A new turn

Reader alert. Dyneslines may be about to move in a new direction. My best friend, who is writing his memoirs, suggests that I do the same.

I am now 77 and have had a fairly interesting life. I grew up in genteel poverty in a fairly good neighborhood in Los Angeles. My parents were poor not for any cultural reason--both had gone to college--but because of the huge medical bills that had to be paid for my mother.

When I moved to New York to go to graduate school in 1956 I observed big differences between LA and NYC, as well as the closeted gay scene here. The biggest effect, though, was the enormous benefit of being taught by great scholars of the Transatlantic Migration, German-Jewish professors who had escaped from Hitler. We shall not see their like again.

Then I lived in Italy and England for substantial periods. But I came back to the US because that is where the action was--and is. Specifically for me, it was the gay and lesbian liberation movement. That led to my actual scholarly mission, centering on the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality.

If I can muster the appropriate moxie, some chapters will follow.