{"id":29266,"date":"2013-06-10T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2013-06-10T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=29266"},"modified":"2015-05-06T12:52:54","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T11:52:54","slug":"ancient-gay-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/06\/ancient-gay-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient Gay History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2026 is really just yesterday. My surrogate parent Clayton Coots was one of countless closeted men who didn\u2019t live long enough to see this moment.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"frankrich130603_claytoncoots_560\"<\/a>

Clayton Coots in front of the Blackstone Theatre in 1966.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In a new century dominated by terrorism and recession, few would deny two big bright spots: the election of an African-American president and the expansion of gay civil rights. The first arrived nearly 150 years after the Civil War. The second happened with the speed of a fever dream. The modern gay-rights movement only got going in 1969, after the Stonewall riots<\/a>. Now a dozen states have legalized same-sex marriage, a concept unknown in political discourse a mere quarter-century ago. More astounding is the likelihood that a conservative-leaning Supreme Court will expand those marital rights, however incompletely, next month\u2014it took more than a century after the Emancipation Proclamation to end all bans on interracial marriage.<\/p>\n

As we just learned, a man can still be murdered for being gay<\/a> a few blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. But the rapidity of change has been stunning. The world only spins forward, as Tony Kushner wrote. And yet as we celebrate the forward velocity of gay rights, I think we must glance backward as well. History is being lost in this shuffle\u2014that of those gay men and women who experienced little or none of today\u2019s freedoms. Whatever the other distinctions between the struggles of black Americans and gay Americans for equality under the law\u2014starting with the overarching horror of slavery\u2014one difference is intrinsic. Black people couldn\u2019t (for the most part) hide their identity in an America that treated them cruelly. Gay people could hide and, out of self-protection, often did. That\u2019s why their stories were cloaked in silence and are at risk of being forgotten.<\/p>\n

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\u2014what gays? No one I knew ever saw them or mentioned them. Not until the eighties\u2014when, like many Americans of that time, I was finally forced by the rampaging AIDS crisis to think seriously about gay people\u2014did 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.<\/p>\n

For younger Americans, straight and gay, the old amnesia gene, the most durable in our national DNA, has already kicked in. Larry Kramer was driven to hand out flyers<\/a> at the 2011 revival of The Normal Heart,<\/i> his 1986 play about the AIDS epidemic, to remind theatergoers that everything onstage actually happened. Similar handbills may soon be required for The Laramie Project, <\/i>the play about the 1998 murder of the gay college student Matthew Shepard. A new Broadway drama, The Nance,<\/i> excavates an even older chapter in this chronicle: Nathan Lane plays a gay burlesque comic<\/a> of 1937 who is hounded and imprisoned by Fiorello La Guardia\u2019s vice cops. Douglas Carter Beane, its 53-year-old gay author, is flabbergasted by how many young gay theatergoers have no idea \u201cit was ever that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clayton Coots, the gay man who changed my life, fell somewhere between The Nance <\/i>and The Normal Heart <\/i>on this time line. He was one of countless gay people who were hiding back then, sometimes in plain sight, from their friends, neighbors, relatives, students, and colleagues. In historical terms, back then was only yesterday. Yet much as we might want to reclaim these invisible men and women from the shadows, they continue to slip away. It\u2019s one thing to retrieve the story of a gay American from the pre-AIDS era who was famous or notorious. It\u2019s quite another to track down a closeted gay American of no renown who lived shortly before the gay-rights revolution took hold. I have spent more than twenty years off and on trying to piece together Clayton\u2019s life. Even in death he is still in hiding.<\/p>\n

