THE YEAR 1969 was when the straight brother of my high school girlfriend introduced me to the two gay men who would change my life forever. Savannah, like New York, had its own gay counter-culture that gathered in a Stonewall-like club known as the Basement, which was located in the basement of the neglected Armory Building that later became the home of the Savannah College of Art and Design.

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, on June 23, 1992, sculptor George Segal (1924-2000) witnessed the installation of his first outdoor public sculpture in Manhattan, the city center that had inspired much of his work and had made him internationally famous. Titled Gay Liberation, the piece had taken twelve years to find its intended home within the triangle of Christopher Park in Greenwich Village, just across Christopher Street from what had been the Stonewall Inn.

MY COPY of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation is forty years old and was published by Dell for 95¢. It was a time when literary criticism could be sold as a mass market paperback. A photo of Sontag takes up most of the cover. She is young and pretty, the skunk-like swatch of white not yet streaking her helmet of hair. She is wearing a jacket that covers her to her chin, and yet there is nothing doughty about her.

… The first feature-length documentary on gay themes to win an Oscar, The Times of Harvey Milk depicts with startling frankness and immediacy Harvey Milk’s political ascendancy as the first openly gay politician elected to public office in a major U.S. city.

LARGER THAN LIFE, the statue of John Betjeman (1906-1984) in the newly renovated St. Pancras International Station in London serves as a reminder of the late Poet Laureate’s love of rail travel. But its proximity to the Victorian Midland Grand Hotel has an added poignancy, for the hotel’s dining room was the scene of one of Oscar Wilde’s public humiliations.

THE MAJOR PLAYS of Tennessee Williams- who died just 25 years ago, in 1983-feature women at their core. But for all their centrality as the emotional focal point of these plays, paradoxically enough, these women are without power in the community they inhabit. It is the men who control events; the women are entirely dependent on the men and use them to achieve their goals.

WHEN ALFRED KINSEY’S Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published sixty years ago, in 1948, I was a very gay, extremely troubled, and nearly suicidal sixteen-year-old high school junior desperately seeking any available evidence that I was not the only queer in the visible universe. …

ON THE AFTERNOON of January 22, 2008, actor Heath Ledger was found dead in his Manhattan apartment, having taken, it was later learned, an overdose of prescription medications. …

I was fifteen or sixteen, a sophomore in high school, and a full-flowered cretin in every subject but art and English, so it must have been my English teacher who had mentioned Leaves of Grass in passing.