I had almost forgotten this. However, this morning I was tripping through my photo folders and I came upon this gem of a photo. It’s actually a photo of my roommate, Steve, in the Boston Globe holding a sign reading, “Anita Hitler preaches hate no matter if you’re gay or straight!” It was the day after the Gay Pride Parade in Boston. I’ll be honest with you, I can’t remember the year. However, I remember thinking that I hoped my mother didn’t choose that particular Sunday to read the paper.

To this day, I’m still not sure if she knew I was gay. I mean, she had to have known. By the time she died, the last date I had (as far as she knew) was my senior prom. (He was gay too. That’s another wild story for another day.) She used to refer to me as a “career girl,” who didn’t have time for marriage. Well, she was right about that part anyway.

Of course, years earlier she went snooping around my room, looking in my drawers, stuff like that. Well, you know, if you go looking for stuff to make your hair fall out, you’ll find it. And she did. She found a couple of letters my best friend had written me. We’ll call her Linda. We had quite the thing going on, and it went on for a while. We were just in high school, and I was a couple of years ahead of her. We lived on the same street, which made it easy. Anyway, finding those letters freaked my mother out. I mean, big time. She lost her mind. One thing about Italian mothers, they love the guilt thing. It was the hand-wringing “Oh, my God, where did I go wrong?” Oh, yeah.

Unfortunately, I don’t do guilt. Not good for you. All I had to remember was that after a day or so, all I had to do was treat this like it was some kind of opportunistic infection. It was a mistake that won’t be repeated. She liked that. It was exactly what she wanted to hear. I was 37 when she died, and we never talked about the ‘gay’ thing again, even though it wasn’t going away and I did it plenty more over the years!

Anyway, on that day, I believed we started out on Boston Common after the March and made our way to the bars that evening…all evening. Ah, yes, Boston’s gay bars. There was nothing like them in those days and there’s absolutely nothing like them around today. Plenty of those stories to come.