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PADLOCK ON a wrought-iron gate blocks the old man's way to his past and future.
"The cemetery is behind the house. You go on past the house and through the barnyard and out in a pasture," he says. "My grandfather put a big, thick concrete wall around it. My grandparents are buried there and my parents and others. I guess I'll be buried out here, too."
"Out here" is Massaponax in Spotsylvania County. On the other side of the gate is Bunker Hill, the big house with the rusted tin roof where the old man spent weekends and summers as a boy in the days before World War II.
Down the hill is the Ni River, where he swam. Up the road is Massaponax Baptist Church, where he's been a member since he was 12 and baptized in a gravel pit near Summit. A lifetime later, new subdivisions fill the woods.
"Man, this place has really changed," the old man says. "I remember when Route 1 was a two-lane road. My grandfather was postmaster of Fredericksburg. He lived on Charles Street. When my father was little, he fell over the fence of the Mary Washington House next door and broke his arm."
When the old man was an ambitious young attorney in the 1950s, he and his beautiful wife, Rosalie, moved from the farm to a little house they rented in Fredericksburg on Kenmore Avenue. He was living there in 1960, when he managed John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in the city and stayed up all night watching the television in the living room to make sure his candidate had won.
He prospered. He and Rosalie built a mansion that was the talk of the town on a hill at Westmont. They divorced in 1975 when he realized he was homosexual.
Their two sons both died of cystic fibrosis. Chance was 25 when he died in 1980. "I hope I'm as brave as Chance when my time comes," said Chance's brother, Chris, who died at age 22, eight months later. Rosalie died in 1994.
Mother and sons are buried side by side at Oak Hill Cemetery, within sight of the house at Westmont. There's no space in the plot for the old man.
After his marriage, he moved to a gay life in Fairfax. He continued his Fredericksburg law practice until 2000, when he was caught stealing money from a trust account.
"A Greek tragedy and an enigma rolled into one," is the way John C. Goolrick describes the old man, about whom Goolrick wrote hundreds of stories in The Free Lance-Star years ago.
Now, the old man is 83 and living on a $1,490-a-month Social Security check in the Madonna House apartments for the elderly in Fredericksburg. The manager there calls him "a real doll baby."
"Everybody at Madonna House comes from someplace else," the old man says. "Nobody knows who I am."
***
Forty years ago, practically everybody knew about George Chancellor Rawlings Jr.
Rawlings was a force in state politics, a liberal, white knight in a snazzy suit and a red bow tie riding out in campaign after campaign to battle his archenemies, conservative Democrats of the Byrd Machine and their latter-day Republican kin.
To many of his relatives and neighbors, Rawlings was a traitor to his race and class. But to others, especially African-Americans freed at last from poll taxes and literacy tests, Rawlings was proof that a racist political system from which they had long been barred could be changed.
The high-water mark of Rawlings' political career came one muggy July night in 1966. When the votes of a Democratic primary were finally counted, Rawlings had knocked out Rep. Howard W. Smith, one of the Byrd Machine's most powerful good old boys.
Everybody called him Judge Smith. He was 82 and had not lost an election in 60 years of public life. He had served 36 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and was chairman of its all-powerful Rules Committee.
Insiders used to say that when Judge Smith went fishing, Congress shut down. Single-handedly, Smith had blocked much of the liberal legislation proposed by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
The newspaper called Rawlings' victory "the upset of the century." Afterward, two Time magazine reporters, one of whom was black, came to Fredericksburg and interviewed Rawlings on the front lawn of his home.
Times were different then. Rawlings says Rosalie "got all upset" after the interview about what their white Westmont neighbors would think about the black man sitting in the lawn chair in the front yard.
***
Now, those times, like the old man himself, seem remote and irrelevant. Most people living now weren't even born in the 1960s, when the seemingly placid stream of American life turned turbulent.
By the end of the decade, the fabric of the country had been torn by assassinations, riots, demands for black equality, an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam and a generation of young Americans finding shelter from it all in sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.
In Virginia, Rawlings, Henry Howell and other liberal Democrats redrew the Virginia political landscape dominated since the 1920s by Harry F. Byrd, a courtly Winchester newspaper publisher and apple grower.
Byrd served as governor in the 1920s and 32 years as U.S. senator. Today, he is largely remembered for his opposition to almost everything involving public debt or the federal government, especially his infamous "massive resistance" plan to close public schools to avoid court-ordered school integration.
In challenge after challenge, Rawlings and his allies eventually wrested control of the state Democratic Party from the Byrd Machine.
