Audio Interview, Larry Fine, February 9, 2013

BRUCE WOOLLEY: This is Bruce Woolley representing

the Shoulders To Stand On Committee of the Gay Alliance

of the Genessee Valley.

It's February 9, 2013, and I'm in Palm Springs.

And I'm visiting with Larry Fine,

who was one of the founders of the Gay Liberation

Front on the River Campus more than forty years ago.

Larry.

LARRY FINE: OK.

Why don't I begin by just saying a little bit about how

I grew up and then how I got to Rochester.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Absolutely.

LARRY FINE: I grew up on Long Island.

I was born in 1950, and I grew up in an upper middle class

Jewish household.

And I had very strong interests in music and in science.

I played the piano.

I was the piano accompanist for the choir from sixth grade on,

but I didn't really see a place for myself in music.

But I wanted to continue my music studies at some point.

And I developed a very strong interest in meteorology,

whether it's instruments on the roof

and all that kind of stuff.

And my plan-- to the extent you can have a plan when you're

in high school-- was that I would

get a bachelor's in physics and then an advanced degree

of some kind in meteorology.

I was a straight-A student, an honor student and all that,

and I took what they call--

I don't know if they still have it today, but at that time

they had something called early decision.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yep, absolutely.

LARRY FINE: And it was determined somehow--

I don't remember anymore how this was determined--

but that University of Rochester was a perfect school for me.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Perfect-- all the background at the time,

that's the kind of student--

LARRY FINE: That's right.

And I remember going up there for an interview in the fall

of 1967, I believe it would be.

I think I probably went up there with my father.

And I was interviewed by someone, an admissions officer,

who I got along well with.

He was interested in my interest in meteorology.

He had actually served in the Navy,

I think, and had been involved in some way with meteorology

in the Navy actually.

And, anyway, we got along well, and I was granted

the early decision option.

So I accepted that.

I think it was probably around December or January.

And that took care of my college decision.

Of course, Rochester had the Eastman School of Music

and my plan was to take piano lessons there,

which I did for a while.

Although I was no good at it at all compared to the others.

I excelled in music in my own little milieu in high school.

But once I got into the college setting,

I was definitely at the bottom of the heap

and really didn't do much with it there.

That was one of the series of disappointments

I had about myself and my future at Rochester

and where my life plans, my well-laid plans from age

seventeen, kind of disappeared.

Do you want me to do something with the dog?

BRUCE WOOLLEY: No.

LARRY FINE: Because he's going to be

trying to get our attention.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: No, Gershwin is fine. (unintelligible).

LARRY FINE: OK.

Don't let him destroy your thing there.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: No, I've got copies of that.

LARRY FINE: So, let's see.

The summer before I went to Rochester

I took some summer courses at Cornell.

I think I took a summer course in Russian at Cornell--

neither here nor there, but it was just my first taste

of college life and being away.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: And being away from home.

LARRY FINE: Being away from home.

Yeah.

So at Rochester, I was a lonely kid.

I didn't fit in anywhere.

I wasn't the top guy in music anymore.

In high school, I had had a group of friends interested

in classical music, and we had a little club and all that.

In Rochester, I was just a lonely kid, a freshman

trying to figure things out.

And although I knew I was gay, I didn't

know that there were other people like me.

Or I had only some distant idea there were

some kind of misfits like me.

But I had no idea there was any kind of community.

I didn't even know the word "gay."

I had never told anybody.

And in fact, in high school, I had dated women just

a little bit, but just enough to get by socially.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yes.

LARRY FINE: There was never any physical involvement,

no nothing.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah.

I think that's also typical of the time period.

LARRY FINE: But interestingly, there

was one woman, who was a couple of years older than me

in high school, who I fell in love with.

It wasn't a sexual thing, but I fell in love with her.

In fact, when I look back at my life,

I see that I've probably been in love with women as often

as with men, but there is just nothing sexual with the women.

There's no desire to do anything like that.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Just really, really nice people

to whom you related very deeply.

LARRY FINE: Yeah, very deeply.

Yes.

And this one woman, Sue, we had a very close friendship.

