Once he was just Harry-Harry in the morning, a student in my first period 7th grade English class-a handsome boy-almost identical to his older brothers whom I had taught in high school a few years before.

I had developed a lot as a teacher in those intervening years and was now in my 7th year of teaching-interestingly enough working down the spectrum from twelfth to eleventh to tenth to ninth to eighth and now to seventh grade-where, quite honestly I had found myself at home-I must confess I am a twelve year old boy inside my heart, brain, soul and viscera and found that remarkably wholesome when years later, I was elected as favorite teacher-in our 6th-12th grade school with over 3000 students.

Did I have a gift? Or did the skill just develop as my inner longing to be true to myself-I'll never know-but what I do know, is that I had fun with my students and they had as much fun with me. Often, I'd bring in a few records (The Chipmunks, the Godfather, The Andrew Sisters, or classical music) and give them the opportunity to do some 'creative writing'. "You can write about anything-just have fun, tell a story others would like to listen to and when you've finished, I'll take them home and judge them-not with a grade but with a comment just for you and then I'll read the stories that excited me most."

The kids were dancing in their seats the first time I announced this project and the first year's experiment went so well that I continued the process from that POD when all of us-all 240 seventh grades and their eight teachers (including me) and all supplies, tables, desks-were in a "room" that would make the Pentagon look tiny. And all this happened because the wife of the superintendent had gone to a college seminar and "learned" that students performed best without direct teaching and without walls in something know as a POD with 'learning stations' which we teachers would devise, build, and post on wall after wall in our spare time and create make-shift bulletin boards-complete with ALL the answers because that way students can 'learn best-by checking their work." Sadly, neither the wife of the superintendent nor he himself had ever taught, but they sold the idea to the county government and my fate was sealed.

Carpe Diem became non compos mentos and away we went as I could only wonder how Dante might have handled the same situation? But he was not in the trenches now, was he? And neither they nor anyone with a right-mind realized the chaos and pandemonium that that superintendent and his one-classroom experienced wife, caused-not to mention the fact that stress was the primary cause of teacher drop-out.

I was teaching in Maryland, a state with a mere 23 counties and I bet it won't take you long to guess that when state reading scores were released, which county was at the very bottom of the proverbial shoe next to chewing gum and fungus of all those other counties?

I put up with it for ten more years-teaching 6th, 7th and 8th grade every day with a total of 6 different subjects before I burned out, partially because I often ended up as the disciplinarian, corralling the two or three brand spanking (and I always thought of the olden days when students were paddled and could picture wide-eyed 22 year olds over my knee at the end of day-because they were unable to control their classes, so I would hike across the POD and by merely standing in that section, a hush would consume them all. But then reality struck and I realized I would have been paddled-probably bare-assed-as well, in that proverbial woodshed at the end of day during my first few years "in the struggle." Forgive a mind that wanders, but such is the glory of a middle-school mind!

I was deeply closeted as a teacher back then-because, well, because we had to be-otherwise we would have been fired, lost our income, our homes, and our families-everything would have gone up in a cloud of smoke and just in case you're new to what happened back then over half a century ago just picture a tsunami eradicating your name, your history and your life and dumping it a thousand miles out into the deepest part of the Atlantic as the sharks chewed you and slowly digested every part of your viscera.

And now back to Harry and Harry's world. He went on to graduate high school, and years later while I was walking down Pennsylvania Avenue here in DC just a few blocks from Queen J. Edgar Hoover's FBI Headquarters (next time I'll share a story about that queen) when I heard a sweet feminine voice say, "Mr. Walker. . . oh, Mr. Walker!"

I turned around and looked and looked but saw no girl and I continued walking when again I heard the same sweet voice saying "Mr. Walker"-and there was Harry Gray, grown up-in his early 20s and he came to me and told me how important a teacher I was and then he told me he was gay and asked me if I was-because he had suspected that way back when he was 13 in my class. I told him I was and he told me he had a great job as a secretary at the FBI Headquarters across the street-I sensed he wanted to give me a hug but no one in Washington did that in public back then. So, we exchanged numbers and we called each other a few times, and then he disappeared.

A few months passed and by some macabre stroke of fate, I began dating Peter, an FBI agent. Washington is an extremely small town, for those of you who do not know, and I mentioned to Peter that I'd taught a student named Harry Gray who told old me he worked at the FBI so I asked Pete if he knew Harry Gray.

"Yes, Harry was a secretary in the Director's office-he died a while back."

"He died?"

"Yes, I think of AIDS, but I can find out."

Pete did find out and he gave me the date that Harry had died-and I cried and cried and cried. And then, the activism lurking deep inside my soul erupted and I called the Whitman-Walker Clinic and asked about projects I might be able to join-it turned out that "we" were the only group on earth that gave a damn about our own people-and then they told me they were assembling a task force of volunteers who would go into the homes of men dying of AIDS (and while the plaque killed so fast and our government sat on its behind with the motto that AIDS is God's cure for homosexuality.)

I just copied this from my computer and doubled checked with Alexa the woman who lives in my computer, and now I am really crying-rivers of tears: Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in 1981, more than 700,000 Americans have died from AIDS-related causes.

So I went through a short training program-and all the men (except me) were infected with AIDS and they each gave their stories about how in the last few weeks or months of their lives they wanted to give back to the community (AIDS was a fast and horrible death-several guys I met at a party a few weeks later, admitted they had it and were going to rent a rowboat and fill it with cans of gasoline and go out like Vikings, gloriously in the middle of the Potomac River-within sight of the Lincoln Memorial.) Other men committed suicide, but the vast majority died ostracized by their families-alone because they-all of us, in fact-were worthless queers and needed to be exterminated. Please let those words sink in-this was America the Home of the Free-the land of glorious opportunity-barely half a century ago living with so much hatred that it still makes my head swim!

For the next two years I worked as a part-time aide to those men, many of whom were wealthy beyond belief-living in mansions, retired Broadway actors, Colonels at the Pentagon, TV personalities, playwrights, steamfitters, plumbers, merchants, and leaders of our country (yep) not only with their lives disintegrating but with the nation, much like it is today, degrading the sick, the infirm, laughing at cripples, and exporting everyone with a brown skin-when will the hatred end?

Years later I attended a performance of my favorite Broadway show: Hello Dolly, and saw for the 4th or 5th time Carol Channing perform and at the end of one of those performances, during her curtain-call, she blithely said, "Do you remember all those boys? Those boys who danced on Broadway? Those boys who were with me night after night. … well, they're dead, they're all dead." And I cried some more, wondering if she was heartless or just suffering from a major lapse of moral turpitude or if she was reflection of society itself.

At any rate, I learned more about compassion and honest love from those men whom I pushed in wheelchairs, took to doctors, helped in and out of bed, fed, and in one case after his death, I donated a cemetery lot because his parents had disowned him, than I ever learned with my three college degrees, and all my years of teaching: Those men did nothing wrong-except love another man and for that they died.

And then, just one more tearful memory - I made a quilt for Harry-where it was displayed here in Washington, and when we read the names of the 40,000 or so who had died by then, every third name was anonymous-that's what our nation had become-nothing more than anonymity itself spoken from the mouths of the anonymous into an anonymous heartless, cruel and uncaring world but even half a century later, I am thankful that Harry found me!

The End

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