When I met Clayton, he was a company manager for touring Broadway shows and I was a stagestruck high-school junior just turning 17. We crossed paths at the National Theatre, a busy Broadway touring house in downtown Washington in the pre\u2013Kennedy Center era. I had landed a part-time job there as a ticket taker. Most of the visiting show people I met were characters out of Broadway Danny Rose<\/a>.<\/i> But not Clayton, who hit town as the manager of the tour of Neil Simon\u2019s first big hit, Barefoot in the Park<\/a>.<\/i> Then about 30, he was younger than his peers, as handsome as a model, and came to work each day as if he were attending a glamorous opening night in Times Square rather than cooling his heels in the provinces. He always wore a Pierre Cardin tux to the theater, with accessories to match\u2014a Patek Philippe watch, glittering cuff links, and a long black-and-gold cigarette holder that matched his Dunhill lighter. (He would soon instruct me in these brands.) He took an interest in me from the start, chatting me up about school, my family, and the only subject I really cared about, Broadway. It was the first time any adult in the theater had taken me seriously, and I was flattered and dazzled and entertained. He was a perpetual wisecrack machine, wry but not bitchy\u2014\u201cthe closest I ever got to No\u00ebl Coward,\u201d as one theatrical colleague of that time would later recall.<\/p>\n

Our running conversation lasted for the first three weeks of Barefoot<\/i>\u2019s summer <\/i>run in Washington, after which Clayton was heading to Chicago for an extended stay managing the road company of a newer Neil Simon hit, The Odd Couple<\/a>.<\/i> As it happened, I, too, was heading to Chicago for the summer, to attend a course for high-school journalists at Northwestern. Clayton told me to look him up if I wanted to bring any friends from Evanston to Chicago to see his show.<\/p>\n

Some weeks later, just as my course was ending, I left him a message with the switchboard at the Blackstone Theatre in the Loop. I had decided to spend an extra weekend in Chicago to be with a girl I\u2019d met at Northwestern. I hoped to take her to see Dan Dailey and Richard Benjamin in The Odd Couple.<\/i> But by the time Clayton called me back, the girl\u2019s mother had changed her mind about letting me stay with them. He immediately suggested that I bunk at his apartment instead, if it was okay with my folks.<\/p>\n

That turned out to be the day I first heard the word homosexual<\/i>\u2014in my stepfather\u2019s ensuing question on the phone: \u201cDo you know if he\u2019s homosexual?\u201d I gathered this was not a compliment and said I was certain that Clayton was innocent of the charge. But my stepfather wanted to verify: He would call the manager of the National Theatre and ask. The verdict arrived a few hours later. My boss had vouched for Clayton, and so I could stay with him for the weekend. It never occurred to either of my parents (or to me) that the National\u2019s manager, whose ticket-taking staff consisted entirely of young, single men, was also gay\u2014in hindsight a larger-than-life queen worthy of The Nance.<\/i> Such was the closeted world, even in the theater, as seen by those on the outside looking in, circa 1966.<\/p>\n

What started that weekend in Chicago was the most intimate relationship I\u2019d had with any nonparental adult. It was, in retrospect, a chaste and mostly epistolary love affair. In those days when people still wrote letters, Clayton and I often exchanged two or three a week, his densely typed on regal-blue stationery engraved with his name in large capital letters, or, even more romantically to my mind, on Odd Couple <\/i>stationery festooned with the show\u2019s logo. Since my stepfather was an airline lawyer, I could wrangle occasional free plane tickets back to Chicago. I\u2019d travel there to visit my girlfriend on odd weekends, each time staying at Clayton\u2019s apartment a few blocks north of hers on the Near North Side. Clayton would take the two of us out after his business was done at the Blackstone, and he schooled us in fine dining, in drinking brandy, and in overall bonhomie at watering holes like Punchinello\u2019s on Rush Street, where the casts of every touring show in town gathered after their final curtains. It was preposterously glamorous. Clayton knew everyone in Chicago and everything about the Hollywood movies of the thirties and forties he watched nightly on the Late Show.<\/i> He was an accomplished classical and saloon pianist; he spoke German and French, which he had picked up on a checkered path through European boarding schools before forsaking college to enter his father\u2019s calling of show business. His dad was the songwriter J. Fred Coots, the author of Tin Pan Alley standards of the thirties like \u201cYou Go to My Head\u201d<\/a> and \u201cSanta Claus Is Coming to Town.\u201d<\/a> Clayton made a point of saying that he got no money from home. Making ends meet was a constant worry, particularly given his serious clotheshorse proclivities, his generosity about picking up checks, and his insistence on showering cast, crew, and friends alike with extravagant presents on birthdays and holidays.<\/p>\n

