It certainly took a toll on me as a child a few years later when my family moved to Alabama. I was just figuring out I was gay, I was shocked by the constant racist slurs I heard, and by the stark, exclusionary racism that people at least symbolically objected to up in Ohio where we came from.

When my Baptist-preacher dad tried to include Black people in our Gadsden church, a chain of events began which eventually led to his being ejected. That's how things were.

I could at least feel some moral outrage about the racism, which I had learned elsewhere was wrong. But I certainly couldn't feel any about the constant homophobia, which was every bit as bad where I came from as I found it to be in Alabama.

I grew up in that sea of homophobia, and I internalized it, like so many of us gay people do. There were very few places in those days too escape to, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco being among them, so long as you restricted yourself to certain neighborhoods.

I suspect that's probably where Keith went. And if he survived AIDS, maybe he stayed in a gay mecca, or maybe he did what I did and eventually headed back to the heartland somewhere, trying to cope in broader society.

Thanks for sharing his story!