Preface

This is not the whole story. For that, you will need to visit the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto, where you will find the journals I’ve kept since age 22 (September 1955). They total three million words. My story here is edited to120,000 words. I’ve used the same method as scriptwriters who turn long books into movies. Some characters and plots are totally eliminated. I apologize to those curious to see what I’ve said about them, only to discover they’re not here. Like the movies, I’ve changed some names and identifying details, “to protect the guilty” (and me from libel!).

We humans are adept at deluding ourselves. We do not store memories until recall, we revise them again and again over a lifetime. “The faintest ink is better than the best memory,” so, besides my prolific journals, I have five other guardians to help me avoid invention, denial, repression, distortion and all the other demons of memory:

• 20,000 words of documentation by social workers who observed my life while I was a ward of the state, from ages four to twenty-one.
• A yard-long shelf of scrapbooks containing clippings, photos and souveniers, which provide many of the illustrations here.
• Two yards more of shelf, containing books and articles, both scholarly and popular, which I researched and published.
• Thousands of letters sent or received. I’m a real pack-rat.
• Finally, the comments of people who appear here under their own names, who have read the manuscript and approved my recollections or suggested changes.

Occasionally I could not resist my own comment, with the hindsight of 2004; these comments are enclosed in [square brackets].

Many thanks to those who read the manuscript, to all those who have made my life so interesting, and to Joe Calleja, who created this site.

Enjoy!

Viewer discretion advised. This text contains sexually explicit stories.