Trapped: Memoirs of a Gay Boy in the Fifties and Sixties

By Richard Bagarozy

Experience:

The wonder of the earliest childhood memories.

The delight of the unexpected discovery and joy of sexual feelings and sexual play.

The overwhelming power of first love.

The brutal and completely unexpected shock of homosexual insight.

The unrelenting prejudice and judgment of a hostile society.

The persistent and literally paralyzing fear of exposure.

The profound sadness of loneliness and of alone knowing what I was.

The unquenchable fear of complete separation from God's love.

The hopelessness of a child facing eternal damnation.

The chronic persistent worry of what family, friends, and peers would think of me and do if my cover was ever blown.

Sexual abuse: unendurable confusion and loss of innocence

Spiritual explosion: understanding, gratitude, and peace

This is a letter to the heterosexual world toward understanding and acceptance on behalf of present and future generations of gay children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636924533

Book preview

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Trapped

Memoirs of a Gay Boy in the Fifties and Sixties

Richard Bagarozy

Copyright © 2021 Richard Bagarozy

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-63692-452-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63692-453-3 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Getting Past the Trauma of Civil Commitment

My Experience Taking the PPG

The Most Malignant Cancer Prejudice

The Source of Perfect Love

Tag, a Poem

Beauty

Touched by God A Memoir of Yoland T. by Her Son

Summary by the author

Postscript to the book and ushering in a more welcoming and compassionate future

With great love, I dedicate this book to my mother, Yolande T., who passed away April 18, 2016, at the age of eighty-eight. I love her and miss her so. The world, for me, is just not the same without her. In this book, the reader will get to know both the ups and downs I experienced with her in life and the profound spiritual experience that was a gift from God upon her death. May God continue to bless her always as well as the readers of this book.

From the Author

I was born in New York City in October 1948, and I lived the first seventeen years of my life at 230 West 105th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam in Manhattan. It is those first seventeen years of my life that this book deals with. There are some brief descriptions from subsequent years, and those years may well be elaborated on future works, but this book’s focus is about the impact on a child coping with the gay experience.

For my first four grades in grammar school, I attended Ascension Catholic School several blocks away from our Manhattan Apartment. It was taught by the sisters of charity for the first three years (which were coeducational). For grades four to eight classes were either all boys (taught by the Christian Brothers) or all girls (who remained with the sisters).

After I completed fourth grade, my parents then transferred me to Mount Saint Michael’s Academy, a Catholic boarding school in the Bronx taught by the Marist Brothers. I attended the Mount (as the students referred to the school) from grades five to eight, and I boarded there in a dormitory of fifty boys during the school week and then returned home on the weekends. It was during the latter part of those years that I became friends with JL, was completely taken by his beauty, and fell in love with him.

It was also during the latter part of these years that I encountered the shock of realizing I was a homosexual. This insight, along with confronting the prejudice of a hostile society, caused me unimaginable shame and fear for which I was grossly unprepared.

In this book, I attempt to recreate for the reader the thoughts, feelings, and experiences that bombarded me during that period and hopefully also to sift out some additional modicum of understanding as to the indelible lifetime impact those experiences had on me.

As I revisit that period, I can recall in my mind’s eye times of great excitement but also of trauma. I recall the following:

The unexpected delight of sexual feelings and sexual play.

The overwhelming power of love.

The brutal, unexpected shock of homosexual insight.

The unrelenting prejudice and judgment of society.

The paralyzing fear of possibly being exposed.

The profound sadness of alone knowing what I was.

The pounding fear of complete separation from God’s love.

The hopelessness of facing eternal damnation.

The persistent worry of what my family, friends, and peers would think of me and do if my cover was ever blown.

I disclose my story openly first in support of other gay human beings who have experienced significant suffering in their lives as a result of the scourge of prejudice but primarily to give a bird’s-eye view to receptive heterosexuals who are open to trying to understand and empathize so that one day, open-minded readers of this book will find themselves in a position to provide wisdom and comfort to a struggling gay child by way of the indispensable gift of understanding.

The reader will glean from references within several parts of this book some of the events in my life subsequent to my graduation from high school, such as me spending time in federal prison, being civilly committed, my mother’s death, and the corresponding spiritual experience I was blessed with around the moment of her death that has changed all the perspectives of my life. This further led me to finding new insight into the first two chapters of Ephesians in the Bible. I did not know God as a teenager, despite a Catholic education, as I know and trust him now.

