Empty Promises

that Larry wasn’t sick at all, much less suffering from a fatal malignancy. Faced with the facts, he admitted that he’d made it all up.
    Larry had always had great difficulty managing his money. That spring of his twenty-ninth year, he was so deep in debt that he decided to declare bankruptcy. His life was in a shambles. That was why he had vowed to make an entirely new start. His first step had been to reveal his gay lifestyle to his family. Next, he decided to leave Santa Barbara and move to Seattle, Washington. He didn’t have a job waiting for him in the Emerald City, but he had a friend and lover there. If their relationship was to move to the next step, he needed to head north and give it a chance. And so he left the sunny climate of Santa Barbara for the misty rain and bright green filigree of leaves that meant spring was coming to Seattle.
    Larry soon found a job as a library assistant at the Suzzallo Library on the University of Washington campus. The money wasn’t great, but the job meant security and he was popular with his co-workers. He found an apartment in one of the big old houses that lined the street across from the west end of the campus.
    The move might have been a mistake; Larry and his former lover found they couldn’t ignite the cool ashes of their relationship. And one or the other of them always seemed to be jealous about something. It was more a relief than a disappointment when Larry walked away for good.
    He wasn’t lonesome; he had many friends of both sexes, and he received a ton of mail from friends in Santa Barbara. He was working his way out of bankruptcy, managing on his small salary, taking the bus because he had no car, and, perhaps surprisingly, enjoying his Spartan lifestyle and the new ambience of Seattle.
    Larry Duerksen was not into cruising, that danger-fraught practice of seeking rapid and anonymous sex in the shadows of the gay world. He wasn’t looking for casual pickups or tawdry rest room encounters; he was hoping to find someone he could really love. In his tweed jackets with leather-patched elbows, Larry looked more like a young professor or a graduate student than a library assistant. He longed for someone he could look up to, someone strong and competent who could help him organize his life.
    The decade of the eighties was fast approaching and there were oceanic changes in the mores and popular culture of America. In the summer of 1979, as Larry followed the media’s coverage of events at Fort Lewis—the huge army base south of Tacoma—he was mightily impressed. For so many painful years, he had hidden his homosexuality, and when he felt close to exploding with guilt and depression, he shared it only with his immediate family. Now he read about twenty-one-year-old Gareth Stuart Leifbach, who was risking his whole army career by not only admitting he was gay but daring the army to do anything about it. Gareth Leifbach was making headlines all over America. His was the kind of controversial story that the media loved. He had been a perfect soldier during his two years of service, and no one had suspected that, like Larry Duerksen, he had a secret life. Larry could not imagine what might have happened to his air force career if he had ever let any of his barracks-mates know his secret. But here was Gareth Leifbach telling the whole world. Larry may have felt some envy of Leifbach’s almost-celebrity status; he himself had always loved being in the limelight.
    The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that Gareth Leifbach revealed his homosexuality when he learned that an old friend from Michigan was having trouble getting into the army because he was gay. Leifbach went to his commander and pointed out that his gayness hadn’t interfered with his performance as a soldier. He felt it was grossly unfair that the military should bar men and women simply because of their sexual orientation.
    Leifbach was handsome, a top-seeded player on the army tennis team, who had attained the rank of private first class. No one in his unit knew he was homosexual, and he had never seen any reason to mention it before. But now he had a cause and a friend who needed help.
    Initially, Gareth Leifbach’s revelations about his sex life seemed to have backfired on him. Not only was his friend refused admittance to the army but Gareth himself faced discharge. The U.S. Army had decreed that homosexuality was entirely incompatible with military service. Although there were certainly