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And a guy hauled himself out and sat on the deck and said something to the effect of, ‘It’s too hot to swim - you want to go get a Coke?’ Well, I didn’t know anybody in Manhattan except my cousin. So, I hauled myself out and sat on the deck. I went to the public pool in Greenwich village not far from where I lived and the water was too warm. "I had the day off in 1954 in the summer. So I was posted to a clerking job in a blood bank in lower Manhattan. I was a conscientious objector - refusing to be drafted - I had to do two years of alternative service. Went abroad for two years to work in French public schools, came back to Manhattan, where I had to work for two years. And so (I) graduated from college in 1951. Scarcely at all sexually attracted to her, but again, there was never any discussion. So, I went onto college in the same village, had a girlfriend there.
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I was not especially sexually attracted to her, however, I didn’t have a clue, because there was no discussion of homosexuality or the range of sexual orientation. She was a member of the Episcopal church that we both went to. I just learned by growing up in that village in Ohio in the ‘30s and ‘40s that female people and male people were expected to pair off and get legally married, and then have kids and just move along. This would have been in the 1930s or 1940s where there was no discussion - at least that I was aware of - of sexual orientation, still less any awareness of what we now refer to as gender identity or gender expression not a clue. And as I say, every possible '–ism': racism, sexism, classism, but I had no notion of that time of concerns about sexual orientation.” When was it that you knew? So it’s been a piece of work for me to try to at least address them because they’re all down in my gut. “I grew up in Ohio in a village permeated with every '–ism' that one could imagine, and of course, I absorbed all of them. Tell me about your early years and your upbringing. He has founded countless gay rights and support organizations around the state of Michigan and continues to be active in the Ann Arbor community at the age of 87. He was the first man in the state to publicly come out during an anti-Vietnam war rally in Detroit in 1970, the first person to establish a staffed sexual orientation support office at a university and in the world, The Spectrum Center, and was the driving force behind changing the University of Michigan's nondiscrimination bylaw to include sexual orientation.īoth the library at The Spectrum Center and the Jim Toy Community Center in Kerrytown are named after him. ANN ARBOR – The name Jim Toy is synonymous with the gay rights movement in Michigan.