And we're actually still friends today,

although we've gone up and down with that.

And she's happily married, but is a good friend

and a good supporter.

But I was in love with her, and that gave my parents

some hope that--

because I think-- my mother tells me that many years

earlier, when I was about ten or eleven,

she had sent me to a shrink--

and I recall that--

to a psychiatrist, because I was having some problems.

I don't know exactly what problems she saw me as having.

I was a lonely kid.

I wasn't playing with other kids.

And he, on some basis--

I don't know what--

had told her that he thought that I would end up being gay.

And I don't know how he saw that,

but neither am I surprised or offended that a professional

might be able to tell that.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yes, well it was clinically an illness

at the time, before '74.

LARRY FINE: Right.

But he saw something in my behavior,

or what I talked about or didn't talk about,

or whatever that led him to believe,

based on his experience, that I might turn out to be gay.

So when I fell in love with this girl,

and she didn't want to be--

I wanted to be physical with her, but not sexual.

And I didn't really--

I wanted to hold her close.

She didn't want to do that with me.

She was a couple years older.

She was very pretty.

She had boyfriends her own age.

And she didn't want to do that with me.

I felt spurned, and I was devastated.

And I told my parents.

I had to tell somebody.

And I think they were secretly relieved,

even though they didn't like that I was in pain about her.

That eventually blew over.

But anyway, I went to college.

I just felt lost socially.

And my freshman year, which was '68-'69, was somewhat

of a bleak year for me.

And I also had difficulty in physics.

I found that I wasn't able to do very well in physics and math.

Even though I loved the concepts,

I was not able to solve the problems.

And I think looking back on that, I think some of it

was an inherent problem with my being able to do that,

and some of it was just that because of my social problems

and my feeling lonely that I was unable to concentrate and have

confidence in myself in doing what I loved.

And it affected everything else that I did.

So by the end of my freshman year,

the handwriting was on the wall that I

was going to have to change majors from physics

into something else.

And the summer after my freshman year,

I believe it was that summer--

I don't remember exactly, but I think it was that summer.

I took a summer course at the U of R, an Introduction

to Psychology course, because I thought

I might want to change majors in to psychology.

And I wanted to take a summer course

because I didn't want to mess up my requirements

and so on by taking that during the rest of the year.

There's a reason I'm talking about all this, by the way.

It's not idle chatter.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Oh, no, it gets it.

And it all sounds, really--

because I was there at the same time period,

and I can assure you the U of R, especially at that time--

It was an unhappy time in the country.

And the U of R was not, and still really

isn't, a warm and fuzzy place.

So, yeah.

LARRY FINE: Well, during my freshman year I was lonely.

I should mention there were a couple of women

who had an interest in me, and I was

very lackluster about showing any interest in them.

I knew it wasn't going to go anywhere

I didn't want to mislead them and get myself

into a tight spot.

And I didn't know what to do.

It's too bad because some of them

were very nice people who could have been my friends, at least,

and my allies.

I mean there's so many opportunities for friendship

I really didn't seize because of my confusion.

And there was, by the way, as you mentioned,

a lot of political turmoil going on over the Vietnam War

at the time.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Absolutely.

LARRY FINE: And I was not a very political person.

I would classify myself as liberal.

I grew up in a very liberal household.

But the liberality that my household

was involved in mostly had to do with things about civil rights.

Say my father all his life worked

for a Jewish civil rights organization called

the American Jewish Committee.

And in our town, and in our milieu, the civil rights--

throughout the sixties, the mid-sixties, civil rights

was a very big issue.

And a number of us had gotten together,

families had gotten together to further that cause and so on.

The Vietnam War was more confusing,

I think, even to liberals, about what to do about it.

Looking back, I don't think I had any understanding

or knowledge of it to really take

a stance one way or the other in any reasoned way.

But because I classified myself as a liberal,

and that's who the people I ran with were,

I was, quote unquote, "against the war."

Not out of any real knowledge of history and the war

or the reasons for or against it,

but just as a matter of self-definition, I'd say.

And I think that's true of a lot of people

at that time, and even today, that people define themselves

politically on the basis of who they see themselves

as rather than on a serious examination of the issues.

