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The implication was that gay sex was like cigarettes, something that could kill you. I understood that celibacy made his death seem like a fluke-bad luck-like dying of lung cancer decades after you quit smoking. This was the first time I encountered that word, and she told me what it meant. He had, my mother explained, been “celibate” for several years. John’s death was presented as something of a mystery. Long before I ever set foot in a bar, I knew that Montrose was where the bars were. Montrose was seedy the houses were cheap and it had tattoo parlors and “adult bookstores,” which I later figured out were different from bookstores for adults. The people who lived in them were often referred to as “artistic”-a word which, I later figured out, meant gay. Unlike my own, more homogeneous community, inhabited by people like my parents-straight white professionals with a couple of kids-Montrose was what we would later call “diverse.” Ratty apartment complexes stood alongside old mansions. Montrose was developed just west of downtown Houston in the 1910s.
![beautiful gay men making love beautiful gay men making love](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/58/b0/f8/58b0f8598553804ad83df9aea44b4957.jpg)
My earliest memories of gay people came from watching a neighborhood. But the old language used to express them was on its way out, and those who hated homosexuals knew to say “religious freedom” or “family values” instead of plain old “faggot.” 4Įven before I graduated from high school, I had seen the radical change in attitudes toward homosexuals. There was still no lack of haters, but in the social and educational world that I was brought up in, people had gotten the memo that it was no longer cool to say derogatory things about homosexuals. And in 1994, gayness was considered far less novel than it had been even a few years before.