When I was a teenager, I believed, as many have, that I had personally invented homosexuality. This was prior to the gay movement, when there was scant public evidence that being gay existed and, if it did, it was sick. In high school life, the mere suspicion that you were a queer or a fruit or a fag was social death (which is still true in some North American schools today). Once you reached legal drinking age, you could explore a furtive world of gay bars, but they were subject to random reputation-wrecking police raids. If you happened to be in the military (I did a hitch in the American Navy), you had to operate with the discretion of “special forces” troops and, even then, you faced dishonorable discharge if not brig time. It’s difficult to convey, a half-century later, what a dirty, dangerous secret homosexuality once was.