My name is Larry Picard. I’m from Holyoke, Massachusetts. 

So I met my first, well, my only girlfriend when I was 19 years old, and I was a singing waiter and she was a singing waitress. We had a relationship for about three years until we finally broke up after I told her I was gay. 

I moved to New York. I lived in Brooklyn, was doing all sorts of things, including singing in church choirs. And I got this temporary gig at this big church in Manhattan and met this guy. We got along very nicely. He was very sweet and we started dating. 

He was very quiet. I was less so being an actor and a singer, and so we were moving through. It became more serious. He was Republican. And kind of closet-y. And this became more and more apparent as the years went on. And after about three years, that’s when I usually assert my personality in a relationship. I’m… I’ve sort of become them for three years. I don’t know why, but that’s the case. I came out as who I was, which was all of me, and he sort of stayed where he was very quietly homosexual doing his thing. 

It was just at the beginning of this… this new rash of LGBTQ activism. AIDS was just starting up and also it coincided with the Hardwick decision about sodomy and privacy in one’s home. The queer population just went nuts and we started rallying. And there was a big rally in Sheridan Square in the Village and I went, because like, what else can you do?

 

It was just at the beginning of this… this new rash of LGBTQ activism.

And there was a band there. It was the Lesbian Gay Big Apple Corps. We all rallied down to Battery Park. But my boyfriend at the time wasn’t there. He was up at a party with his cousin celebrating – it was the 4th of July weekend, celebrating the 4th of July, and I wasn’t invited because he wasn’t out to his family at all. So I’m marching downtown and the band is playing and the people are chanting, and I’m thinking of this guy who’s just up there in some, you know, apartment, having a party. And that wasn’t feeling great. 

The conductor of the band, Sam, we had mutual friends. We knew each other from this social group in Brooklyn, Gay Friends and Neighbors. So we’re down in Battery Park pointing to the Statue of Liberty and saying, “Shame, shame, shame, shame!” Shaming the Statue of Liberty, which was a great symbol for how we were feeling at the time. 

And then there was this party, a band party, and I was invited to the band party and it was called Dancing Through the Decades. At six o’clock was the twenties, at seven was the thirties, at eight was the forties. And you’re supposed to dress in the era that you wanted to. I dressed in the forties, and Sam was there and he was dressed in the forties too. 

At one point during the party, we all went to the rooftop and everyone got stoned except Sam and me. And we went downstairs and Frank Sinatra was playing. It was kind of the forties/fifties era. There was a transition into the fifties and Frank was singing his tunes and we started dancing. So with each Frank Sinatra tune, as we got closer and closer together, the guy who was on the top floor, 4th of July party that I wasn’t invited to began to disappear, and Sam grew larger in my life. 

That was 39 years ago. Two years later, he moved – we moved in together. Then we got married in 2014. And 2017, we moved out of New York to where we live now. I was 29 when I met Sam. I’m 60, almost 68 now. That’s a lot of territory. There are lots of things that… that we went through together, that we shared. Lots of personal things that I had, lots of events in my life that he shared, lots of events in Sam’s life that I shared. And I would say that Sam is the most important thing that’s happened to me in my entire life.