Leaving Australia - Clifton Park, New York 1960 – 1965

• Original 2003 & Updated 04 October 2021 & re-read-edited 21 July 2025 Adelaide, South Australia

  Clifton Park , New York  1960 – 1965

   

  There was a technique for meeting girls at the movies. Of course, the first thing was to adjust my eyes to the dark theatre. I am still amazed to this day that always – and I don’t remember a time it wasn’t so, at any movie theatre in Schenectady, Albany or Troy – all the cities that I could get to at one time or another – there was a girl sitting alone. Now remember I was between 13 and 16 during this time – this is not something an older person was doing but one teenager meeting another teenager. I would always sit behind the person I wanted to sit with. Sometimes I would walk down the aisle and back up if there were more than a few in the theatre.
  
  Partner choice is so excitingly reptilian.
  
  Having evolved past that stage – the reptilian stage – not the sucked into money and soul losing trips – was an evolutionary mistake. What a mess we have made of the planet since. Adolescence is the reptilian cycle of the individual. Then we become filled with wisdom as we rape this planet.
  
  Eventually I would settle in a row behind someone. After a while I would lean forward and ask if I could sit next to her. Most often the answer was yes – if it were no, I would go elsewhere until I succeeded. Touching was easy – at least holding hands would occur within minutes. How we remember things is always different than how they probably were. But my memory has always been that it was not long before we would be kissing. This has held true throughout my life. If I am not intimate with a woman within a short period after meeting, then it never happens, and we may become friends, but we will never become lovers. It may have something to do with my Methodist upbringing but at this point in my story I have yet to connect the dots to that one. Some of the girls I sat with would let me touch them but not as many as those who were willing to kiss. I remember only one time getting a phone number from someone and meeting her at her house – a girl I met at a picture theatre in Albany. I do not recall what happened so long ago but the memory of meeting girls at the picture theatre and kissing when I was supposed to be praising the Lord at a youth meeting stands out as one of my few triumphs over my strict childhood. I was able to get to the movies at other times too; if my family went to the city (Albany, Troy or Schenectady: insignificant, needy, forgettable little cities in upstate New York) I would have the same results. We are the people who did free love in the 1960’s and 1970’s, then settled down, and had families in the 1980s. Well, I sort of settled down, sort of had a family. If being a single parent and moving ten times in ten years is being settled, then I was settled. At least it was in the same state and that was only because the South Australian Family Court would not let me take my children back to the States or even to another state in Australia. By the time the year 2000 and the years beyond came along, I joined the ranks of people who started dating people they met online. The 1960s sexual revolution moved to the Internet.
  
  

  The same people who had many partners three and four decades ago were now having many partners on the Internet dating cycle. It was the same type of meeting too. Instead of sitting behind someone in a picture theatre, then sitting with them, followed by a kiss and a feeling of breasts and/or whatever other areas became accessible, we were looking at hundreds of photographs and statistics of each other and sending out emails and then meeting. If the sex did not happen in the first or two times together then it was on to the next photograph on the Internet dating service. With my life partner I am now with it was she who saw my picture on the internet and wrote me, we met, and it was on our second date, in the back seat of a government car... Now we are married and living in a foreign country that is only partially foreign, because even though I am now a duel citizen, I am still an American first, I suppose. Other foreign countries have been our life too such as China (three years) and many others between China, Australia, and the United States. I am always a foreigner. Who would want to be anything else? Even growing up in the small farming area of Clifton Park I never felt local. I was just visiting. I was only on a temporary visa. Just hanging out with some people I never really got to know and surely who never took the effort to get to know me.
  
  

  I would leave the movie theatre usually around six PM – I think that is when most people I met had to leave – and after a couple of hours of touching I was too sore to sit around longer either. Some afternoons I would be with one person then after they left, I would hook up with another person. None of these encounters got to the sexual part because we were in a movie theatre, and we did not leave to do anything more. It seems so strange to think of this now as movie theatres are smaller. I liked the ones in the 1960s with balconies the best because it was easy to see if someone – like an usher – was trolling around. In Australia and the States, it is rare to see a movie theatre with a balcony anymore. Old movie theatres are now divided up with several theatres taking their place. In addition, more theatres are a part of the shopping center complexes. With the women’s movement of the 1960s and beyond the thought of a girl as a willing prey is quite out of fashion but at one point in my history I remember when they were. But then again, they were not fully prey but indeed they were willing explorers in the first step of freedom. Maybe every girl I met was from a repressed Christian background – from a Catholic school or an escapee from church services. Maybe even some of the girls I met in the darkened theatre I was a lover with a few years later in New York City, New Orleans, San Francisco or any number of cities I once lived and loved in. I lived on a nude beach on Maui for several months too – but that was later.
  
  I had a somewhat similar experience on Saturday nights when we went to youth church services in neighbouring towns and villages. There was a girl in our church who was my age and we would get under a blanket in the back seat of my family’s station wagon and have quite a good time all the way to church and all the way back if was winter and it was dark by the time we left – and of course who would not need a blanket in New York in the winter in a cold car? If it was summer, we just used the ride home at night to explore and we had to do so without a blanket. Often the services would be an hour or so away – but the girl and I never had anything to do with each other outside of going to church Saturday nights.

  I used to deliver newspapers to her house and a couple of times I suggested I come in and we continue what we were doing on Saturday night, but she was not interested. I never quite understood that one accepts that it must have been the safest option for her. What was remarkable was that my parents in the front seat never paid any notice of what was going in the back seat. My mother would sing hymns, and my father would just drive through the night. Another remarkable thing was that there would be other people in the seat in front of us – our station wagon had three rows – and they never seemed to notice – except for my brother who constantly threatened to tell on me –but then he could not understand why I was so interested in girls. I did not know he was gay at the time. He had a short life dying of AIDS in New York City in 1991.  Now I miss him but back then I was just mean to him. Two people who knew him well have been working on a book about him for the past several years. He was a significant artist I was just a slut. No one will read my book, but my brother will be seen as gifted.

  
  
  My brother used to dress as a woman (above) I dressed as a hobo for Halloween – that is how our life turned out. He died of HIV/AIDS in 199 1- I was a bit of a hobo or I suppose a hippie.

   

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  NEXT: The Physical Me

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