The liberals changed something else, too.
In the Byrd era, the Republican Party in Virginia was a nonentity, a hated reminder of what Abraham Lincoln and other Yankees did in the Civil War to the vainglorious myth called Old Virginia.
The attacks of Rawlings, Howell and other liberals on the political and social status quo frightened old-line Democrats and turned thousands of them into Republicans, setting the stage for GOP dominance of state politics that continues to this day.
"I see George Rawlings as a hero," says University of Mary Washington political science professor emeritus Lewis P. Fickett Jr. "He and Henry Howell dramatically changed Virginia politics.
"They challenged the system sufficiently that there was tremendous change. Sadly, it's all gone back now, but there was a period when George and Henry and their populous rhetoric almost succeeded. They came awfully close."
***
Rawlings was born in Fredericksburg and grew up in Ashland. He was a son of the well-to-do president and board chairman of Lawyers Title Insurance Co. H. Laurie Smith, Howard Smith's brother, had founded the firm. At his father's side, the young Rawlings met all the rich, old men he would grow up to hate.
In 1942, Rawlings received a bachelor's degree in history and government from Randolph-Macon College and went on to spend a year at the Harvard Graduate School of Business. His heaviness and an arm injury disqualified him from military service in World War II. Instead, he worked in war industries in New England.
He says two teachers taught him to be liberal. At Henry Clay High School, English teacher and forensic coach Ella Talley persuaded the young Rawlings to give a speech titled "Jews" for a public-speaking competition.
He went to Richmond and interviewed a rabbi. In his speech, Rawlings quoted Shakespeare's Shylock: "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?" The speech won the district and placed second in the state.
"All that tended to broaden my attitudes," he remembers. "It wasn't hard to extend those thoughts about intolerance toward Jews to the pervasive intolerance toward blacks that existed then."
At college, Rawlings took some classes from Early Lee Fox, a professor of history and government. Fox's frequent lectures against Byrd Machine politics struck a chord in Rawlings, especially after he found out his grandmother, Daisy Bullock Colbert of Massaponax, had campaigned against Harry Byrd when he ran for governor in 1925.
Rawlings earned a law degree from the University of Virginia degree in 1947. He moved to the old, 340-acre family farm at Massaponax, hung up his shingle in Fredericksburg and grabbed at every rung of the ladder to local success.
He joined the Ruritans, Lions, Elks and Farm Bureau. Seeking to bolster his law practice, he ran unsuccessfully for Spotsylvania commonwealth's attorney in 1951.
In a few years, he had become president of the local and state Jaycees, the Fredericksburg Agricultural Fair, the Spotsylvania Volunteer Fire Department, the Fredericksburg Title Agency Inc., bar associations and Young Democrats, as well as serving as chairman of the Spotsylvania Planning Commission and the local Red Cross and American Heart Association chapters.
In 2004, politicians and environmentalists would celebrate the destruction of the 20-foot-tall Embrey Dam on the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg. But when Rawlings was a young man on the move, the region's leaders wanted to build a new, 200-foot-tall dam. Proponents called it the Salem Church Dam after the topographic map on which it was drawn.
The boosters called themselves Eager Beavers and occasionally wore beaver hats. They believed the abundance of water and electric power from the vast manmade lake would spark a renaissance of sleepy, old Fredericksburg, then reeking from the sulfurous odors of its sole major industry, a cellophane plant.
In 1963, Rawlings championed the Salem Church Dam in a Democratic primary campaign for the House of Delegates against Francis B. Gouldman, a 12-year veteran of the job. Gouldman, a Byrd Machine stalwart, described himself as a "100 percent foe of racial integration."
Rawlings lambasted Gouldman for saying that he would probably never live to see the dam built. Rawlings won the primary with 63 percent of the vote and went on to win the general election against Stafford Republican H. Ryland Heflin. He would hold the seat against many challenges until 1969.
In Richmond, Rawlings "was anything but welcome by the Byrd Democratic leadership," Goolrick recalls. "House Speaker E. Blackburn 'Blackie' Moore despised him." Another legislator of the era once remarked that he didn't know anything about a bill then under consideration, "but if George Rawlings is for it, I'm against it."
Rawlings' longtime, faithful ally was Henry E. Howell Jr. of Norfolk, an irrepressible liberal force in Virginia politics for 30 years. He served as a delegate and state senator, won a two-year stint as lieutenant governor and ran three brutal but unsuccessful campaigns for governor in 1969, 1973 and 1977. "Keep the Big Boys Honest" was Howell's mantra.
