Hi History Makers, Eric here. A few months ago we launched Making Gay History's Patreon

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And thank you so much.

As I head back to college after the summer of 1977, the summer I came out to my mother,

I make a conscious decision to turn over a new leaf. I don't want my gay identity to be

the one thing people know about me on campus, even before they meet me. So, I get rid of

my mustache, which to my mind was a identifiably gay. We'd later call gay men who sported

mustaches like mine with tight jeans, lacosses, polo shirts, also tight, and work boots,

clones. I also started to make a point of avoiding the gay students I'd gotten to know through

the school's gay alliance organization. It wasn't like I had any interest in being an activist.

What I really wanted was to be in love, to find a boyfriend.

Around this time I decided to leave my native queens behind too, with a preppy, all-new

me. I'd already managed to ditch my queens accent. Instead of saying sure and coffee,

like we did at Hillcrest High School, I'd been practicing for months how to say sure

and coffee like my private school classmates. If I was truly going to pass as a preppy,

the clothes had to go too. Outwent the synthetic bell-bottoms and floral

kiannen at shirts, they were replaced on a shopping trip to the Roosevelt Field Mall

...