So, the summer of 1969, when I took this course in psychology.

I believe that's when it was.

I may be confusing dates and courses here,

but my recollection is that that--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: It would be after freshman year.

LARRY FINE: Yes, but such as when

I took this course, whether it was in the fall

or whether it was in the summer.

But my recollection is that this course

was taught by a man named Jay Efran, Dr. Efran.

He was a short man with shockingly red hair, who

was very funny and one of the most popular lecturers,

professors, on campus.

This course-- this particular course, the Psych 101 course,

I think it was, or some other course that he taught that I

took--

I can't remember, again, which it was--

was a very popular course.

Let me just think whether it was that course or a different one

that he taught.

I don't remember exactly.

Anyway, as often happens in these courses

that people take around their freshman and sophomore year,

students are asked to be guinea pigs in experiments,

psych experiments.

I think there's a standing joke about college sophomores

being--

psych experiments tell you all about college sophomores

and about nobody else.

But there was a call for volunteers

for some kind of an experiment, and I volunteered.

I don't remember what we were told about it.

But it turned out to be some kind of experimentation

about counseling methods.

And as part of this experiment, students

would receive one-on-one counseling with Dr. Efran,

with a graduate student in the room as well.

And we were never told what these methods were

or what the experiment was about.

But during the fall of my sophomore year,

I attended these once-a-week counseling sessions

with Jay Efran.

And I talked about my loneliness.

I did not talk about my sexuality at first.

But I got a lot out of these sessions.

And I know that one of the things Dr.

Efran was working on around that time--

and whether it was part of this experiment or not,

I don't know--

but it had to do with crying and helping people cry

in order to loosen themselves up inside.

And I became very good at crying.

I could just walk in there and cry.

I wish I could do that today.

I can't anymore.

But I became very good, almost too good, at crying.

At some point in the fall, the experiment ended.

But I was never told when it ended.

All I knew was that the graduate student was no longer there.

And there finally came a point when I asked,

how long does this experiment go on?

And Efran said, oh the experiment ended a while ago,

but I kept you on in the counseling

because I could see you were getting a lot out of it.

So just out of the goodness of his heart he was doing this.

There finally came a point where he asked me about sex.

And today such a point would probably come much closer

to the beginning of the counseling session than it--

but back then--

and I think he also sensed my reticence to talk about it.

At one point he asked about it.

And I remember saying, I don't want to talk about it.

So of course that's a red flag right there that he knows

he needs to talk about it.

So he finally did ask me again, and at some point

I got up the guts to tell him that I

thought I was homosexual.

I didn't know the word "gay."

I didn't know anything about that.

And this was the first time I'd ever told anybody.

This was in the fall of 1969.

And by the way, I knew nothing about Stonewall,

which had just occurred during the summer of '69.

I hadn't heard about it, knew nothing about it.

Maybe it was on the news, but I hadn't seen it.

So when I told him, I remember him

asking me to repeat it, to say it several times,

because it was so hard for me to get it out the first time.

And then he told me that it was OK to be homosexual,

which blew my mind.

I kind of looked at him, I think, like he was crazy.

So over the next several sessions we worked on that--

on my talking about it, my being told it was OK,

and things like that.

I don't remember any more of the details of what

he might have told me or not told me about other people,

or I don't think he said anything

about the gay movement.

But I really am not sure.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Because what gay movement?

He wouldn't have--

LARRY FINE: He might-- he probably would not have--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: You lucked out.

I mean, this highly informed mentor (unintelligible)--

LARRY FINE: Let me tell you--

I lucked out big time.

Big time.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah.

LARRY FINE: Jay Efran had an enormous effect--

a positive effect on my life for which I still think

of him with gratitude today.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Absolutely.

LARRY FINE: But it went further than that.

At some point, as the fall, the winter and so on wore on,

he realized that what I really needed next

was to meet other gay people.

And he knew one or two students who were gay.

And he told me that he wanted to line up a meeting between me

and some other gay students.

And he said, "Please don't tell anybody that I'm doing this."

He said, "This is not really allowed

under my professional ethics, but it's

exactly what you need."

