FLORIDA. BOSTON. NEW YORK.
Around this same time, in 1976, I took a trip to Hollywood, Florida. I had just finished my junior year in high school and I went to visit my cousin Laura and my godmother, Titi Sylvia. Laura had the coolest friends, one being Diane Hensley. As it was my first visit to Florida, I wanted to go out on the town, but none of the girls wanted to take me anywhere. Diane suggested her friend Dennis to show me around. He was a twenty-four-year-old music lover who worked for the U.S. postal service as a mailman, and had a 1976 Corvette convertible.
It was early evening when he picked me at my Titi’s house. I heard the car pulling up and by the time I got to the door, he was standing outside in front of his car. When I saw him, he looked so gorgeous and masculine, I was completely thrown, and I hadn’t even spoken to him yet.
There was an immediate attraction between us. I didn’t think he was gay, but it didn’t seem to matter. We drove around that evening, getting to know each other and listening to the Steve Miller Band’s album Fly Like an Eagle, which eventually became “our” record.
On another night when he came to pick me up, we decided to go to the local drive-in in his convertible to see Logan’s Run. It was all popcorn and Jack Daniel’s. The moment we got there though, we had to put the top up on the convertible because the mosquitos were eating us alive.
I looked over at Dennis, and he was wearing these gold-rimmed glasses which gave him a very John Lennon vibe that was insanely attractive. When the movie was over, we drove back to his house in Hollywood. Somehow, we ended up in a sleeping bag together. We held each other and it felt very natural. It was so easy and peaceful to fall asleep there with him. We didn’t have the word for it then, but what Dennis and I had was a true “bromance.”
A bond developed between us that lasted over the next forty years. I was always so excited when I saw his name come up on the telephone, and the first thing he usually said to me was, “How’s my New York superstar?”
Dennis became an ordained minister at the Lamb of God Center in Florida. But he struggled with alcohol and drugs his whole life. In 2014, I learned that his kidneys were failing, and that although he had no drugs in his system, he was praying to die. He was on life support for a few days with his family by his side before he passed in August 2014. I know he is now at peace.
That happened to me a lot. I found myself in relationships with men who identified themselves as straight. They may have been bisexual, though they rarely admitted to that, and my experiences with them always happened under the guise of secrecy.
Sexuality is often described as a spectrum; some people identify as entirely straight and others as entirely gay. However, many people lie somewhere in that sizeable grey area between the two . . . 1
I think it was because I was small and charming, with Farrah Fawcett-like hair, which many men found appealing and non-threatening.
Very late one night, I was cruising the Combat Zone in downtown Boston—the city’s adult XXX playground. There were scores of young men hanging out there, going through all the sleazy bars looking to pick up a john to make a few bucks: “The area was infamous for its strip clubs, peep shows, dirty bookstores, booze, drugs, and violence.”2
I ended up at a small bar with a pool table, where I met a gorgeous blond. His name was Lewis and he had that “just out of prison” look—well-built, with tattoos and brilliant blue eyes.
Actually, he was not a good guy. He told me he was on the run from the law, because, apparently, he had killed a policeman. I never confirmed that had happened, but he said that was why he kept himself under the radar.
A few months later, I went to visit him when he moved to Florida. He lived in a ramshackle cottage with a few other people, not far from the beach. We spent a lot of time near the ocean. We had a visceral, sexual connection and, of course, I wanted to photograph him. We had sex on the beach every night, but we didn’t have a lot in common.
After that trip, we stayed in touch by telephone, and then at some point I never heard from him again. It made me wonder if he went back to jail, or if he didn’t want to be friends, because I was this innocent kid still in art school. It all felt like a dream, a short moment in time—he was there, and then he wasn’t.
One summer day, I was walking along Christopher Street. I was still in my teens and all of a sudden, I saw a beautiful, blue Ford pick-up truck, with a blond muscleman sitting in the driver’s seat. He was looking out the window and he slowed the truck down as he got closer to me. When I looked over to him, we made eye contact.
He had long, scraggly hair and amazing muscles. The truck came to a full stop right in front of me. He pushed open the passenger door and I got in without a thought. His name was Kip, and he was really hot.
The next thing I knew I was driving with him to Boston, then Provincetown. It was another one of my romps—always with a muscleman, sometimes straight, sometimes gay—all part of my crazy, wonderful journey.