Consequently, I’d built up a thick, defensive wall of big words around me. I’d grown up in a middle-class Massachusetts town, which was largely Irish and Italian, and, frankly, prior to that summer, I’d not known much in the way of tenderness or warmth from straight men. By this time I knew deep down I was gay, though it would be another five years before I’d come out. The turning point in my life with straight men came in 1986, the summer before my senior year in high school. Rock Hudson and Robert Lansing in A Gathering of Eagles.
