Blog by Candy Dawson

The horrific attack on young gays and Latinos at Pulse Nightclub occurred just three miles down the road from our home in Orlando.  We were in the process of moving to Lakeland and drove over from there just hours after the carnage ended.  It was supposed to be our first open house after putting our home on the market.  I picked up the last Orlando Sentinel in the rack at a convenience store staffed by a young Latina.  As I paid her for that paper

with this picture

and headline  staring up at us, we looked at each other and tears streamed down our cheeks.  My eyes are brimming even now as I write this.

There would be no open house that day nor the next or even the next weekend as the entire city mourned.

I visited the Pulse makeshift memorial yesterday. It’s  been 50 years since 1967 when Chuck Walls, the main character in our book and his former roommate, Alan Thomas were SO closeted that they didn’t even know that each other was gay until years later.  I wish Chuck had lived long enough to Come Out with PRIDE.  Perhaps the sections in our book looking at gay life in the sixties as told by those who lived it, will help a tiny bit as we continue the struggle for Equality.

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Excerpt From The Book

The book revolves around Chuck,

Tony (Chuck’s student) and Myriam

When Chuck Walls met Myriam Champigny in the late ’60s, it was a convergence of alien worlds. Local high school teachers and French wives of existential poets didn’t run in the same circles. The lines of social demarcation were bright red and rigid:  town and gown, blue collar and tweed, catfish and caviar, Grand Ole Opry and high opry.

The ’60s changed that in university communities like Bloomington, ripe (in Leonard Cohen’s phrase) with “the spiritual thirst” for a new world. Political tumult over Vietnam, revolutions in sex, drugs and music, and the incipient liberation of blacks, women and gays all flowed together in a tide eroding the boundaries between gender, race, class and culture.

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Myriam had a magnetic personality “that you were madly attracted to,” said Thomas, who had his first gay sexual encounter in her home. “If you were doing a portrait to illustrate effervescence, you would not show a glass of Alka-Seltzer, you would show Myriam,” said [friend, Ann] McGarrell. “She had that gift of being silly.”

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It was difficult for anyone of any orientation with a beating heart and libido not to fall for Myriam. Chuck’s attraction to Myriam was more complex. It seemed to spring from a deeper place, a starved region of his psyche as a closeted gay man. Myriam satisfied a need in him more gnawing and urgent than sex: unconditional acceptance.

She had done the same for Thomas. One night over wine he confided to her that he might be gay. “Of course you’re gay,” Myriam said. “What is the big issue here?”

“She was so nonjudgmental,” said Thomas. “She instilled freedom in people. She brought them alive. I knew people who were so into being an intellectual, being hot shit. You’d introduce them to Myriam and two weeks later they would be out flying a kite. I mean that literally. She would say, ‘Why are you so uptight? You’ve got to live your life...have a good time.’ She would break the chains and bonds to allow you to be you.”

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Standing Tall at the Makeshift Pulse Memorial