When I was a waiter at a high-end sea food restaurant in Fort Wayne, one of our duties was to arrive an hour before opening to help with any prep work. One evening I was folding napkins with one of the bus boys, an unsophisticated high school sophomore from nearby farm country.

We were pleasantly talking and joking when he asked, “it’s not true what they say about you back in the kitchen, is it?”

I knew where this was headed but I played along, “I don’t know, what are they saying?”

“That you’re a fag.”

I responded calmly, “well, they’re right.”

The kid jumped up grabbing his head with both hands as if he had a violent headache. He exclaimed, “No! No! No! That can’t be! You’re too nice!”

My generation was the first to identify openly as gay. There had been a few isolated cases of brave souls before us who were openly homosexuals. But for the most part anyone living a gay life was constantly in fear of incarceration, being subjected to electro-shock therapy, or losing their jobs or apartments if they were found out.

With the baby boom came numbers and my contemporaries and I thought it was ridiculous to keep hiding. We were no different than other kids our age except for who we had sex with.

One of the most effective tactics of the early Gay Liberation Movement was encouraging everyone to identify openly as gay. It was a way to show just how many of us there were and it personalized it for straights as they discovered members of their family or friends in their community who were gay.

I did not come from a family that had meaningful personal discussions or gave confrontational speeches. Still I knew the importance of the visibility strategy and struggled with a way to make it official at home..

My Mother enjoyed it when I brought my friend Eric to the house. In Rock Red Republican Fort Wayne Indiana, sex education for women was basically just lay there, close your eyes, and think of the John Birch Society. She was too intellectually curious to settle for that and was looking for an outlet to get more granular. I could talk about many things with her but drew the line at others.

Eric had no such limitations and their discussions about sexuality, relationships, birth control, and physiology would become so graphic I would leave the room. I was happy she had an outlet but was it necessary to include me? Because he was so frank and open, Mother became very fond of him.

Even though I was twenty years old, I’d had so many major illnesses as a child I felt the need to report back to Mother when I had anything more than a slight cold. On one of my calls from campus I officially put her on notice that I was fornicating with men by telling her that I had contacted gonorrhea from having sex with Eric (neither of which was true).

She replied matter-of-factly, “have you been to the doctor?”

My parents were divorced at the time and there was no communication between them. I knew I would have to have the same conversation with my Dad at some point. He was not as open-minded as Mother and more working class. Still he was extremely affable and worked hard to be popular with the outside world. Inside the nuclear family, however, we had to be sensitive to his temper which could be explosive (and occasionally, physical). Like with the building blocks incident.

When I was ten we lived in a house whose stairway to the second floor was enclosed. When others were watching television, they would close the door so they wouldn’t have to listen to me singing and cavorting upstairs.

One afternoon I took a hundred primary colored blocks of various shapes to create a structure that rose and fell the entire eight foot length of the upstairs railing. As I marveled at my masterpiece I accidentally hit a block rendering the entire construction unstable. The closed door at the foot of the stairs created an echo chamber which amplified the sound of wooden blocks crashing against wooden stairs to a thunderous level. With a few athletic leaps my Dad bounded up the stairs, picked me up and spanked me for scaring the shit out of everyone.

A couple of years after crossing the visibility line with my Mother I was living in San Francisco. I called my Dad to tell him I would be coming home for a week’s vacation. Then I casually added I would be bringing my boyfriend with me.

He said warmly, “we certainly look forward to meeting him.”

I was an abject failure at delivering the proscribed “Mom, Dad, I’m Gay…..” speech required by the Liberationists. But I still got the message across. I wondered if it was just me who had difficulty with confrontation, if my siblings had different experiences with our parents. There were some indications that sensitivity training had occurred.

When I obtained a Stones Discography catalog from England, the cover photo had them looking particularly fey. I realized I was probably the only Hoosier who thought they looked cool. Showing it to my brother he harrumphed, “Rolling Stones? Looks more like the Rolling…” then he paused for a second before concluding “…..Gays.” His choice of words lacked the oomph! he’d originally intended. Nonetheless I appreciated his thoughtfulness.

By the time my brothers had families, homosexuality was no longer society’s great hidden secret. It was a divisive issue for a few wingnuts (e.g., Republicans like Phyllis Schlafly who very publicIy disowned her son when he came out while simultaneously offering how her actions were in keeping with the Doctrine of Christ’s Love). My family continued to low-key the issue.

I would visit Indiana twice a year and Mother always arranged a night when all four grandchildren would sleep over. Once when they were in their pre-teen years, we’d been out to dinner on a hot July evening. As we walked back to the car one of them said “Did you see that guy looking at you Uncle Chris? He kept staring like he knew you.”

I had not noticed but my appearance differed significantly from most men in Fort Wayne. I was quite adept at blocking out the stares. I brushed it off, “he probably liked my Armani shirt.”

Then the 11-year-old piped up, “maybe he was gay and he wanted to meet you.” It took me completely by surprise. I knew it was important not to make this an awkward moment by going into denial or invalidating the observation. I wanted to remain encouraging and open while also sidestepping the finer points of how the child’s concept of “meeting” might differ from mine. I responded positively, “it could be.” The topic soon died a natural death.

It was about this time that my friend David started working at Joe Boxer’s world headquarters. He was quite generous and creative with the merchandise. Every year 50 pound boxes of the most current styles, samples, and rejected designs would arrive at the last minute on Christmas Eve. Sometimes on Christmas Day itself.

The kids would have a blast tearing through all the robes, beach towels, pajamas, underwear and miscellaneous novelties. They were especially intrigued when Joe Boxer decided to recycle the old Smiley Face as their logo. The kids weren’t buying the Smiley Face name and tried to give it a new identity. They finally settled on Happy Boy.

It wasn’t long before the nickname was transferred from the logo to me. Sensing the confusion of the old meaning of “gay” with happy, and the idea that I lived a somewhat mysterious, exotic, and maybe controversial life, they teased me relentlessly as Happy Boy.

I’ve had so many nicknames through the years, adding another one to the list was no problem. Especially when I realized they weren’t being mean-spirited, they were just being facetious. Where the children picked up a character trait like that I have no idea.

As the top photo documents, the spirit of Happy Boy’s Indiana Christmases lives on.