In person and in his letters, Clayton talked about various girlfriends of his own, one of them a touring musical-comedy belter I\u2019d seen in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying<\/a><\/i> at the National. But these women never materialized in the flesh. Not that I minded. What mattered to my narcissistic teenage self was that Clayton was interested in me. I was an unhappy child of divorce. My mother was in her second stormy marriage. I was always one step away from running away from home. In his letters, written with the salutation \u201cDear Pal Frank,\u201d out of John O\u2019Hara\u2019s Pal Joey, <\/i><\/a>Clayton would try to steer me back on track with what he called \u201cBig Brother Lectures\u201d about minding my studies and my parents and not feeling sorry for myself. \u201cLife is beginning, not ending!\u201d he wrote in one pep talk. \u201cYou don\u2019t help yourself by allowing the loneliness to take control and affect your life or your studies,\u201d said another. When I fought with my mother, he defended her: \u201cShe may have problems you know nothing about.\u201d He defended my girlfriend too: \u201cMany times in the future Frank you are going to have to take loved ones only on faith and you may as well start learning now.\u201d Then he would go back to telling me backstage stories about his cast, or reconstructing (dialogue included) a scene from the Mae West movie he\u2019d seen on television the night before, or detailing his track-by-track reaction to the newly released original cast album of Cabaret.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

By high-school graduation, Clayton had left The Odd Couple<\/i> and Chicago. Now back at his nominal home in New York, he invited me for an overnight visit on my way to meet up with a school friend for the weekend. After a dinner at his favorite Italian joint, by the 59th Street Bridge, we went back to his apartment. At bedtime, Clayton made what even I could identify as a pass. I deflected it easily enough, and neither he nor I ever mentioned it again. It upset me, but not because I feared I was in any danger. What bothered me more was the realization that Clayton did have another life that he had never so much as alluded to in all our correspondence and conversations. My feelings were hurt more than anything else. I had told him all my humble secrets, but he had not reciprocated.<\/p>\n

We stayed in touch as if nothing had happened, but less and less so. I was now at long last about to escape Washington for college, and it was perhaps inevitable that we\u2019d drift apart. I had outgrown my combination Auntie Mame and Peter Pan. The last letters I received from Clayton were brief and uncharacteristically angry. He was furious at Marlene Dietrich, whose one-woman show he was managing on Broadway during my freshman year. She is \u201ctruly horrible,\u201d he wrote, and treated him \u201cas a dog.\u201d<\/p>\n

A decade or so passed. When, in 1980, a notice appeared in the Times<\/i> that I had been appointed the paper\u2019s drama critic, he wrote me a sweet note, saying with typical cheek that he knew I\u2019d amount to something. I was overjoyed that he was back in touch at this of all moments. He\u2019d been present at my baptism in the theater. I wrote back at once proposing that we get together and catch up. I never heard from him again.<\/p>\n

By the early nineties, I had married for a second time, and as a surprise for my birthday, my wife, Alex, set out to find this Clayton I had talked about with such affection and who had been a solace to me at a low time in my life. Alex had once worked as a Broadway house manager, so she turned to her old union, which would have been his, to see what might be in the files. The answer was more of a surprise than she had bargained for: Clayton was dead. He had died almost a decade earlier, in 1984, when he was in his late forties. The loss felt like a body blow. I went to the Times<\/i> morgue to find his obituary. There was none.<\/p>\n

By then I was starting to think about writing a memoir about my youthful obsession with the theater and how it rescued my childhood. I knew Clayton would be a significant figure. But what did I really know about him? It would be impossible to write the book if I couldn\u2019t locate his old correspondence. I anxiously retrieved the boxes of youthful detritus my mother had packed off into storage before her death, hoping that she hadn\u2019t thrown out his letters along with my baseball cards. When I found the stash, I picked one at random and read it aloud to Alex. She at once recognized the voice, witty and sardonic and yet kind, that I had described to her.<\/p>\n

