Composing a Further Life

it would be important to include something about the ways in which gay men and women look at their lives in their later years and at the place of caring for each other and contributing to society in their choices. A colleague put me in touch with a gay couple, over sixty, one of whom at one time had been married and had living children and grandchildren, who were willing to talk to me about their lives and to appear in print without disguise, like others I have worked with on this book. So I flew to San Francisco to stay as a guest in the home of Dan Jepson and Michael Crowe.
    Dan lives in Newark, California, a suburb of San Francisco, with his partner of more than a decade, Michael. They have a small house with a charming garden, carefully tended, in which they have installed a murmuring fountain that flows into a fishpond. Most of Dan’s life has revolved around music. On the day I arrived, he and Michael took me to a choir concert in which one of their friends was singing. The following morning, Dan and I sat down to record in the shade of the garden.
    Dan knew I had written sympathetically about the gay community in several contexts, including a book about the HIV/AIDS epidemic, coauthored with my biologist colleague Richard Goldsby, and he understood why I had been introduced to him in particular, so it is not surprising that, as he told the story of his life, he emphasized his development as a gay man. It struck me that this was what I have come to call a learning narrative, this one dealing with an unfolding understanding of his sexual orientation, what it meant to be gay, and how to live as a gay man in American society, a lonely process with no real guidance, which led to a lifelong concern with mentoring and heightened my awareness of how much learning is taken for granted when fitting in comes easily. At the same time, I heard another through line in his narrative, one of which he was perhaps less aware, a theme of taking responsibility that went back to his early childhood. The story began, however, with a note of rejection, another theme that recurred.
    Dan started out as if he were creating a legal document: “I, Dan Jepson, was born about seventy years ago, April 6, 1938, in Douglas, Wyoming. It was not an easy birth. In a sense, I was rejected from the beginning. I was unusually large and my mother is very small, and at one point they gave the choice to my father and said, ‘Which do you want, the mother or the baby?’ And my father said, ‘I didn’t marry the baby.’ This was all apocryphal. I wasn’t there. So I came out … but I was a mess. They pulled me out with forceps, and they threw me on this other table and then worked on my mother, who was hemorrhaging like crazy, and it was only later that the nurse said, ‘Oh, the baby’s alive.’
    “My mother didn’t have a full uterus, and she had been told she would never have any children. She had three in the end, but all of us are missing minor things, like when I had a hand injury, they were going to take a donor area from my hand and restring it, and they discovered that, although everybody has two tendons that work their fingers, I only have one. The spare tendon is missing. And my sister had a very weak fourth finger, so playing the piano was difficult for her, though it wasn’t hard for me.”
    The family was not well off, but they were rich in relatives (Dan had some forty first cousins), some of whom moved into the household at various periods. Dan’s grandfather had lost his farm in 1933, and his father had had a car repossessed in 1936 because of a single missed payment. Financial concerns were increased by living in a small town where class was important: “It was very much a haves and have-nots kind of thing, coming out of the depression,” Dan said. There was little work for Dan’s father in Douglas, and in 1941 the family packed up, planning to move west, but ended up going only as far as Riverton, Wyoming, less than two hundred miles from Douglas, where his father got a job as a roustabout on the oil rigs. Eventually the family purchased a small house, which they improved over time, cultivating a substantial garden on adjacent land.
    Dan and his brother went to college, but only one other cousin was able to go that far in school. Still, throughout his childhood, along with the anecdotes about his difficult birth, Dan heard comparisons made between himself and older cousins in the neighborhood. “This had some effect