Which was amazing that he would do that.

Of course now I can tell it forty years later.

He wouldn't mind, I'm sure.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Nobody would, thank goodness.

This is just the best time.

LARRY FINE: Yeah.

So he first arranged a meeting between me

and a student who really wasn't that positive about being gay

and was kind of cloaking it in bisexuality and all that.

And I remember meeting him, and I came away,

I think, a little disappointed in some way or feeling

like this didn't do much for me.

It was--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: It was very confusing.

If you're confused and he's confused, it just--

LARRY FINE: But also the guy wasn't all that likable.

That was part of it.

He wasn't someone I really want to be friends with.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: It happens.

LARRY FINE: So then he lined me up with somebody else.

This was toward the end of April, in 1970.

This guy was a senior.

I was a sophomore.

This guy was about to graduate.

He was a very handsome guy, very interesting guy,

very involved in theater.

In fact, he was a star in a play around that time

that the U of R theater company was giving.

And he had been to San Francisco and knew

all about the gay movement.

He also knew what was in Rochester as well.

But he knew about the gay movement and all that.

And I remember I met with him on April 28, 1970.

It was one of the most important days of my life.

And we sat and talked for a long time.

And he told me all about the gay movement,

about Stonewall, about San Francisco, and all of that.

And it was unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

And everything kind of took off from there.

That's what I needed.

So my plan was that that summer I

was going to go to San Francisco, the summer of 1970,

and find out for myself what was going on.

And the early part of the summer,

however, I stayed in Rochester and took another summer course.

I don't even remember now what the course was.

But at some point during the summer,

I met a man in Todd Union and ended up

going home and having sex with him.

And that was the first sex that I had.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: This was somebody from off campus, or--

LARRY FINE: No.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Not a student?

Or grad student?

LARRY FINE: Well, I don't remember anymore

why he was there.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Maybe he was there cruising.

LARRY FINE: Maybe, but I don't remember.

And it turns out it wasn't an especially good experience.

He wasn't a very nice guy.

He was also conflicted about his own homosexuality.

And it was not a particularly loving sort of thing at all.

It didn't do anything for me.

Looking back now, I'm surprised I even had the gumption

to approach him.

And I'm not sure why I approached him or how--

why I thought he might be gay even.

I don't remember.

But it just seems unlike me.

Even unlike me today.

Let's see.

Oh, I remember now.

I wasn't there that summer to take a course.

I don't think I was taking a course.

I was working at the library during the summer.

That was when the new library was opening.

And I was on a crew that was transferring

all the books from a storage facility south of town.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Into the new--

LARRY FINE: Into the new library.

And I was the one who put all the books into the reference

area.

And I don't know if you ever knew a guy named

Bradley, Brad Smith?

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Absolutely.

He was the reference librarian.

LARRY FINE: He was the reference librarian.

I got to know him a bit because of my being

the person to put all the books in his shelves.

I had also the previous year--

or maybe it was the following year, I can't remember--

during the year I had a job, a part-time job,

working in the reserve reading room.

So I was there until mid August doing this work.

It was just grunt work.

But it was enjoyable grunt work, I have to say.

I remember my partner in this book thing

was an art major or art history major,

whose either first or last name was Carter.

I can't remember-- very nice guy, cute guy.

So I was there until August.

I'm trying to remember the timeline now.

But what I did thereafter--

Let me backtrack a little bit.

After this mind-blowing thing happened to me in April with

this guy, whose name was Jeff, by the way.

And I know his last name, but I'm not sure--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: We don't need to publicize that.

LARRY FINE: Yeah, well I found out later

that he became a psychologist in Los Angeles.

But I really had no contact with him

again after a little bit in April and May.

He graduated.

And we actually made a tentative plan to meet on the West Coast

when I was going to come out and do that,

but to him I think I was just a kid.

And not a particularly attractive

kid either, to be honest.

And he had no interest in me.

And it ended up that I tried to find him

when I went out to the West Coast

but reached a dead end as far as the contact

information he had given me, and I never saw him again.

Too bad because he was really a major effect

on my life through his--

just being who he was.

So I knew I needed to go out to San Francisco.

