Saying goodbye is always hard, but this farewell was especially so. When we arrived at the Pan American terminal of Miami International Airport, I knew in my heart that it would be best to get our goodbyes over with as quickly as possible, but I had promised Jacqueline to walk her to her departure gate. I kept wiping away the tears flowing down her sullen face while we were walking toward the escalator. Her return to Chicago was an emotional ordeal. As we neared the check-in counters on the second floor, my partner decided to stay back a few feet to give us a moment to say goodbye alone. I just wanted to get her to her gate, hoping she wouldn't make another scene, begging to stay like she had in the car on the way to the airport. She was shaking so badly that I stopped and gave her a kiss on her cheek and a hug for moral support. She held me tightly. When Jacqueline let go, she looked at me and started to say something, but at that same moment, commotion broke out all around us. Someone yelled, "Oh my God, he's got a gun!" A couple of women ran by us screaming. The escaping crowds were frantic, pushing one another out of the way. A man tripped and took several people down with him as he ran down the escalator the wrong way. Then six shots rang out, one right after the other.

Security ordered an immediate shutdown of the terminals. Except for police, medical responders, and news media, everyone was told to wait outside. All flights had been put on hold until there was an all clear. Loud, screeching alarms were going off, and a recorded announcement blared over the speaker system, repeatedly informing people, "This is the airport emergency authority. Miami International Airport has been placed on heightened alert. Please exit all terminals now. This is the airport emergency authority. Miami International Airport has been placed on heightened alert. Please exit all terminals now." The advisory, along with the deafening sounds coming from the rotor blades of multiple helicopters that filled the sky, only added to the chaos both inside and outside the terminals. Fleeing travelers were running and screaming. In the melee, dozens of people were trampled while trying to exit. Soon, the place was filled with police. They began yelling through their megaphones, ordering everyone to exit in an orderly fashion. The police tried hard to keep some semblance of calm, but they lost control of the crowd within the first few minutes.

The shooting was the latest murder scene of the day in Miami, but that was the first time one ever happened inside Miami International Airport. It was Friday, February 13, 1981. When the shooting stopped, four people lay on the floor in pools of blood. Within minutes, a team of medical emergency responders and the news media arrived. Soon afterward, reporters had taken over the terminal. They talked quickly into their live television cameras, speculating on what had just happened and announcing multiple deaths. It was immediately labeled by the media as the "Friday the 13th Massacre at MIA." When the coroner arrived, he pronounced all four dead. He tagged each body with a number, and ever so carefully, he covered each with a sheet.

I had moved to Miami a month before, on Monday, January 12, 1981. I'd heard lots of stories about the city's problems with drugs and murders, but I didn't let it bother me. I figured the violence only affected the people who were involved in the drug cartels. I couldn't stand the damp, cold, northern weather any longer, and I loved Miami's climate, especially the warm winters. It seemed like the logical place to escape to — a place to begin building my new career. A fifteen-month emotional journey of ups and downs had brought me there. I was ready for a major change in my life. Jacqueline soon followed.

Let me circle back in time and tell you about my life from my teen years to witnessing the scene at Miami International Airport. During my teen years, after puberty arrived, I always knew that I was different from my friends, and it was a constant challenge. The hardest part was trying to understand why I had an attraction to guys while all my friends liked girls. I'd thought about it a lot, but I didn't know anything about people who were queer. That's the name society gave those people years ago before they were labeled as gay. I always heard queers were all very effeminate and psychologically confused. It seemed as though opinions about that subject might change because the United States was in the middle of the sexual revolution, among a lot of other chaos. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. Hate crimes against gays and police harassment were higher than ever. It was okay to beat up a queer or faggot (whichever word you chose and whichever pejorative was the new flavor of the day). The police would set up traps and sting operations to round them up by the dozens. They would be arrested, photographed, and strip- searched — which sometimes led to physical and sexual abuse by perverted police who taunted and laughed with insults while spitting on them. They were treated as less than human and thrown in jail. The police would immediately release all their personal information, along with their mug shot from their arrest report, to the media. It didn't matter if you were guilty or innocent — the law of the land (innocent until proven guilty) didn't apply to faggots. Sometimes, members of the media were invited to go along with the cops for the roundup.

