All that remained to complete my coming out was to tell my parents.  The draft board hastened that process along.  During my first year in graduate school, grad students got an automatic deferment from the draft, but that soon ended as more and more troops were needed to go to Vietnam.  As important as what happened was in my life, I don't remember the exact year.  I think it was 1967 or 68, nor do I remember whether the lottery had been instituted and I drew a low number or whether some other circumstance led to my being drafted.  But I got my notice that I was to report for my pre-induction physical.  As someone who had spent a lot of time protesting the war (and someone who did not want to kill or be killed), I knew that I wasn't going to go.  One popular alternative was to flee to Canada or Sweden, so I started investigating that possibility.  But according to popular myths, there were other ways to avoid the draft.  I remember getting up in the dark and meeting the bus that was to take us to Oklahoma City for the physical.  I had been told that drinking a lot of Coke would increase the sugar in your urine to unacceptable levels.  I drank two two-liter bottles, and sure enough, the sugar level was too high.  All that meant, however, was that I had to go to the OU health center every day for a week to have the level tested, and eventually it returned to normal levels.

I was called again.  This time the Coke--in addition to making the wait for the physical very uncomfortable--raised my blood pressure.  Again, I had to spend a week making daily visits to the health center; again, the level returned to normal.  I was called for a third time to make the trip to OKC, and this time I decided to fess up and "check the box," shorthand for declaring on the form that I was homosexual.   With hands even shakier than normal, I filled out the form, checking the box and waiting my turn to present it to the officer in charge.  When I was called, he took one look at the form and called out to the 200 men in the room, "Hey, we've got a queer over here."  I'm sure I was quaking.  "How do you know you're queer?" he asked.  Always quick on my feet, I said, "Experience."  "What kind of experience?" he continued.  Even more deftly, I said, "Homosexual experience."  He told me to go sit down and wait to be called by the psychologist.  Inwardly, though shaken, I felt a sense of relief: the worst was over and the rest would be smooth sailing.  The psychologist wasn't convinced, however.  He said there was no reason to believe my declaration and I would have to find a psychologist to write a letter confirming that I was gay.

I thought that at least this would be easy, but every psychologist I called in Norman said s/he wouldn't write the letter without treating me first.  I argued that I didn't want or need treatment, that I was quite happy being gay, but I made no headway.  Finally, a friend said he knew a hippie-ish psychologist at the federal penitentiary in El Reno, Oklahoma.  So I got someone to drive me to El Reno, had a fifteen-minute meeting with the shrink, and waited for him to write to the draft board.   (When I finally saw a copy of his letter, it was so filled with errors of spelling and construction that I was afraid the draft board would think it was fake.  They didn't.)

I was registered with the draft board in Iowa, so the letter exempting me from the draft went to my home address there.  And that meant that  I soon got a call from my parents asking why my draft status had gone from 1-A to 4-F.  So the moment was at hand, and I explained to first my mother and then my father that their son was gay and had used that fact to get out of the draft.  Much to my surprise, my father took it better than my mother, who seemed most concerned that the word would get out in Ames, where my father worked, thus ruining his reputation.  I can't imagine that my parents hadn't suspected, but at least now it was out in the open.  I don't remember how the conversation ended, but it must have been awkward.  My friend Darrell still recalls how that evening I shlepped my portable, manual typewriter to his apartment and spent what seemed like hours typing out a letter--several pages long, I'm sure--to my parents.  The next few conversations must have been equally strained, but the 600 miles between us made them easier.  And eventually my parents came around and accepted the reality.  Since I was an only child, their decision was probably easier.  I felt a little guilt since they would never have grandchildren.  But otherwise, it was the final step in coming out and led to two big sighs of relief--one, that they finally knew and I could live honestly, and two, that I wasn't going to Vietnam or Canada.  It helped, too, I spent the entire 1970s with one man, and my parents liked him very much and soon thought of us as a couple.  His parents felt the same way about me, so all was well.

I've listened to a lot of coming out stories in my life, and mine seems rather unremarkable, easier in many ways than most.  It wasn't always without difficulty,  but neither was it as traumatic as many I know.