But rereading the letters nearly three decades after they\u2019d been written, I noticed much that had passed me by in high school. Though the invocations of romances with women were as plentiful as I remembered, they coexisted with a steady barrage of camp references and jokes that had flown right above my head. In one letter, he had sent a parody \u201creview\u201d he\u2019d written of a fictional cabaret act starring Pat, his most persistent girlfriend. He\u2019d named her backup group the Gayboys. \u201cGay\u201d was not then in common usage as a synonym for homosexual. (\u201cFag\u201d was, and Clayton used it once, repeating someone else\u2019s wisecrack.) But while it\u2019s conceivable Clayton\u2019s use of \u201cgay\u201d was old-school, I now had to wonder. \u201cThe stunning outfits of the Gayboys,\u201d he wrote, consisted of \u201cskintight lavender pants, fuchsia boots and lime green tops.\u201d Here was a code that I and much of America could crack by the late nineties but that was still impenetrable to the uninitiated in 1966.<\/p>\n

What also struck me for the first time all these years later was just how unhappy Clayton was. Even as he constantly bucked me up, he confessed to blues of his own. \u201cOh how bad can Saturday nights be when you are alone on the road,\u201d he wrote in one typical soliloquy during the dog days of August in Chicago. \u201cHappily, I am well adjusted to life enough to keep cheerful and \u2018up\u2019 but there are times I\u2019m not and I get terribly lonely as I am today. The theatre is dark, it\u2019s cold and empty and I come here for there is no where else to go. You know what I mean. That hotel is great if there\u2019s someone around, but that room can be depressing alone. What a strange business\u2014so many people every day, so much to do, and so many lonely moments. Please don\u2019t get mad because I\u2019m writing of trouble to you, but these are things you don\u2019t tell just anyone. Also, I\u2019m sort of a legend around here and I\u2019m always Happy and with it and this is a side you don\u2019t show to just anyone. When you are a manager, your troubles come last and it\u2019s the company that needs you and you owe them that. Anyway, these moments don\u2019t last and there is no truth to the rumor that I intend to leap from the balcony some night.\u201d<\/p>\n

He made a point of saying he didn\u2019t confide in anyone else: \u201cFrank, it\u2019s funny, I tell you things that I\u2019ve told no one, but maybe you understand.\u201d I didn\u2019t quite understand\u2014he was a great man of the theater, how could there be any trouble?\u2014but his feeling of being \u201calone and unnecessary and unloved\u201d resonated in my teenage heart. I longed to emulate him, and sit at the piano and play Chopin nocturnes before I went to sleep, as he did, \u201cto try to forget where, who, and what I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rereading Clayton\u2019s letters, I realized he was the only adult I knew who freely admitted to feelings like this and would indulge me in conversation about them. And unlike anyone else, he was available whenever I needed him. \u201cIf you feel low on anything,\u201d he wrote, \u201ccall me collect cause I\u2019ll cheat the show out of the cost.\u201d The source of his loneliness was unknown to me, though. It would be a clich\u00e9 to say Clayton\u2019s melancholy had to do with his sexuality, and it\u2019s entirely possible it did not. But what was clear three decades later was that he was rootless, that he kept his deepest feelings under wraps, and that he was running away from something, most likely himself. Not for nothing did he keep moving from town to town on the road like Harold Hill, the irresistible hero of one of my favorite shows from childhood, The Music Man.<\/i> It was also obvious that I had had little to offer Clayton in return for all the empathy he had bestowed upon me. Much as he tried to teach me how to be a man\u2014\u201cStand on your own two feet and don\u2019t blame someone else; it does you no credit\u201d\u2014I was a long way from becoming one.<\/p>\n

Once I started in on my memoir in earnest, it was not easy to find anyone who knew him more than in passing. The only family member he ever spoke of fondly\u2014his mother, whom I had met with him briefly in New York\u2014had just died, in 1997. I placed an ad in the managers\u2019 union newsletter seeking anyone in the theater who had memories of Clayton. There were only a few responses, all from people who\u2019d known him in the early seventies, after I had. I learned he had been a road manager for Hair<\/a>, <\/i>surely the ultimate indignity for a man whose default wardrobe was black tie and whose one minor dispute with me was to question my opposition to the Vietnam War. One acquaintance of Clayton\u2019s had attended his small funeral at a church on the Upper East Side and reported that the few family members in attendance had been \u201cice cold.\u201d Over martinis one night at an old Clayton haunt, the Pump Room in Chicago, a director friend told Alex and me that he had had a one-night stand with Clayton just after graduating from Juilliard. Our friend promised he had more to tell but died before we could reconvene the conversation. Another reminiscence came from a colleague of Clayton\u2019s in the mid-seventies, when he was in what was apparently his last theater job\u2014as manager at the Martin Beck (now the Al Hirschfeld) on 45th Street. That was when New York City was in drop-dead mode and Broadway was all but abandoned, with more houses dark than not. Clayton had fallen into the habit of riding his bike from the East Side to the Beck in the dead of night to sit alone and play its old grand piano for hours with only the stage night-light for illumination. I seized on the theatrical slang for that lamp\u2014\u201cghost light\u201d\u2014for the title of my memoir<\/a>, taking it as Clayton\u2019s last, posthumous gift.<\/p>\n

