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I did hear that Al had found a new group, he had joined the Pikes fraternity.
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Neither Tom nor Al did, so the friendships ended. By then I had a policy when this arose: if people wanted to break off from me, I would not try to stop them. They were visited by agents of the FBI to talk about me. I met Al and he told me in the summer he had stayed at Tom's home in Houston. "I would like to talk to you about something." "Go ahead." "Not on the phone." With that phrase, I guessed something, as it had happened before. In September with the beginning of the new university year, I received a call from Al, who was back in town. I did not see them at all during the summer of 1957. Al was a native of Central America, and knew Spanish. Al had black hair but he too had a barrel chest and strong arms.
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Once we went to a public swimming pool in the spring of 1957, and I suddenly realized how scrawny my body was compared to Tom's big chest, muscular arms, blond hair, and blue eyes. My parents had given me a car, and I took them like a tour guide to some places beyond the campus. The other non-native was Al C., who was not a A student, but the 3 of us began to hang out some. Tom C., another A student in the class (there were only 4 of us), was from a posh Houston suburb, a fellow Unitarian, and a member of the Beta fraternity. Some 80 students packed the classroom in the old barracks, and 2nd semester, I befriended two non-natives. My first year at Tulane, 1956-57, I excelled in my American History class. Rather than a sexual deviant, I was a political deviant. I am a native New Orleanian and attempted to be as closeted as possible. The feds cooperated with the media and friendly reporters to undermine the Garrison case, his witnesses, the use of hypnotism, and when witnesses fled Louisiana, other governors like California's Ronald Reagan, refused to extradite them back to New Orleans.
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Indeed, shortly after Garrison announced his charges against Shaw, the US Attorney General, Ramsey Clark responded to the national TV reporters stating that the federal government had already investigated Shaw and he was not involved in any conspiracy.
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But the authors say nothing of the attempts by the Federal Government to obstruct the entire proceedings and derail the trial against Shaw. Worse, the authors assume that Shaw was innocent because the jury did not convict him. Of course, one would not expect the Kennedy assassination and the case against Shaw to consume a book on gays in New Orleans, but the authors downplay how New Orleans gay circles became the center of national attention. Partisan, one-sided, the point was that Shaw was prosecuted for this crime only because he was gay, a one-sided view boiled down to some 3 pages In Exile. The anti-Garrison position was presented in the huge volume by James Kirkwood published in 1970, American Grotesque, a book quite sympathetic to homosexuals. Their view is one heard in the 60s - Garrison, a closeted gay, persecuted the innocent Shaw for a variety of reasons, mostly which a psychiatrist might have to unravel. Yet, all the attention to gay New Orleans barely makes a ripple in the Perez/Palmquist book. And this at a time even before the Stonewall riots in New York. Suddenly, there was so much gay gossip and allegations in the national news - news stemming from New Orleans. Others suspected of being involved in the plot included David Ferrie, a pilot fired from Eastern Airlines after being convicted of sex with a male teen. Local attorney Dean Andrews claimed that Lee Oswald had come to his office in the early 1960s accompanied with a bunch of gay Latinos. And it was not merely Shaw in the spotlight.
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One of the big issues nationally in the late 60s was the case of Garrison against Shaw. As the legal maneuvering continued over months, Annette, who would later marry a psychiatrist, added that she had heard the reason for the prosecution was that Shaw would not let Garrison into Shaw's gay circle. The implication was that a gay was too frilly, too frivolous to be involved in anything serious like an assassination. A colleague, Annette, dismissed the entire investigation, "How could Shaw be involved? He's a homosexual!" I was shocked that someone could be judged innocent of murder simply because he was gay. In the late 1960s I was teaching at a Black university in New Orleans as news blared the latest information about District Attorney Jim Garrison's prosecution of local businessman Clay Shaw for partaking in a conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of Pres. This book helped me learn of events in gay New Orleans that followed my departure.