In his campaigns and lawsuits against archaic state practices, Howell "stirred Virginia politics only like dynamite could have done in a pond. He gave greater impetus to mass voting in Virginia and stirred people more than anybody in my lifetime," Gov. Colgate W. Darden Jr. once said.
Howell encouraged Rawlings to run against Smith in the Democratic primary in 1966. In announcing his candidacy, Rawlings said: "We must have representatives in government who are responsive to the needs of the people as they exist in modern America. We can no longer be content with opposition for the sake of opposing, nor with a refusal to recognize the onward flow of events and ideas in our rapidly growing and changing nation."
Old-line Democrats liked neither the message nor the messenger. Twelve of the 15 General Assembly members in the 8th District, the mayor of Fredericksburg, 11 of City Council's 12 members, the governor of Virginia and the courthouse crowds in the district's 20 counties all were in Smith's camp against Rawlings.
"Everybody was against him but the people," said The Free Lance-Star.
The district stretched from Fairfax to Charles City County. Rawlings seemingly knocked on every door in it and busied himself registering newly enfranchised black voters by the carload. Rawlings won by 645 votes of nearly 54,000 votes cast.
***
"A liberal in Virginia is a person who believes in life after birth," Henry Howell liked to quip. But it was a belief in racial equality that fundamentally set liberals apart from their conservative neighbors.
As Rawlings says now, "All you had to be in those days in Virginia was tolerant and you were considered liberal."
In his days in the legislature, Rawlings supported issues considered left-wing then but accepted facts of life now.
He favored a minimum wage of $1 an hour, a state sales tax, free public-school textbooks, semi-annual billing for local taxes, testing public drinking-water supplies, allowing federal employees to serve on county boards, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, and tapping a huge budget surplus for schools and highways. He also backed protections for consumers, studying the status of women and repealing the state's poll tax, which remained defiantly on Virginia law books after federal laws and courts had struck it down.
Rawlings achieved only modest success with his legislative agenda. Many of his initiatives suggested a future that conservatives could not accept, one in which the state and federal government ensured social, political and economic justice for blacks and working people. There was no room in this liberal vision for the Byrds, Judge Smith and other fossils from Virginia's segregationist past.
In 1967, Rawlings outlined his principles in a speech at a gathering in New York. He said he and other Virginia liberals "have abandoned the idea that the South is a separate part of the United States and we are prepared to enter into a partnership with federal government rather than regard it as a foreign power."
The liberals hailed Democratic social programs such as Medicare and the War on Poverty. They also welcomed new federal legislation to guarantee civil rights for blacks, their right to vote unhindered by poll taxes and literacy tests and the redrawing of voting boundaries to ensure the principle of one man, one vote.
These were odious propositions to patriarchs such as Byrd and Smith, whom Rawlings called masters of "opposition and obstruction."
But to Rawlings, the new laws and the political victories of liberals like him were milestones of an "overall course that will be forward and away from the old prejudices and limitations. At long last, all of the people will have a say as to the men who will govern them."
As things turned out, the people would say no to Rawlings.
***
"I'm for Bill Scott," a Fairfax County grocer told a reporter in October 1966. "I like what he says. I wanted Judge Smith to win, but a lot of people let him down. Now I think they've seen the light and they're going to keep Rawlings out of office. We don't want any more left-wingers up there than we've already got."
Few people outside of Fairfax County had ever heard of William L. Scott when the GOP nominated him to run against Rawlings in the 1966 general election for Smith's seat in the House of Representatives. Scott was a lawyer who had worked nearly 30 anonymous years for the Department of Justice before entering private practice in Fairfax.
Skyrocketing inflation, President Lyndon B. Johnson's policies and Rawlings' support of blacks and labor became the campaign's major issues.
Conservative Democrats such as Gov. Mills E. Godwin and U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Jr. mounted an anything-but-clandestine campaign to defeat Rawlings. Saying "there are not enough Republicans in the district to elect me," Scott openly courted old-line Democrats still smarting from Smith's defeat by Rawlings.
They responded in droves and joined Citizen-for-Scott committees all over the district. Smith urged them on by saying he could "never forgive or forget" the primary campaign Rawlings had waged against him.
When all was said and done, Smith got his revenge and Rawlings his comeuppance. By 15,000 votes, Scott became the first Republican in the 20th century to represent the district in Congress.