Once my book was published in 2000, I heard occasionally from others who knew Clayton. Their overall impression confirmed mine\u2014he was magnetic, generous, and hilarious. Beyond that, there were more enigmas than explanations. One day I received a lengthy phone message from the actor Elliott Gould, who had roomed with Clayton for a few weeks on the road during the 1957 pre-Broadway tryout of an unsuccessful musical<\/a> in which he was a young chorus dancer and Clayton an assistant stage manager. He had not seen Clayton in the nearly half-century since then but had found him so captivating that he asked to meet so I could tell him more stories about him. He had had no idea Clayton was gay. Neither had Clayton\u2019s roommate during a two-year apartment share in the late sixties. Recently I asked a friend of Clayton\u2019s from his Chicago days, the veteran Broadway dancer Harvey Evans<\/a>, why Clayton remained closeted, at a time when gay performers like Evans were out to each other, at least within the confines of the theater. Evans speculated that it was because Clayton was a manager who had to deal with a company\u2019s entire staff, the back office in New York, and the public, and didn\u2019t want to take any risks, especially in a day when homosexuality invited police harassment and worse.<\/p>\n

Mining the archives at Lincoln Center\u2019s performance-arts library for any additional evidence of Clayton, I found one incident that supported Evans\u2019s theory in a letter deep in the files of the Broadway producer Leland Hayward. In 1963, Clayton had written to his immediate superior in New York about the abusive lead actor in a road company he was managing of the comedy A Shot in the Dark.<\/a><\/i> In Clayton\u2019s telling, the star had accused him of \u201chand holding with a theatre manager and peregrinations in lobby of a theatre in San Francisco\u201d and had addressed the show\u2019s cast to deride him as an \u201ceight-year-old little girl in boys pants from finishing school\u201d who hated any \u201cmarried man.\u201d The actor threatened to \u201cbeat the shit\u201d out of Clayton if he came backstage. Though Clayton toured for months with this show, neither it nor the offending actor ever turned up in the many behind-the-scenes tales he told me once our friendship began three years later.<\/p>\n

The final glimpses I have of Clayton, near the end of his life, were courtesy of a reader who wrote me almost a decade after Ghost Light <\/i>was published. He and Clayton had worked together in the late seventies at M. Rohrs\u2019, a small coffee-and-tea shop that survived until recently in the East Eighties. Clayton, now out of the \u00adtheater, was at this point \u201ccobbling together a living,\u201d the reader wrote, working part time at Rohrs\u2019 and at a bakery run by a friend. He was also \u201chustling bridge at the Cavendish Club.\u201d Talking with Clayton was \u201ca tutorial in graciousness, treating people well, and always presenting an enthusiastic front,\u201d he recalled, adding that \u201can entourage began to appear\u201d on the days Clayton worked. Clayton was still working at Rohrs\u2019 when he took ill in 1983 or 1984. \u201cHe said it was lung cancer,\u201d the letter went on, \u201cbut I was never sure if it was that or AIDS. I visited him a couple of times at his apartment, but it was clear that he was failing. The last time I saw him he was just hoping to hang on to get back to the beach on Fire Island with his friend (who I didn\u2019t know) one more time.\u201d Enclosed with the letter was a copy of a photo of the two of them outside the shop, with Clayton wearing the very un-Clayton accessory of a coffee vendor\u2019s apron. \u201cI have met a lot of exceptional people, but Clayton was truly special,\u201d my correspondent concluded. \u201cWith the picture on our wall, hardly a day goes by when I don\u2019t think of him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who was that unseen \u201cfriend\u201d Clayton was trying to get back to on Fire Island? Did he exist? As I embarked on this article, I decided to do one more round of sleuthing. When I wrote Ghost Light,<\/i> the Internet was not nearly as comprehensive a tool as it is today. Why not try to go way back once more? I searched for the girlfriend whom Clayton had partnered with those \u201cGayboys\u201d back in Chicago; her last credit, in stock, was in 1967, and I could find nothing else. But I did locate another woman Clayton rhapsodized about In his letters<\/a>, Diana Eden<\/a>, who played one of the Pigeon sisters in his company of The Odd Couple<\/i> before migrating to Hollywood, where she built a career as a television costume designer. I reached her by phone at her current home in Las Vegas. Like me, Eden had lost touch with Clayton after those Chicago days, but when I asked her about their tearful parting when her Odd Couple <\/i>run ended, she described the 1 a.m. farewell scene at O\u2019Hare much as Clayton had in a letter. She had adored him and, like others, had held on to old photos of him. \u201cClayton was very funny,\u201d she recalled, \u201cbut that\u2019s not the thing I most remember. There was an element of wistfulness and loneliness about him that I sensed strongly \u2026 I assumed from the beginning he was gay, but he never mentioned any love affair at all. He came to all the parties, but I never saw him with a date or touch anyone. But I felt immensely loved by him and taken care of.\u201d<\/p>\n

