Miles Cigolle

Hello book lover. This is Miles Cigolle. I'm a gay author who grew up in Albuquerque in the 1960s. In 1951 my adventurous parents bought a classic adobe house near Old Town. It was as if I and my three siblings had landed in heaven. In high school I took Creative Writing with Mr. Ness. He was the best. We wrote short stories and poems. They were my private joy. I was your awkward closeted gay dork. My Mom was an artist. My Dad owned a local grocery store where I worked summers before heading east to Cornell to study architecture. That's where I met Jim, my first lover of nine years. Jim was a French Literature Professor who introduced me to the worlds of the opera and the ballet. We moved to NYC five years after Stonewall and discovered gay liberation and the gay party years before AIDS. My first trip to the steamy backroom of The International Stud was a watershed event. Suddenly in the darkness, monogamy was out, and communal sex was in. I bought my first black leather motorcycle jacket even though I didn't own a motorcycle. On a solo trip to Venice in the dead of winter, I discovered sexual liberation. Upon returning to NYC, Jim and I were toast, but still forever friends. The next four months I was busy making up for lost time. It got a little crazy. I was the cautious voyeur, not the care-free player. Thank God I stumbled on Abbey at 2 am in the leather bar Maneuvers in NYC's Meatpacking District. Abbey rescued me. He's the love of my life. We've been together since 1982. In NYC I worked for the architects SOM and Richard Meier. Abbey worked at the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) as their grant's administrator. I'm a lucky HIV+ survivor. Abbey is thankfully HIV-. We discovered Fire Island Pines together in the decade of the 1990s. We got married in City Hall after the Supreme Court finally did the right thing. Then we retired to New Mexico to live the good life. Rome, Italy is our home-away-from-home several months of the year. I write in memory of friends who did not survive those years, and also for the next generations of gay men for whom the struggles of Stonewall, AIDS or Marriage Equality are now remote history. To all of the above I dedicate these stories of my life.