Since it's prom season, here's a prom story--even though it happened 51 years ago.

My hometown (population at the time about 1600) was proud of many things: we had two parks, one with an antique carousel, tennis courts, and later a swimming pool.  We had our own library.  On summer nights, the high school band performed concerts in a downtown park.  For Christmas, there was always a large tree at the intersection of the two two-block long main streets.  The big celebration of the year, though, was Scandinavian Days.  People drove from miles around for authentic Norwegian cooking, especially lutefisk and kumla.  As one of my friends said, it was like Beaver Cleaverville.  One of the objects of pride was that we had our own movie theater.  It was originally called the "Opera House," like so many buildings erected in the 19th century American Midwest by towns striving for respectability and sophistication.  The theater showed one film on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evenings, and a different film on Friday and Saturday nights.  When I was little, the entrance for kids cost a dime. 

The theater was run for decades by one family: a mother (Dora, I think) and her two unmarried sons, Dick and Virgil, who lived above the movie house.  When there were movies, Dick sold tickets, Dora ran the concession stand, and Virgil projected the films.  During the movies, Dick often patrolled the balcony, which was off limits and thus an object of temptation for all of us.  The family was respected in town; after all, they kept our movie theater going, but they were also the object of some gossip, since the living arrangments seemed a bit odd.  Dora wasn't seen around town very much and didn't seem particularly friendly.  Virgil consistently wore overalls, even though he wasn't a farmer or a mechanic and didn't seem to do anything except project the movies four times a week.  He rarely spoke to anyone.  It was Dick who was the respectable one.  He worked for an insurance company and always was dressed in a suit and tie.  He was the sociable one.  He was also the one person in town who everyone knew or suspected was "queer," as they said then.  Not that people actually said it, or at least not very often.  But somehow it was understood.

When it was prom time, the tradition was that the junior class put on the prom for the seniors.  That meant decorating the lunch room, serving the dinner, hiring a band, and organizing a midnight movie that was supposed to keep randy teenagers out of trouble.  The theme that year was South Pacific or Bali Hai.  I remember painting (badly) murals on butcher paper which we taped to the walls.  Serving the seniors was a nightmare for me.  My hands, like those of my father, have always shaken, a condition that used to be called Intention Tremor (they shake more when you're conscious of intending to do something), but is now called Benign Essential Tremor.  I carried one plate or one glass at a time from the kitchen to the tables, the drinks always slopping over the rim, while my classmates blithely carried several plates at a time.  After dinner we cleared away the tables and there was the dance--not the "sock hop" without shoes which was the norm for high school dances, but more formal, the seniors dressed up, shoes allowed.

I was the president of the junior class, so I was in charge of organization, including arrangements for the midnight movie.  So Dick, the proprietor of the theater, and I made an appointment for an afternoon meeting.  I remember climbing the stairs to the family's apartment above the theater; it all seemed rather exotic.  When I knocked at the door, Dick appeared dressed only in a kimono-like dressing gown.  I thought I must be early and said I could come back later, but he insisted that I was on time.  None of the rest of the family was about.  We talked for a while, as his robe seemed to become looser and looser.  After a while, he asked me if I'd like to see the old props that were stored downstairs behind the movie screen, and I said yes and followed him to an area few had seen.  Nothing happened, though the possibilities were clear, and I finally left.  I never told anyone about the experience.

This isn't a story about potential sexual predation.  I was just as interested in sex as most of the other twenty-one boys in my class; it was just that my interests lay in a different direction.  Although I wasn't exactly "out" to myself, I wasn't an innocent.  I had never fantasized about a woman in my life; my Portnoy-like adventures always focused on men.  In some ways, I was "confused" (there was certainly no public discussion of being gay in 1962, nothing but derogatory, locker room jokes), but at another level, I knew what I wanted.  Had something happened, I wouldn't have been a "victim."

But as I look back on the story, what strikes me is the desperation of what it must have been like for Dick to live in such a small town and the chance he was perhaps willing to take that afternoon.  What if something had happened?  Did he think it would just be once and that no one would ever know?  That I wouldn't ever speak of it?  Did he think there would be some sort of continuing liaison that could be kept secret?  What sort of life did a gay man live in such a setting in 1962 that he was almost willing to take his chances, to gamble so much?

But nothing did happen, and I kept my mouth shut.  The prom went on, and most of us went to see what must have been "South Pacific."  What else could we have chosen given the theme, though it's hard to imagine that that was a popular choice?  A few, of course, sneaked off for more exciting moments.  After serving the dinner, the juniors were allowed to go the dance and the movie.  My date's name (and I'm not embellishing here) was Racy Peters.