My final search was for a name I had been told when I was researching Ghost Light<\/i>\u2014that of a man who might have been that \u201cfriend.\u201d The name had been given to me by a woman who had known Clayton in his Hair <\/i>period. She was the only Clayton acquaintance I ever found who cited any specific lover. The man she named lived not on Fire Island but in Hawaii. I couldn\u2019t find him in the late nineties. But this time he did turn up via Google: as the namesake of the Clint Spencer Clinic<\/a> at the Hawaii Center for AIDS at the University of Hawaii. I sent an e-mail to the Center asking for any biographical information that might be available.<\/p>\n

A nurse wrote me back empty-handed but pointed me toward others who might help. A doctor and HIV\/AIDS researcher named Dominic Chow responded to my query. The clinic had been named after Spencer because he had been the first patient to participate in an AIDS study at the university, as well as \u201ca strong HIV research and care advocate for the state of Hawaii\u201d when HIV was first discovered in the eighties. \u201cI knew Clint for the last two years of his life,\u201d Chow wrote. \u201cHe was a warm and compassionate man\u201d who fought hard \u201cwithout compensation or need for recognition\u201d to fight the epidemic and promote \u201ccompassion and respect to those infected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chow sent a link to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin<\/i> obituaries<\/a> of April 4, 2001. Spencer\u2019s is just a few sentences long and makes no mention of his work on HIV\/AIDS. The notice said he died at 53, named his domestic partner (of whom I could find no other trace), and described Spencer as \u201ca retired stage director\u201d born in New York. I tracked down his credits\u2014he was indeed a stage manager for a few regional and Off Broadway productions in the seventies, though none of them intersected with Clayton\u2019s theatrical orbit.<\/p>\n

Thus the Clayton Coots story, like so many others of his time, trails off into fragments, ellipses, and mysterious dead ends. I\u2019d like to believe that he did have a partner in his last years, and that he was taken care of as he had taken care of so many others in his peripatetic, too-brief life. But I can hardly say it for a fact. This being America, the next step for half-\u00adforgotten stories like Clayton\u2019s will be to fade away altogether, just as the vanished, unmourned world where they unfolded already has. That\u2019s progress, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

I imagine that if Clayton were still here, he\u2019d find the idea of same-sex marriage as far-fetched and funny as his favorite late-night movies. But, of course, I am speaking of the dashing public Clayton, who was \u201calways Happy and with it.\u201d There\u2019s no way of knowing what the hidden Clayton would think. Like Harold Hill in The Music Man<\/a>, <\/i>he might have found his someone and made a home. As the rest of us are swept up in the euphoria of weddings unimaginable only a decade ago, the least we can do is pause for a moment to remember him and all the others who were never given that choice.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nymag.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026 is really just yesterday. My surrogate parent Clayton Coots was one of countless closeted men who didn\u2019t live long enough to see this moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sexualities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}