the gay park

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matt kent

Recent issues of ONE have featured the gay bar and the gay beach but not a word about the gay park.

What an injustice to the non-drinking, non-swimming reader!

I have just spent my first summer in the park, and I want to tell something about what I found.

The homosexual there is obsessed with the time. That isn't all he is obsessed with, but it is one thing. "Do you have the time?" is a question always on his lips. And yet the time cannot mean anything to him. He spends all of it in the park. Undoubtedly this obsession is the result of a traumatic experience and the poor devil should see a doctor.

There are others. . . the old who have spent their lives in the park and now wait for someone who never comes, the young who are making their first explorations in the gay world. I tried to talk with some of the older ones but found it impossible. They weren't there to talk. But, like army recruits, a few of the younger ones were eager to talk with someone who had completed basic training. Frankie was seventeen. It was his second year in the park, and his last, he said. Every time I saw him I would ask, "Haven't you quit yet?" and he would only grin. Next year, maybe, but not this year.

Julio was a young Spanish dancer who didn't know what time it was. I suggested 9:15, but he didn't agree. He leaned definitely toward the opinion that it was 9:30. It couldn't be, I insisted, for I had left home at 9:00 and more than fifteen minutes couldn't have passed. Finally we settled on 9:20. By that time we knew enough about each other to talk for three hours, and did.

After that I saw Julio almost every time I went to the park. We didn't have a place to go, we had to content ourselves with talking in the park, so we became friends.

I told him about my battle with homosexuality, said that I wavered between suicide and getting myself cured. "Don't you know you'll always be gay?" he said, even up there-I'm not sure, but I believe it'll be a Gay World." Just then a car stopped and a man got out and walked through the park. Later he returned with a sailor. "See!" Julio pointed. "Gay people are everywhere-in the army, the navy, everywhere."

Julio's head would turn toward all who passed by, to smile approval or pronounce a judgment-too old, too young, too fat, too small, too swish. Many spoke. "I have been with him," Julio would tell me, smiling. Then he began to introduce me to his friends. At first I was embarrassed, but soon I managed to greet them without blushing.

As the weeks passed by, I turned to the park again and again for a moment's relief from loneliness. It was almost like sitting in front of the general store in a small town, watching the familiar though nameless faces pass by.

It was the first comradeship I found with those of my kind. And so I believe something is to be said for the "gay park."

Summer is gone now and soon the snow will come. Where will I

then?