault. I said, “I don't feel like I fit in the group very well.” What I have decided is that there's another reason I cut out the Tuesday evening thing: so I could study for this damn botany class I'm taking. I have to do a test to hand in tomorrow morning, so I have to take that sometime today. I've had 91 that for the last five days and I've been reviewing all this stuff. He said, “Well, I'll give you a take-home test, but you can't use any books or anything. You have to use this [points to head]. I'm going to trust your honor.” Well, I have no choice. I have to honor his request. So once that is over, I think I'll go back and interact with a group a little more and see if maybe I have misjudged them or whatever. Maybe there's another way I can interact with them that would be more rewarding. Life goes on, and you know, it's a damn shame that there isn't an easy way to find out. There's 55 homes here. There's four bachelors in a row here—well, there were, up until a month ago when one moved out. I'm gay, the next-door guy R is not gay. The next-door guy T is not gay. The next-door guy B is not gay. If there's 55 males in this community, what's the probability that there's no gays? I think it's low. Now, I don't know whether there's other bachelors here; I don't know the people that that well. I go to class. Nobody wants to say anything or give any indication, but occasionally you'll see a guy and it's obvious they're gay because of their mannerisms, which they've picked up somehow, somewhere. That's a learned thing, I think, but I don't know. In a really equal world, it would be much easier to find out who's gay and who is not, so you know who to date and who to approach and who not to approach, but I wouldn't approach any of these without knowing that they would be receptive in some way shape or form because I don't want to create a negative atmosphere. That's just the way the world is now. Yes, it's better, much, much better, but we still have a ways to go, and we still have parents who throw their kids out on the street. We still have people who get killed. I watched a two-hour documentary. It's Welcome to Chechnya. Did I mention that to you? The president of Chechnya says there are no gays in Chechnya. If he finds out that you've been in a gay relationship, you get arrested and you get 92 beaten until you tell the name of every gay person you know. Then they pick up those people. There are no gays in Chechnya because when once you get back out of jail, you get the hell out of Chechnya. You aren't going to take the risk of being beaten again. One guy said that after they got done beating him, they were going to take him back to his cell and he couldn't stand up. He had to crawl on his hands and knees back to his cell. There's still a lot of places that are far worse than the U.S., but the U.S. is still a lot worse than Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, etc. So we got a long way to go. But thank God, we're going. LR: Yep, I agree. Well, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. 93