However, what the reader gleans about my subsequent years is not developed any further here. That is for future books. I have much else to share about some of those and subsequent experiences, over fifty additional years’ worth.

It is my firm belief that we all have a story to tell and that in each of us, that story has the capacity at times to be spellbinding. As I reread what I have written in this book, I find myself reexperiencing literally the whole range of emotions I was pummeled with all those years ago. I perceived the reader may also be so moved. So I am optimistic that this story will find an audience.

Profound thanks to Newman Springs Publishing. I couldn’t have put my story together and put it out there without their experience, help, and expertise each step of the way.

Finally, to the readers of this book, thank you for your precious time and willingness to share in the life and experiences of a gay child who, God willing, has come through it all with a modicum of growth and wisdom.

Sincerely,

Richard Bagarozy

P.S. My twelve or so paintings displayed in this book are for sale and are signed simply: R. Bag. (See Etsy.com/shop/rbagpaintings).

Preface

Do you know what a homo is?

Sure, it’s someone who walks around in the Bowery with a cup begging for money.

No, that’s a hobo. What’s a homo?

I don’t know. What’s a homo?

A homo is a man who loves other men, and a lesbian is a woman who loves other women.

Ew, how gross!

To the best of my recollection, the conversation in the preface of this book took place during the summer of 1961 or 1962 when I was twelve or thirteen years old. I was asked the question out of the blue by fourteen-or-fifteen-year-old IS, a friend of mine at the time and the daughter of the landlord of the beach house in Ship Bottom, New Jersey, where my parents and my uncle and his family each rented apartments several summers in a row. It is only now that I wonder if she asked that fateful question because she had some inkling at the time that I might be gay perhaps because I didn’t appear to have the same interest in girls that my friends did. The conversation later proved to be a catalyst, ultimately exposing my homosexuality to me and resulting in great hardship, confusion, and unhappiness in my life.

I generally have fond memories of those summers at the Jersey Shore. Throughout that period, I had good friends and became very close to my fourteen-year-old male cousin (TB).

Prior to these years, my parents, my younger brothers, and I had spent our summers at my grandmother’s country property in the Catskill Mountains in Hunter, New York. I had loved that place also and remembered it as a veritable garden of Eden in which my brother, my friends, and I hunted for frogs in the frog pond on the property, played with our dog, explored the forest, swam in the creek running thorough our land, and simply imagined all kinds of play scenarios from battling aliens from outer space to fighting Indians. When I was eight, I recall that my best friend in the Catskills was a twelve-year-old also named Richard (RL). We all called him Big R, and I was Little R. RL’s family had leased one of the ten bungalows on the property my grandmother rented out each summer. He was a friendly, gentle boy who was smart, honorable, and trustworthy. I recall that I grew to love RL, and each day, I sought him out to be with him and to share the adventures of the day with him and our other friends.

I remember making these summer trips to Hunter from the time I was five or six years old until I was eight (summer of 1957). At age nine (summer of 1958), my brother and I were packed off to a summer camp for boys because my mother had been contracted that summer to sing on television in the Dominican Republic. Camp Hilltop was also in upstate New York albeit far from my grandmother’s property, and although I first resented having to go and be separated from my parents, I ended up making new friends there and learning many new things such as riding a horse, arts and crafts, improving significantly as a swimmer, and exploring nature with an adult teacher and guide, so even today, I have fond memories of that summer and of Camp Hilltop.

After that summer at Camp, I believe we then went to the Catskills one additional summer (1959) and that we then started going to the Jersey Shore in the summer of 1960 when I was eleven and continued going there for six consecutive years. If these memories are incorrect, it may have been that we didn’t start going to the Jersey Shore until the summer of 1961 when I was twelve. At any rate, to the best of my recollection, we went there every summer thereafter through the summer of 1965 when I was sixteen years old.

I seem to recall my early relationship with my brother GB was fairly good in that, as children, we used to play with each other. However, as will be explained below, when we got older, we frequently argued and wrestled with each other.

In September of my ninth year (1958), after my summer adventures at Camp Hilltop had ended, I began fifth grade at Mount St. Michael in Bronx, New York, a Catholic boarding school taught by the Marist Brothers in which during the week, I boarded in a dormitory of approximately fifty boys and on weekends went home to my family’s apartment at 105th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam in New York City where I lived with my parents and my two younger brothers (GB, two years younger than I, and JB, nine years younger). GB was accepted into Mount St. Michael the next year (September 1959).