The first time I saw that was on April 10, 1969. I'd just gotten up out of bed and gone into the kitchen to eat a bowl of cereal. My parents were sitting at the table, sipping their morning cups of coffee, holding onto the newspaper together as my father read the shocking morning headline out loud to my mother. They shook their heads in disgust, and he continued reading the article to her with a venom-laced voice.

There were twenty photos of the men arrested. The article told all about the raid the night before at a popular late night gay cruising area in Lincoln Park next to Belmont Harbor. It included some explicit details of what the undercover police did to lure the men in. The negative comments of my parents and the journalist's salacious writing sickened me. I didn't want to stay and listen to my father any longer so I got up, took my half- filled bowl of cereal to the sink, dumped it out, and left the room.

The newspaper story reminded me of game hunters going on a trophy hunt, looking for a particular noxious breed of an animal species — dangerous to all mankind. They had a heyday reporting on it; next to their mug shots were their names, their professions, where they worked, and their addresses. It was the stuff that ruined many people's lives, but that kind of stuff — where suffering was involved — sold lots of newspapers and brought in high ratings for the television channels. Many people lost their jobs, their families disowned them, and most of all they lost their dignity. Some committed suicide, and others were forced to move away to try to restart their lives.

Societies and individuals around the world used all that hate being spread about queers in their churches and governments as permission to kill them. Societies labeled them as freaks of nature. There was little — if any — guilt that followed that kind of treatment against precious human life. Society's intolerance of queers escalated during the late 1960s. There was not much compassion for or use for them. Very few people cared. Everything came to a head on June 28, 1969, in New York City. That was the day gays united and began a revolution. They rebelled after the terrible beatings and multiple arrests they encountered at the hands of the police during the early morning hours at the Stonewall Inn Bar in Greenwich Village. The famous Stonewall Inn Riots erupted that night because gays had had enough of the abuse, name-calling, bullying, arrests, torture, and killings happening all over the world. That's the night the gay movement for equal rights began in earnest in the United States, and it soon spread worldwide. It was never easy, and it continued to be a monumental struggle because the majority of people never stopped using the words queer and faggot when referring to them. Television shows and comedians still made constant innuendos about them. They always painted gay characters as very effeminate.

Cruel words had always been used to try to dehumanize anyone who was different from what society or the church considered the norm. Those things scared me because I never saw myself as being like that. I didn't know anyone else like me I could talk to. I felt all alone. I remember that I prayed to God every day not to let me be queer. I didn't see myself as being a freak or anything like they described those people as being. In the years that followed, most of my gay friends told me they used to do the same thing.

When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I was so scared of being labeled a queer that I would go out into the woods near my house for days on end and yell as loudly as I could in hopes it would strain my vocal chords, making my voice deeper than it was meant to be. I didn't want anyone to think I was one of those people.

I guess you can say I had an epiphany one day that was much stronger than my willpower not to be gay. His name was Jimmy Mahoney. That's when I got my first big crush. I also realized that day that my biggest fear came to fruition. It hit me — I was one of them, one of those people I feared the most of becoming — a queer — and you know what? All that damn praying and all that damn worrying I had done didn't work!

Jimmy was the first person I ever met like me. He was the only one I could talk to about my sexuality. With everything I'd heard and read, I knew that if I was going to make it through my life, I would have to toughen up to protect myself. I would have to be very cautious about my surroundings and those I picked as friends. Jimmy helped ease those fears, yet we both knew that we had to be careful being together. We felt like two normal people, but we never forgot that society didn't look at us like that. It took me a few days to realize there wasn't nothing wrong with us. It was society who had problems with it. Many people had been brainwashed over thousands of years from religious teachings, along with the fear they were taught that we were all sick, psychologically and morally. It was a well-known fact every religion has groups of fanatics who are so deep-seated in their beliefs that they can become dangerous to anyone or anything they oppose. They were the ones who preached the most hate and intolerance against us. They were the ones who taught their followers that it was alright to hurt us. Fear of the unknown had always been the culprit to social struggles in civilization. That helped empower the ego of certain races and cultures to feel superior over other groups. There have always been sectors in society that have been hated for one reason or another. It's human nature to hate a certain group of people because they look different, their religion is different, their skin color is different, or they chose to believe in something different from you.

