Ancient Gay History

Rich remembers Clayton Coots, a man who was his “surrogate parent,” and also one of the many closeted men and women who died before the cause of gay rights made such huge leaps in America:

“This history is not ancient. My own concern about its preservation comes not from some abstract sense of social justice but from my personal experience. I grew up in the Washington, D.C., of the sixties, where the impact of racism was visible everywhere, front and center in my political education. But gays—what gays? No one I knew ever saw them or mentioned them. Not until the eighties—when, like many Americans of that time, I was finally forced by the rampaging AIDS crisis to think seriously about gay people—did I fully recognize that a gay man had been my surrogate parent in high school, when I needed one most. Not that I ever thought to thank him for it.”

Author: Frank Rich
Published: May 29, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,840 words)
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