Lucky

All in all, I think I'm one of the luckiest people I have ever known. Essentially, I never made a dime. The most I ever made in salary was thirty thousand a year twice, both of those times it was fairly short-lived. I have failed more times than you can imagine. It all started in the 1940s when everybody realized that in first grade I couldn't even understand the alphabet, no matter how hard I tried. No one knew how to deal with that, not even the experts at the different universities where I was taken. The diagnosis of dyslexia didn't come until later. Now if you're dyslexic, there are myriad ways of helping you, but back then everybody just threw up their hands. Then I realized on top of that there was something else. Of course it wasn't called "gay" in the '40s and '50s. It was called homosexuality, plus a slew of terrible names like Fagot, Queer, Sissy, and other epithets. I was scared to death that I really might be, so every time I tried to open that door I would slam it shut again and I stayed in that damn closet. I certainly thought I would cure myself, but as research shows, that just cannot happen. I wrote this book because I feel that I lived through some amazing things, and I certainly hope that it might give young people the courage to live life with joy and not have some of the weird problems of growing up that I did in the '30s, '40s, '50s and '60s, being dyslexic and gay.