I accepted the fact I was born gay, and I didn't have any control over that part of my destiny, no matter what anyone said. The one thing I found out for sure in life — everybody had to believe in something; be it a religion, spirituality, or their own thoughts on how they wanted to live in order to get through life. We are all different, but it became very clear to me that not everyone understood that because of all the hate that exists in the world. Too many people are easily persuaded to follow the popular theory of the era of society they are born into.

I knew I had a long fight ahead of me, but from that day on, I embraced it. I understood who I was. After meeting Jimmy, I never doubted my sexuality again. He was real nice, a typical red-haired Irish Catholic import whose family had just immigrated to Chicago from Dublin, Ireland, in March of that year. We met on May Day — Thursday, May 1, 1969. We were in the same grade at St. Bartholomew Catholic High School. My parents were devout Catholics, and their minds were made up from the time my siblings and I were born; we were all going to a Catholic grade school and a Catholic high school. They worked extra hard to save enough money to make that happen. It was very expensive to send your kids to those schools. None of us wanted to go to St. Bartholomew. We fought them, kicking and screaming, during the weeks leading up to the beginning of each school year. In the end, they always won out. We all wanted to go to the local public high school where most of our friends went. The best thing I got from going to that school was meeting Jimmy. He was in Sister Mary Edwin Joseph's classroom, and I was in Brother Paul's. St. Bartholomew was a Jesuit high school with a mixture of Franciscan nuns and Jesuit priests. There weren't enough priests to teach all the classes. Jimmy and I met in the school cafeteria about three weeks before school let out for summer vacation. I'd noticed him a couple of weeks before because he always ate lunch alone. None of the other kids had warmed up to him, and I assumed he was too shy to ask if he could sit with any of them.

Something drew me toward him (probably his good looks and his heavy Irish accent), but I didn't figure that out until I went over and introduced myself to him. Then I understood. It was an immediate attraction. After that, it felt as if we were connected at the hip when we weren't in class. We had a lot of serious talks, mostly about us, acknowledging our feelings for each other. Jimmy and I were very naïve when it came to understanding our sexual emotions. It was first love for both of us, and we weren't going to let anything or anyone separate us. We'd never kissed except for a quick peck on the cheek because we were afraid of getting caught, but that all changed on Friday, May 23, 1969. We lost our virginity to each other on that late spring night. It was Memorial Day weekend, the first weekend of our summer vacation. We spent the weekend house-sitting for one of my parents' friends. We didn't have any books with instructions to tell us what two people of the same sex should do in bed, but it wasn't too difficult. We did what came natural to us. We had already pledged our love to each other a week before, but we never had any place to go and consummate it until that weekend. My parents' friends' house had a wine cellar, and it overflowed with bottles of wine. It was the first time I'd ever seen one of those. Jimmy asked me if I'd ever drunk wine before. He said that in Ireland, his family, including the kids, had a glass of wine with every meal. He said it was very common in Europe. I told him I'd never tried anything with alcohol in it, but I would love to try it for the first time with him. We didn't think they would miss a bottle or two, so we opened one up. Of course, being two teenage boys, we didn't stop until the bottle was empty. After our first glass, Jimmy looked at me with a tender glance, and when I looked back into his eyes, I became hypnotized by them. Then he gave me the most loving kiss. I remember our first kiss more than anything else because it was a feeling I never had before. I never knew a kiss could make you feel so warm and so good. Even at my age, I knew that kiss was the special kind of kiss people who were really in love talked about. We professed our love to each other over and over that night and the next one too.

Jimmy and I made love many times that weekend. I was making love with a guy who was in love with me, and I was in love with him. He was my equal. It was the greatest feeling I'd ever had, and I never wanted it to end. Life was never the same at St. Bartholomew after that.

We had a beautiful relationship and friendship that lasted throughout our senior year of high school. It continued into our first year and a half of being separated while going to different universities. There wasn't a lot to do during summer vacation at that age, except go to the mall or the cinema. We both liked films, so we went to a lot of movies, especially R-rated ones. Lucky for us, one of our friends worked at the neighborhood cinema, and he let us in for free. We never got busted by any of his bosses. We took advantage of the situation and made it our goal to see as many films as possible.