I really didn't know where I was going to go,

how I was going to find anything.

However, in May, before the summer, after I had met him--

In May, knowing what I knew then about gay liberation

and knowing that I wanted to start a gay group at the U of R

eventually, I put a two-line ad in the Campus Times

anonymously, in May, that said--

this is before the group started.

This was in May of '70.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: '70.

LARRY FINE: May of '70.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: OK.

Because we can go and look.

LARRY FINE: You can look if you want.

I put a two-line ad, a classified ad,

in the Campus Times that said something like,

"Take heart brothers, gay lib is coming."

That's all it said.

Just out of my enthusiasm, I did that.

And you go look.

You'll find it.

I assume it was in May because by June I think--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: School was over, yes.

LARRY FINE: Yeah.

And a few people saw that, I found out later, but didn't

know what to make of it.

There was no phone number or no contact info, nothing.

And I remember doing it anonymously,

putting the ad and my fifty cents in an envelope

and dropping it in at nighttime in the Campus Times' mail slot.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Nobody should know.

LARRY FINE: That's right.

Nobody should know who wrote it or anything.

But I checked, and it was there.

Anyway, in the summer, after this stint with the library,

I put a pack on my back and hitchhiked from Rochester

to San Francisco.

Now, back then, hitchhiking was--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: That was what kids did.

LARRY FINE: That's right.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Kids did that--

LARRY FINE: But again, you have to understand

that I was a shy, timid kid.

I'm a mixture of things.

I mean like we all are.

There's a lot of me that's very shy, socially very

shy and timid about a lot of things.

And yet there are times when I do

things that blow people's mind, and blow my own mind,

with the courage that it took to do that.

My life is full of those kinds of things, where I--

and people have mentioned that.

They've said to me, "You know, you're so bold about this,

and yet you're so timid about that."

They can't quite put the two together.

And I really am that way.

So I hitchhiked.

I got some book about hitchhiking or something,

I remember, about tips about things and whatnot.

And I think I may have used the Whole Earth

Catalog to get some supplies of one sort or other

that they recommended for hitchhiking.

You remember the Whole Earth Catalog, I'm sure.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Oh, yes.

LARRY FINE: And I remember putting my thumb out

on one of the major boulevards in Rochester

that led to the freeway, or whatever,

and hitchhiking all the way across country.

And I met up with some other people here

and there, fellow hitchhikers.

And once I slept by the side of an interstate highway

in St. Louis or something.

I don't remember anymore, but various things--

I somehow managed through it all.

One of the--

By the way, is this OK?

Is this showing everything to be OK.

Is there anything that's--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: As far as I know, yeah.

Looks good to me.

LARRY FINE: I just wondered if any of those lights

meant low battery or anything like that.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: No.

LARRY FINE: OK.

So one of the important things that

happened to me on that trip was going

through the middle of the country, which I had never

seen before.

The fields of wheat and grain of some kind or other

in Kansas and Nebraska--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Goes on forever.

LARRY FINE: That's right.

But I had never seen that, and I loved it.

And I wanted to return, and I eventually

did, which I can mention later.

But that was fascinating to me.

And I've always been fascinated by parts of the country that

seem to be very sparsely populated, which

is what brought me to the desert many years later.

Although Palm Springs is not sparsely populated,

but I've always sought out places

on the map that looked empty.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: And certainly this

is less crazy in terms of busy than, say, Florida

at this time.

LARRY FINE: Yeah.

But I've also spent lots of time in remote parts of Utah,

and New Mexico, and other places.

So I hitchhiked across country.

And I actually was fortunate to get

one ride all the way from Denver to San Francisco,

so that helped me a lot through that part.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: That helped.

You bet.

LARRY FINE: And in San Francisco,

I had a place to stay in San Francisco

that I had arranged ahead of time.

One of the women who worked with me at the library

had a friend in San Francisco and arranged

for me to be able to stay there for a few nights

until I found something.

Just to show my naivete--

I mean I was very naive, and I really didn't know who was gay

and who wasn't--

Settle down, Gershwin.

Settle down.

Leave us alone.

OK?

You want to come up here?

