Travel is so interesting to me, when you have access to so many different worlds and so many different people, I think it really changes your perspective. I think it does. It opens your eyes and it makes you
realize that as different as we all may seem to be, we basically all want the same things. We all want decent food to eat, drink clean water, a place to live, happy life with the family that we’ve created or love we’ve inherited. Whatever that might be. Just to be able to live our lives and generally be good people. I don’t care what country you’re from, I think we all have the same dreams. How much do you think that experience informed the way you look at the world? I think we’re able to see our own country from a
better perspective. Because we’re getting viewpoints we wouldn’t necessarily get from other people. It sounds like you were at PanAm during some of the glory days of airline travel. Back then it was a very different world. I caught the tail end of the glory days. We were still serving champagne and caviar in first class and we would do a chateaubriand cooked to order, carved seatside in first class. You know it was a different world. It really was. You’ve talked about your PanAm collection and I read that you are an avid collector of memo- rabilia. Did I read correctly that it’s on display somewhere, currently? Some people would say crazy, nut bag, cuckoo. (Laughs) It was on display, I think it was three years ago. I did a show for modernism week in Palm Springs. I had maybe about half of the collection out on display, which right now numbers about 4,000 pieces. You have to consider some of these things are stir sticks and matchbooks, but it still takes up an entire storage unit. Seems like it would be great to find a permanent place to house it all. I’m one of the advisors on the board of a museum
in New York called the PanAm Museum Foundation. We had our second gala in November to celebrate another opening of the exhibits. So, I’m continuing to do that. I’m also involved with the Sunshine Kids which is a charity that helps kids with cancer and one that’s really close to my heart is the Covenant House, which helps homeless teens and that’s a really good program. That’s a wonderful thing and there’s such a huge need. It’s ironic in a way that you should mention it. The other feature in the magazine this month is
a film calledSaturday Church and it’s about LGBT teen homelessness. It’s huge, between 40 and 60 percent of teens on the
street are LGBT. The reason they’re out on the street is because they’re LGBT, parents or family have just thrown them away and they’ve got nowhere to go. This is a really cool program, they offer immediate emergency housing and medical services. Also, a lot of these kids have also been trafficked, so, they’ll move them from one city to another to get them away from people who have been doing it to them… To give them a fresh start. Along with job training, they help them with simple things, like how to cook a basic meal for yourself or how to do your own laundry. They provide tons and tons of services and there’s a number of them throughout the United States. It’s a really cool thing to be involved in. You get to see some nice results. Can you tell us a little about what the process of coming out was like for you? It was hard. I was 17 andstill living at home, I had
a boyfriend, someone I worked with at a Mexican restaurant in Riverside. He sent me a Valentine’s card and I hid it in the most secure place in the world…my mattress. (Laughs) My mom found it and she read it—I was working a split shift that day and I came home—she had this look on her face and I couldn’t really tell what was going on, but I knew something was wrong. I went outside into the backyard and she came up to me and just started screaming and smacked me across the face and backhanded me. Told me to get out, that I was disgusting, that I was not her son, she didn’t raise me to be this way and I had to go back to work after that. That was a hard one and after I moved out, from then on it was just out in the open. She just couldn’t understand it and I didn’t really have her support for a number of years. A lot of people have that experience, some people don’t but that was mine. Generally, it seems to be so much better than it
was. I tried to rent an apartment with my boyfriend back in 84/85 and they wouldn’t rent to us. They basically said, “We don’t rent to gay people.” Being on the end of that, even though you may feel good about yourself generally… when someone does something like that to you it really plays havoc on your self-esteem. You’re thinking, what is it that I’ve done that is so awful that you’re reacting this way. It’s that projection of fear onto those of us who are different, rather than taking responsibility for it. It becomes a heavy burden you know, a cumula- tive burden. Here’s to coming to the other side.
JANUARY 2018 | RAGE monthly
33
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