***
The magnitude of Scott's victory made it clear that many Democrats had crossed the once uncrossable line to the GOP. Instead of trying to reach out to the defectors and bring them back into the fold, Rawlings' forces at party meetings across the district replaced old-liners with liberal loyalists guaranteed to support Democratic candidates.
The conflict between liberal and conservative factions broke out into open warfare at a state Democratic convention in July 1968, when Rawlings led a loud, successful challenge to the 8th District's traditional leadership. The fight moved closer home in September, when Northern Virginia liberals elected Rawlings chairman of the district committee over his old friend and supporter Dan M. Chichester of Stafford.
Chichester blamed his defeat on Rawlings. To this day, Rawlings denies rigging the parliamentary ploys that resulted in the defeat of Dan Chichester and "his becoming my bitter enemy for the rest of his life."
But the damage had been done, and when Rawlings sought re-election to the House of Delegates in 1969, he found himself opposed in a Democratic primary by Chichester's 31-year-old nephew, John H. Chichester.
Rawlings beat John Chichester by 561 votes, but the primary returns showed that the strength of the three formerly stout legs of Rawlings' base--blacks, union members and the Mary Washington College community--had failed to grow in response to newfound Republican energy.
At the last minute, the GOP nominated Fredericksburg lawyer Benjamin H. Woodbridge Jr. to face Rawlings in November. A Republican tide was running. In 1968, Virginia had helped elect Richard Nixon to the White House and Bill Scott had won his second term in the House of Representatives. In 1969, Linwood A. Holton would become the first GOP governor of Virginia since Reconstruction.
The Rawlings-Woodbridge campaign "was one of the dirtiest and meanest I can ever recall," John Goolrick remembers today.
In the paper, Woodbridge called Rawlings an "ultra-liberal controlled by a small group of ultra-liberal college professors." Woodbridge lambasted MWC students for printing articles about marijuana and premarital sex in the college paper. In those days of student protests, Woodbridge proposed a law requiring the expulsion of college students or faculty who illegally disrupted classes.
Woodbridge campaigned door to door. In newspaper ads, he blasted Rawlings' "arrogant and totally incompetent brand of representation." He called Rawlings a "master of political hypocrisy" and a wastrel for wanting to spend $73 million to build a mass transit system in Northern Virginia.
He blamed Rawlings for antagonizing old-line Democrats such as Godwin and prompting them to locate Germanna Community College in Orange County instead of Spotsylvania. Woodbridge said a House bill that Rawlings co-sponsored to eliminate race as a factor in real-estate sales "took away from property owners in Virginia the right to sell their homes or land to whom they please."
Woodbridge won by 880 of 12,628 votes.
***
"How can I stop now when we've come so far and we're so near getting many of the things that will help the citizen who has no one else to look out for him? You can't just quit when there's still the unfinished business of progress for our state and area," Rawlings said at the time.
Rawlings' unfinished business was Harry F. Byrd Jr. "Little Harry," as he was often called, had been appointed to what had become the family seat in the U.S. Senate when his father resigned in 1965. The apple had not fallen far from the tree: Little Harry was cut from the same conservative cloth as his daddy.
Byrd Jr. came up for re-election in 1970 and Rawlings, remembering his victory over Smith in 1966, thought he could knock him out in a Democratic primary. Little Harry apparently thought so, too. In February 1970, Rawlings announced his intention to seek the Democratic nomination for Byrd's Senate seat. A few weeks later, Byrd announced that he would bolt the Democratic Party and seek re-election to the Senate as an independent.
In a Democratic primary, Rawlings managed to squeak past Clive Duval, a smooth Northern Virginia liberal promoted by party moderates. That fall, Rawlings billed himself as "The Peoples' Democrat" in his campaign against Byrd and Republican Ray Garland.
Goolrick wrote that Rawlings was "a veritable human buzz saw of activity, traveling thousands and thousands of miles around Virginia to give countless speeches, shake countless hands, issue countless statements, rise at the break of dawn and fall wearily into bed in the wee hours of the next morning at any convenient stopping place for the night."
Rawlings, Goolrick continued, "flailed unceasingly away at the Big Boys, the big banks and public utilities and the so-called Byrd Machine from the farthest corner of Northern Virginia to the farthest corner of Southwest Virginia where the Old Dominion meets the Tennessee line."
For Rawlings and his family, it all came down to an election night gathering at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond. Goolrick remembers going up for a drink to the room of Rawlings' father, who bemoaned the huge sums of money he was shoveling into his son's campaigns. In the next day's Free Lance-Star, Goolrick wrote:
"Rawlings has long boasted he is a 'straight-ticket Democrat' who supports party nominees 'from the courthouse to the White House,' but again he was learning a bitter lesson--that there are not enough 'straight-ticket Democrats' around when the party ticket includes the name of George C. Rawlings Jr."