Want to come up here?

He doesn't know what he wants.

Come.

Up.

I stayed at the home of these two men, who were apparently

gay men.

And I didn't know it the whole time I was there.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Nobody knew.

There was no way that you would have.

LARRY FINE: Well, I think they were probably partners.

But here's the thing.

I stayed at their house, and on their kitchen-- on their living

room table was a copy of a Time magazine issue

that talked about the Mattachine Society,

about the gay movement, everything.

It just happened to be--

Now I don't know whether it just came out that week

or whether it was from a few years ago and it had--

But it was on there.

And it was just by luck that I read that,

and it told me where to go and what to do.

Now, they may have planted it there for people to see.

Maybe they sensed I was gay, and they put it out there.

I have no idea.

They also had a party while I was there.

And I remember talking to one of the guys at the party who

didn't know anything about me and at one point confiding

in him that I was gay and why I was there.

And I seem to recall that he had some--

he may have had some sexual interest in me,

and maybe I'd put him off or whatever.

But I was somehow surprised at that.

For all I know, the party may have been full of gay men.

But I was completely oblivious to the fact

that this was a gay household.

I thought it was just somebody who

was giving me a place to stay.

I mean it blows my mind now that I could have been so naive.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: But that's--

I would have been the same way.

LARRY FINE: Well, maybe.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: it's just that it's so different today,

when kids can look-- they see on TV constantly--

LARRY FINE: I know, gay characters and everything else.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: --in the news.

Or they can go online and stuff.

It was just this big, who knew?

LARRY FINE: Yeah.

Back then it was so different.

And anyone listening to this interview

can get a sense of what it was like back then.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Absolutely.

LARRY FINE: So I realize I haven't even

gotten to the U of R really, to the GLF.

This is all leading up to it, but for whatever it's worth--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: But it sets the time tone.

This was our reality.

LARRY FINE: Right.

So if I had not discovered this Time magazine article,

I don't think I would have known where to go or what to do.

But this magazine told the address of the Mattachine

Society, for one thing, which was still in existence then.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yes, very much so.

LARRY FINE: It mentioned, I think,

about the gay liberation movement

but didn't give any kind of address or contact information.

Anyway, as soon as I could after reading this,

I went to the Mattachine Society office.

And there were a couple of older men there.

Now remember, I was twenty.

And older means anything above twenty, twenty-five.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: If they were real old,

they might have been forty, forty-five or something.

LARRY FINE: I have no idea what age they were.

So I talked a little bit to one man there,

told him what I was looking for, and he

was kind enough to tell me where some gay lib

people were hanging out.

They were in some warehouse somewhere.

And I don't remember where it was, but some warehouse that

was not too far away and that you had to, I don't know,

say a certain thing or knock a certain way in order to get in.

I mean that blows my mind now to think about that, but--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah, but everything

was all very underground, very sub rosa, hush-hush.

LARRY FINE: It was, yeah.

So I went to that, and I did the knock or the secret word

or whatever.

And they let me in.

And the people there, I think they were mostly around my age

or something like that.

And I remember talking to some of them

and then going up on the roof, I think, where there were

some others and having a little sort of sexual tryst with one

person.

And then at some point, leaving there,

I don't remember whether I had more contact with them

or if they simply told me other things that I--

other places to go.

But I went to Berkeley at one point.

And Telegraph Avenue was full of panhandlers.

I remember every three steps.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Everything, Hare Krishna people, and--

LARRY FINE: Everything.

So in Berkeley, there was somebody who actually had

a crash pad for people like me.

Because in those days, there were

a lot of people who were travelers and seekers,

and there were lots of places which were crash pads, which

just means temporary places to stay,

who took in people and for nothing,

or maybe for a contribution if you were fortunate enough

to be able to make it.

I think he was a professor, as I recall, at the University

of California Hayward.

I have a vague recollection.

I think he was one of the better known names from the San

Francisco gay liberation movement.

But I don't remember his name anymore.

And I stayed there a bit.

And again, each place I stayed, people there

told me about other places.

And at one point I went to a coffeehouse

that was called Five Squared Four

Squared because it was 2516 something street or avenue.

