Voenix Rising

Previously on Battlestar Galactica…

A Mentor Arrives

After Ric disappeared and we’d gone our separate ways, I would be lying if I said the rest of the semester was filled with sweet romantic interludes—or at least hot monkey sex, because it most certainly was not. That’s not to say I didn’t fall in love—or at least lust—with two more individuals, both of whom occasionally popped in at Louie’s, but were far from regulars.

The first was a Hispanic boy named Jesse.

Jesse and I were friendly, but he barely knew I existed. And yet, at 18 years old, I fawned over him. I remember sharing some writing I’d done about him with another friend at the table, James Uhrig. James, who was older and wiser than I was…kind…in his assesment of my musings, but suggested that perhaps I move on.

Kent Kelly

It was around that time that Kent Kelly and Peter Whitman entered my orbit. Kent was the catalyst that caused me to move on from Jesse. Peter and I immediately became best friends. I think Kent—also older and wiser by a couple years—sensed my fragile, newly-minted gay state, and very gently let me down when I confessed my feelings for him. It didn’t make it sting any less, but I respected him for it, and out of that grew a friendship which lasted until his death in 1987.

Kent became my mentor, my friend, and my dance partner; my Life Teacher if truth be told. After I quit school in 1978, Kent ended up in Phoenix with me, proclaiming that Tucson had simply gotten too small—or more likely as I suspected he’d simply slept with everyone he’d been interested in sleeping with there.

Shortly before the semester ended, I arrived at Louie’s one afternoon and found the table abuzz. Ric was apparently at Student Health with a case of Hepatitis and they’d advised everyone who’d had sexual relations with him during the previous few months to get a Gamma globulin shot.

Needless to say, I was more than a little surprised at the number of us who got up from the table and formed a little parade that headed over to Student Health. Not as surprised, I’m sure, as the staff at the center was…

Apparently Ric was the table’s resident Welcome Wagon.

I returned home at the end of the semester, leaving all my new friends behind and wondering what the hell I was going to do, not only for summer work but also with my new gay life in general. My 19th birthday was quickly approaching, so I decided to say fuck it and invite everyone up to my parents’ house for an impromptu party. Not exactly how I envisioned coming out, but if they figured things out, they figured things out.

I think—based on that article he’d sent months earlier—Dad knew what was up, and arranged for he and Mom to be out of the house that night. My sister was having a sleepover at a friend’s house.

Phil (the man who initially welcomed me into GSA) arrived on his motorcycle the afternoon prior to the party. Since no one else was showing up until the following day, he and I headed out (not on his motorcycle) to the local mall.

As we walked the mall, Phil freely ogling boys as they passed like a dog in heat and whispering salacious suggestions in my ears, by the time we got back to the house I was…aroused…to say the least. He tried to put the moves on me in my bedroom, but I rebuffed his advances. That was not the way I intended to come out to the family.

Phil was an expert at the art of seduction, and while it didn’t happen that weekend, he did eventually bed me. Or maybe it was the other way around. It doesn’t matter. He and I had many an overnight encounter until he moved to San Mateo in 1980.

As an aside, I briefly reconnected with Phil (not that way—although to be honest, prior to him actually showing up at my door that afternoon I’d fantasized about it) once in 1992 long after I’d moved to San Francisco. I didn’t pursue anything phyiscal or even reigniting the friendship because something just seemed off, and frankly it creeped me out.

Next time on Battlestar Galactica…