Along with Halloween, the Academy Awards are as close to a national LGBT holiday that you can find in this nation. Always will have fond memories of my days in Los Angeles on Oscar weekend when you could actually feel the excitement wafting through the air. From the Valley to the beaches, the city was a buzz of activities and everywhere you looked you saw limos, gowns, catering trucks, lighting trucks and people lined up in the dry cleaners to get ready for the big evening. If you failed to nab an invitation to the big night then you angled hard for the right Hollywood party. Failing that, you rounded up the most notable 'rejects' you could find and host a 'quiet at home Oscar night' proclaiming loudly that it was all just too much and wasn't it 'special' to watch with such close friends.

The first clue I should have had that I was gay was my obsession with Hollywood, its stars, scandals and glamour! How could my parents not have known?

Being a remote country boy, my initial access to Hollywood was through the weekly LIFE Magazine. In its color pages, I was able to access the world of the stars. Basically all through the 1950's, I waited each week for the mailman to deliver the pictures that would enable this isolated young man to escape totally into another world. Of course, I would wait for the photographs of Rock Hudson, James Dean, Tab Hunter, Paul Newman and others and fantasize being with them as their 'best buddy.' Yeah, right.

However, it was the scandals and cheap gossip that riveted me to the pages of my magic carpet called LIFE. Who can forget when Lana Turner's young daughter stabbed Turner's boyfriend Johnny Stompanato to death? None of us believed that young girl killed that wannabe mobster! All of us in Elmer, New Jersey knew that Lana had done it and was convinced by the studios to let her daughter take the rap. Who knows? Then there was crooner Eddie Fisher leaving innocent and beautiful Debbie Reynolds for that sexy and even more beautiful Elizabeth Taylor. He never really sang big time again after hurting poor Debbie. But he got his when Taylor dropped his small-time ass and went with a big star in Richard Burton, whom she met while filming the spectacle Cleopatra (which was so expensive it forced 20th Century Fox to sell its backlot which became Century City.) Ah, it was all so delicious.

When LIFE became too respectable and really wouldn't give us the inside scoop it was off to the tobacco shop and news stand to buy Confidential Magazine which was the pioneer of all the gossip not fit to print. One could even say that the National Enquirer owes its existence to that hot nasty gossip rag. It was reported that Walter Winchell gave the magazine scoops that were too risky to put into his own hot column of the day.

Mostly, I loved the amazing shots of palm trees, searchlights, dressed to the "nines" stars and beautiful celebrity mansions. I yearned to see it all in person. In the 1990's, I went to the roof of my Los Angeles house on Oscar night and watched searchlights crosscross the perfectly clear sky. That evening, as all of Hollywood laid before me, I knew that I had made it. Wow. What a night.