I am Harrison David Eppright, and I’m from Austin, Texas. 

About 1960… I’ll say 1968, I came across an article in Time Magazine. I was 13 years old, came across this article in Time Magazine about this new play that had premiered Off-Broadway, and it was entitled, The Boys in the Band. This was the, one of the first times that gay life was being presented to a mainstream audience. A movie came out of that. It struck me again about the, apparently the importance of this play, because one of the, one of the actors, his name was Cliff Gorman, he appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Cliff Gorman came on and kind of played a… played on his flamboyant character of Emory, and it was a big success with the with the audience. 

That was my first time seeing at least a little excerpt from the play and the movie. and I just came away thinking I didn’t wanna be like those men. They were all self-loathing men. 

Into my 20s and 30s, I was gradually, you know, I was, I was associating with, with gays and lesbians, and I was in the gay community. I was a part of the community, but apart from the community. I was more of a nighttime gay and a daytime straight person.

I was more of a nighttime gay and a daytime straight person.

Finally, it’s just that I met this guy when I was about 37 years old, and he just totally changed my life. He was biracial. He was part Black and part French and, and proud of, proud of both heritages and also proud to be gay. And as we gradually got to know each other, I thought that for me to be worthy of him, that I had to come out of the closet. 

I came out, and then about a year after we were dating, we… I told him that I was ready to come out to my mother. My father was already dead. And so I finally got up the courage to come out to my mother, and it happened on July 5th, 1995, the 5th of July. My mother reacted. She cried. She asked where did she and Sam, her late husband, my father, Samuel, where did they both go wrong? And I told her that it wasn’t where they went wrong, it was where they went right. They taught me to be honest. 

She assured me that she still loved me, but this was something that she had to accept, and it took her some years before she accepted it. I do believe that in the end, at the end of her life, she was comfortable with it. So I consider July 5th to be my personal Independence Day. 

I was 40 years old when it happened, when I came out, formally to my mother and my family, and here it is, I’m now 70 years old. In between, I gradually came out to members at, at church and, you know, people could care less. So instead of being 70 years old, I feel like I’m 70 years young. 

Recently, I found out that the movie – the remake of the movie The Boys in the Band was on Netflix, and so I tuned in to watch it. Looking at the characters in this movie, I went from feeling ashamed or… yeah, feeling ashamed of having gay thoughts to embracing gay thoughts, to embracing it and celebrating it and realizing that I could walk in the sun and be a gay man. 

Ultimately, if you wanna bring change in your life or even bring about the life that you want, that you want to live in, that you want others to experience, you have to evolve. you have to give yourself permission. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world..