It might have been Telegraph, I don't know.

But it was called the Five Squared Four Squared

Coffeehouse.

And I guess it was either a gay coffeehouse where

they had some evening or day that was a gay day

or something like that.

And while I was there I met a man

named Michael who was only about seventeen or eighteen years

old.

He was kind of a spaced out hippy, acid freak,

or something, who had been booted out of his high school

for being a little too spaced out.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: A little too much, even for then, yeah.

LARRY FINE: And his parents lived in some suburb

of San Francisco.

And I remember going there to his parents' house with him.

His parents were away.

I never met his parents, I don't think.

So I ended up having a little relationship with Michael.

It was really not much more than a sexual relationship

that dragged on for a long time because we really

had nothing in common.

I was a very kind of rational, upper middle class kid,

and he was just a spaced out freak with long hair.

And we really didn't have much to talk about,

but I was attracted to him and he to me.

And he ended up coming back to Rochester with me,

believe it or not.

But before that happened, while I was in San Francisco

I got sick.

I became very feverish.

And as it turned out, I had come down

with mono from one of my contacts

there in San Francisco.

And we got a ride all the way back to New York State,

all the way back to Rochester, in a van

with some other people.

But I was ill the whole time.

And so I came back with that illness,

and eventually it passed.

But just to go back a little bit further,

just to return to my sophomore year for a moment.

During my sophomore year--

during your sophomore year, at that time,

you had to make some plans for where you were

going to live your junior year.

And I got together with one or two people I knew

and some people they knew, and we formed a suite

to live in Anderson Tower--

Anderson or Wilder Tower.

And I don't know if people still do that today, or if that's--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Oh, absolutely.

That's still done.

So you formed a suite.

LARRY FINE: We formed a suite.

There were five of us, perhaps.

I can't remember the exact number, five people.

And of course I was not out at that time.

They didn't know anything about my being gay.

So I was supposed to--

There were several singles in the suite and a double.

And I think I was supposed to share

the double with another guy who didn't show up,

or something like that, or he didn't come back to school.

I don't remember now what happened there.

But I ended up having the double all

to myself, which was great because I had Michael with me

that whole time.

Eventually I had to tell my suitemates, who

was this Michael who was there?

What's he all about?

And I came out to them all and said what it was--

who he was.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah.

Were they cool?

LARRY FINE: They were very cool about it, very cool.

They were really wonderful people.

I wish I could go back and thank them today.

They were very, very good about it.

There was one guy named Hal, who was pre med

and eventually went on to be a doctor.

And I think he may have even been at Strong for some time,

Strong Memorial Hospital.

And he was-- later on he became the head of the sex education

committee.

And he was a good ally for me in terms of U of R work.

There was Ron, who I spoke to you about earlier.

And all these guys were straight,

but he was fascinated, I think, by the whole gay thing.

He had a girlfriend he was very tight with and all that,

but he was fascinated by all this.

And he was--

We palled around some, and he was very, very good to me

and very nice.

Although, I remember once, he was approached by another man

and came running back all distressed to talk

to me about it, all flustered.

And I helped to calm him down.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: It's not catching.

LARRY FINE: Yeah, right.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: What do you do?

You just politely and firmly say, "No.

Not interested.

Thank you."

LARRY FINE: Right.

And then I think that was a guy named George.

I don't remember much about him.

But all these people were very nice people,

and they took it in good stride and were very nice about it.

So Michael stayed until December, and--

BRUCE WOOLLEY: And so when--

was he still there when you initiated some of the meetings?

LARRY FINE: Yes.

And by the way, I didn't really initiate it.

We'll get to that in a moment.

I don't want to take credit for something that's not due me.

But that whole semester I was--

well, at the beginning of the semester, I was quite ill.

And then the fever wore off, but I was still--

with mono you're tired.

BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah, you're tired.

You're dragged out, yes.

LARRY FINE: Right.

I was tired a lot.

But then the next semester, the spring semester, I

was no longer tired.

But one of the things that happened, because of my illness

I took a reduced course load of only two courses instead

of four, which as soon as I felt better

gave me time to do a lot of other things.