Boston, Mass (Fenway)
I first arrived in Boston just before Christmas, 1975. After a couple of frustrating efforts at trying to find some combination of work and school in Binghamton and elsewhere, I was ready to try the big city. I had a friend living in Boston, so I stayed at his place for a few days while he was away visiting family over the holidays. I basically just wandered around the city, but also started perusing the want ads. I ran across an ad for a statistical programmer, called the company, and began what ended up being 20 years of statistical analysis for various companies and universities around the nation (with some years of graduate school mixed in with those years.)
I liked working in Boston, had wonderfully flexible hours and fairly good pay, and Boston was a perfect size for exploring being gay. When its warm, it's an ideal city -- a good park system with many trails for biking (and cruising), good transit and a compact downtown, close proximity to the ocean and the beaches on the Cape, easy access to historic villages and vast green spaces in the mountains to the north and west, and interconnected with the culture of the Northeast corridor. BUT, that was when it was warm. What made it not work for me in the long run were two things: 1) the long, cold seasons where even when the sun was out, it didn't feel warm, and 2) the gay culture just wasn't the right fit for me. I moved to San Francisco in '83.
Because Boston is so intertwined with my development as a gay man, and because the meaning of such places in gay history is rapidly disappearing, the gay-related content of many of the areas is an integral part of the descriptions in the following pages.
The August, 2007 visit was the first time I had been back to the Northeast since about '86. One of the first things that surprised me was how green and beautiful everything was -- I hadn't realized how much my memories of the Northeast were primarily memories of cold winters.
Unless otherwise noted, all of the pictures below were taken in August, 2007
| When I first visited Boston in '75, somehow I quickly discovered the Fenway neighborhood. Maybe it was the fact that I met up with a mysterious, handsome, and relatively rugged man while walking through the Fens on a snowy day after Christmas -- but I ended up with the Fenway as my basic base for all the years I lived in Boston. (This picture was taken some time in the 70's, I don't know exactly when.) |
|
 |
My first apartment was in this building (151 Park Drive) -- I believe it was on the third floor (no elevator) -- it overlooked the street, and was on back end of the building. The biggest surprise when I found a building that I liked was that the building manager (Tom) was the man I had met in the park (above). Tom and I remained in fairly close contact for all the years that I was in Boston, though we were never particularly close friends. He was, however, one of the men that I credit for having been a good role model for how to live a fairly radical, and sex-affirming, life as a gay man. |
| In the center of the neighborhood are a number of small restaurants and retail businesses. Like very much of the rest of Boston, though, there was quite a bit of construction of new high risk housing on the edges of the area. |
 |
 |
Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox, is just a couple of blocks northwest of the area. The stadium is so wedged into the neighborhood, that you could pass it without hardly knowing it was there. Interesting also is that two of Boston's more popular gay bars are behind where I was standing when I took this picture. So, on weekend game nights, you have gay bar patrons and baseball fans passing in the streets. |
| The last place I lived in Boston (211 Park Drive) was only a block from the first, though I had lived in various other places in between. Tom was, again, my landlord. On this I do remember the apartment -- on the first floor, in the front, on the right. |
 |
 |
When I lived there, there was a small tree at the bay window that was closest to the main door, and my cat (George) would jump out the window and onto the tree, to wander the neighborhood. (This photo was taken some time in the 70's) |
|
George's window -- and a jade plant that I still have. |
 |
Most of the neighborhood is 4 story apartment buildings and the architecture is very consistent, except a couple of buildings like the red brick building in the picture below. Many of the apartments were converted to condos at some point. When I lived there, it seemed that most of the buildings did not have elevators, though I suspect that has changed as some were converted to condos. One thing that hasn't changed is that parking is atrocious -- the majority of the buildings do not have garages or parking lots. |
|
|
