My Top 10 Gay Experiences in West Hollywood

I tell people that I lived in West Hollywood for 13 years, but actually, it was a little over 10 years, from June 1985 to August 1995, and even that was broken up by a summer in Japan and semesters in Nashville and Turkey.  Still, there was plenty of time for gay experiences.  Here are my top 10 favorites:

1. The move to West Hollywood, from Kansas to Oz.

2. The night that I invited Raul to dinner with my housemate, Alan, who tried to steal all of my boyfriends.  But Raul turned the tables on him. 







3. Raul and I star in a porn film, briefly, and end up bankrupting the porn industry.




4. My celebrity boyfriend. Everybody in West Hollywood has one good "dating a celebrity" story.  This is mine.

5. My date with Richard Dreyfuss.  Ok, I have two good "dating a celebrity" stories.

More after the break.















6.  My ex-boyfriend Fred comes out for a visit, bringing along a Cute Young Thing who criticizes everybody and everything.  And to top it off, the CYT invites us to his hotel room when Fred isn't around.  He gets his comeuppance.













7. When I was working at a juvenile detention camp, a boy named Chazz told me he wanted a day pass to go to his boyfriend's birthday party.  That's not what he wanted.













8.  Outing the Medieval Knight Lucien, who belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism and claimed that there were "no gay people in the Middle Ages." Ok, that may have happened during my semester in Nashville.














9. The Worst Date in West Hollywood History, with brunch, a cruise on a yacht, dinner at the French Quarter, a jazz club, and other festivities.  None of which went right.

10. Getting stranded on the Isle of Dogs at a gay Jewish conference in London.  It wasn't a lot of fun at the time, but it makes for a good story now.










11. Back in Rock Island for the holidays, reuniting with my old grade school bully, who had grown up considerably.