MB: Are there other things like that — because not only has it been 21 years, but you’ve actually moved across the state, and things are really different in Boston.
Yeah. Vacation. I never drove. You know, things like that. You know, I was only 19 and I was just working to try to, you know, have a little pocket money. So I never got to do a lot of stuff.
I’ve got a friend that sent me the Massachusetts registry book so I had time to study that [to get a license] and look at the different rules that have changed and the signs that have changed, because that’s another thing that’s changed a lot: there are more symbols now than there is writing. It’s kind of a time warp in a lot things. Um, bathrooms — automatic hand-washing things, you know. I’m like, looking around, where do I wash my — I’m looking, I’m touching things, I’m like, “Okay …” (laughter)
So you know, there’s a lot of that stuff. You know, finding a light switch. In a cell, you’ve got one light switch. You know where it is, you know, and I’m kind of fumbling around, “Okay, how do I get where.” So things like that are kind of uncomfortable. But you learn, you know, you take it as an accomplishment. You know, that’s — I mean, I’m a firm believer in that’s how you think of things, is how you’re going to respond.
MB: When you were in prison were you able to keep up with sort of current events and news?
Yeah, I always tried to keep a subscription to USA Today, a magazine called The Week, you know, and Smithsonian Magazine and a few other things. Just to try to keep myself educated to what was going on. I like the money section of the paper. I’ve kind of learned a little bit about the market and stuff like that. I like numbers.
9/11 was terrible … just to watch the situation unravel. Being an innocent man in prison, seeing something like that made me at least appreciate that I was safe and wasn’t being harmed. Things like that can put you back into perspective sometimes.
CT: Did you have much sense of how the gay world was changing during those years? Were you able to get a sense of that from prison? USA Today didn’t much cover that.
No, they didn’t cover much of it, but — you know, some of my gay friends had sent me different magazines and different stuff that covers gay topics. And it’s sad to say that, you know, the gay community as a whole (not all gay men; some, but a lot smaller amount than I would have hoped for), did not show all that much support. And I think it’s because the topic with gay men and child molestation is still very scary for the gay community. It’s something that they don’t want to touch. So a lot of the gay papers would not cover it, because it wasn’t the political thing to do, the friendly thing to do. So I think when one underprivileged part of society starts feeling like they’ve moved up the ladder a little bit but won’t deal with tougher topics, then I think they’re only failing themselves. Because, you know, a lot of the magazines wanted to do the fluff stuff. The Advocate wanted to do, you know, the movie review instead of … so, in a lot of ways I think that the gay community has really strived. But I think when it comes to tough things, they shy away.
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