Live 2 Learn

Fall of 1990, in the isolation wing of St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania I am holding the hand of a twenty-four-year-old man, Joey, as he faced death in less than twenty-four hours.  He had asked me to pray for him but my reluctance to pray aloud and my overwhelming emotions at the moment silenced me. I didn’t know Joey that well, and I was not an AIDS-Buddy for anyone let alone Joey whom I had met two months before that night. I had attended several funerals or memorial services since moving to Allentown to work for Air Products and Chemicals. Some of the services were for people I had met briefly or knew through my volunteer work teaching a workshop called “ Eroticizing Safer Sex for Gay Men .” I was at some funerals for men I had never met but attended because their family was not attending, or they had lost all their friends out of fear of contagion or association or through death. I was under constant pressure from friends who were Gay activists or from leaders

One of my favorite perquisites of working for a large company resulted from serving on a Community Affairs Committee for AMD .  AMD at that time had a solid reputation in all the communities in which we operated as a company that “gave back ” to the community.  We had a team of professionals who received and evaluated requests for money and in-kind donations as well as volunteers and that team made choices and recommended to a group of executives (including me) how AMD should respond.  The professionals serving on this team were so good that we as a committee mostly just rubber stamped their recommendations.  Another of our duties as committee members was to represent AMD in photo ops with the non-profits we supported so I have numerous photos of me handing a huge oversized check to some executive director or board chairperson.  In the photo shown here Karin Dicks one of the professionals I was talking about and I flank Father Jaime Case, then the Executive Director of El Buen Samari

            I was in the fourth grade when I had my first identifiable sexual feelings.  I didn't call them sexual feelings then.  Actually, when I begged God's forgiveness that night (because I was certain that anything that felt good was bad) I remember describing it as "a tingling in the bottom of my stomach, like the time I broke into the elementary school - bad and wonderful at the same time."  I wasn't a juvenile delinquent or anything just a kid who was easily influenced by my peers.  Four of us broke into the elementary school and our vandalism was to write (in easily erasable chalk) "Zorro was here!" on several classroom chalk boards. Fear, tingling, sexual - whatever I was feeling I liked it.              It was 1962.  My sister and her friends were giggling about a packet that had come in the mail from the Fabian Fan Club. They were getting ready for my Mother to drive them to the Fernwood Country Club to swim and sun - mostly sun bathe.

I grew up in Magnolia, Mississippi and I wasn't aware as a child but I was spoiled.  The third child, the baby, and the only boy.  My father's father had been the only son in his family of 10 kids so the continuation of the Gardner name fell on his shoulders.  My father had three brothers and two sisters but one of his brothers, Uncle Paul never had children, one of his brothers Uncle Preacher had three girls and his baby brother, Uncle Roy had two boys.  We three boys now owned that burden of carrying on the name so we got special treatment and besides, we were growing up in the fifties when all males were enjoying a lot of male privileges. When I think back on my childhood a certain birthday present stands out as illustrative of my treatment in the family. Eight years old I remember vividly riding in the middle of the front seat of our car. I was sitting on the lowered armrest between Mother and Daddy with my sisters Joy and Jinya Lea in the back seat. We were on a grave

 Summer after 4th grade, I was a Cub Scout and four of us were chosen to sit at the Pike Theatre in uniform all day on Saturday to collect money for the Will Rogers Institute.  Right after the previews, a film about the Will Rogers Institute would play followed by the lights coming up and our walking around with buckets to collect donations. Aunt Alice Gwin managed the theater - she wasn't really my aunt but the aunt of my cousin so we all called her "Aunt Alice." We decided to camp out in my log cabin that night.  My log cabin was a birthday gift to which I devoted an entire Blog . Teddy, Dan, and Bob joined me in this adventure (their names have been changed for reasons that will become clear later). The night started in a pretty standard fashion with everyone telling ghost stories.  There were the standards - the hook, about a parking couple hearing a radio story in which an escaped murderer had a hook for a right hand.  After hearing a noise they drive off a

Summer 1960, I was eight years old when my Father decided to take me to his fishing camp at Lake Mary, Mississippi. I guess he couldn’t get any of his friends to go with him that weekend because he ended up with Mr. Bill Lacy who was eighty and me in a boat fishing for white perch. I vaguely remember spending the night in the exotic camp – well exotic to an 8-year-old – and how cool it was to be “roughing it.” The camp had been built on stilts to protect it from periodic floods but years before after the floods were controlled a “ground floor” was added. The camp had all the comforts of home – more-or-less. The three of us must have made quite a sight on the Lake that Saturday morning. Mr. Bill was a little shaky and so Daddy had to bait his hook for him. I was squeamish about touching the live minnows we used for bait. Since my “weak stomach” was well known by then it only took a couple of loud gags to convince Daddy that he should bait my hooks also! The fish were biting like cra