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This fictionalized memoir is based largely on real events and real people, over a seventy-year span, starting at the midpoint of the 20th century. It's the collection of fifty tales filled with longing and gratitude, which taken together define the events and milestones of my life. Of course names of people and places are changed. If you weren't there, it may sound like a distant dream. We were searching for new ways to love. I look back with pride: Stonewall, Gay Liberation, Gay Rights, the Party Years, AIDS caregivers, Same-Sex Marriage and Transgender Rights. We accomplished a lot. Each phase had its notable places and faces. As memories, they were all indelible. This book touches on a few, some large, some small. Some serious, some fun. Did you see Calvin Klein's 1984 Underwear Campaign? He boldly proclaimed a proud new male sexuality in Times Square, using Bruce Weber's enormous illuminated ads featuring the Brazilian model Tom Hintnaus in revealing white briefs. Things would never be the same. It would be hailed as one of the "Ten Pictures that Changed America." Here's to some other places and faces I still cherish.
About the author
Miles Cigolle grew up in a classic adobe house near Albuquerque's historic Old Town with his parents and three siblings. His mother Terry was a ceramicist and a fine arts painter. His father Edward was a local grocer catering equally to the local Native Americans, Hispanics and Anglos with his two brothers. Miles studied architecture at Cornell University and went on to practice architecture for twenty-five years with distinguished New York City firms. He met his future husband Abbey in June on Memorial Day in 1982 in a leather bar in New York's Meat Packing District. Abbey was a Stonewall baby. The couple returned to quiet Ithaca, New York in 2000. Miles worked on local higher education projects while Abbey joined the Finger Lakes Land Trust. They retired to New Mexico in 2016. Miles's first memoir, Miles's World, was published by Secord Books in 2021. Three subsequent memoirs, Reckoning, Upon Arrival, and Places and Faces were published by Sunstone Press.
