Show notes
Here’s a transcript of the video:1969 was a very memorable year for many of us who lived through that time.The main thing, I think, was the moon landing, which had us riveted to our television sets and fascinated by what was happening with Neil Armstrong as he landed on the moon. The whole nature of space exploration was ignited in that moment.There were other things, of course. There was the Stonewall riots in New York City, although it wasn’t widely known at the time—but it happened then, in that year. Woodstock. A lot of things that we think of as culturally significant in America — and in the world, really — happened then.What happened for me was I had sex with a man for the first time. That’s what made it memorable for me. I was living in Charleston. I was in the Navy at the time. I had been on a tour of duty in Naples on a destroyer tender, which just goes somewhere and parks.I came back to Charleston and got a little carriage house on the Battery, down at the tippy end of Charleston. It was an old cottage filled with charm, and it put me next to the Battery, which was where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. So it made sense that that’s where I fired my first shots.I went down to the Battery one evening, the last time I ever did that in all innocence. I was sitting on a bench admiring the moon when a man approached and began chatting me up, for want of a better word.He was a little bit country, a little fae, and rather nervous talking to me. I finally said, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m what you’re looking for.”He apologized profusely and beat a quick retreat away from me.I thought about that for a while, sitting there admiring the moon not far from the Confederate monument, and I thought, “You’re crazy. You’re exactly what he’s looking for.”So I went back to find him. He was on another bench chatting up someone else, and I said, “I have to apologize for the way I behaved back there. Can I make it up to you and fix you a drink at my house?”Somewhat baffled by what I was doing, he followed me back to my carriage house, and it was there that we did the deed. I don’t remember it lasting very long or being much of a hit in any direction, but it was significant to me because it was the first time I’d ever had sex with anybody.So that moment of semi-passion in my bedroom was stuck in my head when I came back to the ship the next morning in my little Sunbeam Alpine. “Morning Girl” was playing on the radio.If you’re old enough, you remember that song by the Neon Philharmonic, which is about a young woman, I think, losing her virginity. It was:“You’re several ages older now,so go out and find your manwhere the wild wind blows, Morning Girl.”I didn’t have a sense of camp at the time — well, I must have had it, because it seemed campy to me even then — but I had been waiting. I was not officially gay until that moment, and I had been waiting for a sign that I was. And that was pretty much all I needed… to hear that song.I felt like a freshly minted human being for the first time. I’d finally held another man’s body against mine, and the world had not come to an end. I was full of the joy of that when I boarded the ship. The officer of the deck saluted me, welcoming me aboard, in effect, as we did.I wasn’t an idiot about this. I knew there were consequences for a naval officer to be caught in such a situation as I had been in the night before. I had sat in on a court-martial, as a matter of fact, where a fellow enlisted man was drummed out of the Navy. I remember watching him leave the ship in ignominy.This wasn’t a dishonorable discharge as such. It wasn’t honorable either. It was just a way for the Navy to get it over with as soon as possible without any embarrassment. But the ignominy was there.So I made up my mind to keep sex strictly confined to shore, and that had some consequences that weren’t entirely pleasant.I went home one time with a guy who had an epileptic fit in the middle of going to bed with him. He peed all over himself, and he was hugely embarrassed and humiliated and shooed me away — just got me to leave. The next day I saw him. He was a checker at a local grocery, and he wouldn’t even acknowledge that I was the person he’d been with the night before.On another occasion, a married man was blowing me in my Sunbeam. I can’t say that phrase without laughing.And then a cop car pulled up. He was very drunk, the man that was with me. So I said, “Let me handle this.”I pulled myself together and stepped out of the car to speak to the police officer, and thought I was doing a fine job of seeming innocent.He just said, “Be careful, Ensign,” and went on his way.I looked down and realized that my shirttail was hanging out of the front of my fly like a little cotton penis, and that I hadn’t fooled anybody. It was a hilarious and humiliating moment at the same time.On another occasion, I went home with a guy who had porn magazines scattered all over his house. I’d never seen anything so shameless before. He played me a song from a Broadway show about sodomy and fellatio. Years later, I would realize that it was the soundtrack of Hair, but at the time it was just unimaginable.I figured he was the one who gave me crabs, but I had no idea how to treat them. I was worried that if I went to the ship’s doctor he would know the difference between gay crabs and straight crabs.So I tried Mennen Skin Bracer. Not a good idea. I was screaming in agony the first time I threw that pure alcohol onto my crotch. Next, I tried soaking in a hot bath, hoping that would drown the little f*****s. They just enjoyed that bath. It didn’t do anything at all, so I was finally driven to go to the doctor, who didn’t flinch. He’d seen this all the time. Apparently, the ship was riddled with crabs.So that summer of ’69, I had a grand old time down on the Battery. I wasn’t in any way becoming an evolved gay man. I was just finally enjoying myself with my sexuality. It wouldn’t be until years later that I became really comfortable with being a gay man. San Francisco made that happen.And it’s interesting to look back on that summer of ’69 and think of the moon landing, because I actually had occasion to meet Neil Armstrong years later. Chris and I were invited to a small event in Santa Fe, where we were living at the time, and Neil Armstrong was the guest speaker.We were all just flabbergasted. It felt mythic to meet that man, and he was very kind, very sweet. He had timed his speech in such a way that at the end of it, the moon was rising over the mesa, as if he had summoned it. It was an amazing, extraordinary thing, and kind of a witty comment on his responsibility as far as that orb was concerned.He was very fond of saying that he was just a technician, that he didn’t do that much really — he was just there to perform certain functions technically. But he felt very personally involved in it at that moment, and we loved it.That evening, I got to introduce him to Chris and describe Chris as my husband, and I realized how far I had come from those early days in 1969, when this man landed on the moon, to being a happy, well-adjusted gay man. It felt so good.To have him there as a kind of witness to that fact made it even more special. He was such a kind man, and I’ll always remember that about him. He didn’t flinch when I told him what my relationship with Chris was. We were just overjoyed to be in the presence of this iconic man.So that’s my story of the summer of ’69 and how it changed me — and changed a lot of us in different ways.So thank you for coming along this time, and I hope I’ll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit armisteadmaupin.substack.com/subscribe