Rawlings got twice as many votes as Republican Garland and carried the heavily Democratic "Fighting 9th" congressional district in Southwest Virginia. But Little Harry and the Big Boys' big money carried all the rest and beat Rawlings statewide by 210,000 votes.
"Take heart and don't abandon the principles we fought for," Rawlings told his disconsolate friends and campaign workers in the hotel ballroom.
"As he walked to an elevator back to the privacy of his room and his thoughts," Goolrick wrote, "one could not help thinking that at this moment, in this time and place, even those who professed to hate the man and his philosophy, even those who had been his bitterest enemies through the years, would have felt some measure of pity and sympathy for George Rawlings--feel even in their elation over his political loss that it would be difficult to accuse him of lacking courage and fortitude and perseverance."
***
In 1972, President Richard Nixon faced liberal Democratic challenger George McGovern. Former Gov. Godwin and other prominent Virginia Democrats announced their intention to vote for Nixon.
Outraged, Rawlings engineered a hostile, liberal takeover of the Virginia Democratic Party. Godwin didn't even win a delegate's seat to state convention in June.
At that convention, delegates elected a pro-McGovern slate to the national convention. Rawlings and Ruth Harvey Charity of Danville won seats on the Democratic National Committee and Jessie Rattley of Newport News was elected the party's first vice chairman. The two women were the first blacks ever to hold high leadership positions in the state party.
As Rawlings saw it, the Virginia party was still infested with "well-known leaders of the massive-resistance movement or politicians associated with those leaders. We should be glad that we are free at last of their influence and we can let them make the Republican Party the party of prejudice and reaction as they have made ours for years."
A right-wing editorialist of The Richmond News Leader called Rawlings "the embodiment of noise, an accomplished seller of wind, an ambulant cloud of verbal gas. Given the undeniable conservatism of Virginia's electorate, any State party dedicated to marrying Virginia to the national Democrats is doomed to quick oblivion."
It came in November. Nixon carried Virginia with 69 percent of the vote. The GOP landslide also buried moderate Democratic Sen. William B. Spong Jr., who lost his bid for re-election to Rawlings' old 8th District foe Bill Scott.
The next year, Godwin would turn Republican and--by just 15,000 of more than 1 million votes cast--win his second term as governor. He beat Henry Howell, who thought it wiser to run against Godwin as an independent than be labeled the liberal Democrat that everyone knew he was.
Before long, such Democrats as D. French Slaughter Jr. of Culpeper and Herbert H. Bateman of Newport News would become Republican congressmen. In Stafford County, John H. Chichester became a Republican and won his first election to the Virginia Senate in 1978.
Rawlings served on the Democratic National Committee until 1980. After he moved to Fairfax, he was once again elected chairman of the 8th District Democratic Committee and served until 1993.
By then, however, he had largely dropped out of the public spotlight to pursue another, much more private side of his life.
***
He says it started on Sunday mornings in the 1960s. His wife, Rosalie, was a Presbyterian and it was his fatherly duty to take their sons to Sunday school. He would drop the boys off at the church on George Street and continue on to a little William Street shop near the Chatham Bridge. It was a newsstand with a back room full of pornography. It was there, looking at the magazine pictures of naked men, that he says he realized he was homosexual.
"Gayness may run in families, who knows? I'm convinced it comes from something in the genes of gay people," he says.
Rawlings says his first homosexual encounters were with men he met at gay bars on political and business trips to New York, Washington and other cities. When he was 50, he met a 20-year-old man named Edward C. Fairleigh in a D.C. bar and fell in love.
"Society propelled me to get married," he says now, "but when I met Ed, I knew I had to do something. I'm not the type of person who believes something and does nothing about it. I decided I had to get out of the marriage, get out of the house and get out of Fredericksburg."
He moved to Fairfax, where, outside of Democratic circles, he was virtually anonymous. He bought an 18th-century house on the Occoquan near Lorton and restored and enlarged it for Ed and him. They entertained there and traveled to Atlantic City, Provincetown and the Caribbean. Eventually, Ed left him for another man and Rawlings moved on to other partners and other houses.
Rawlings continued his law practice in Fredericksburg, but his income fell short of his expenses, especially after his inheritance from his parents ran out and his divorce settlement. Rosalie got the Westmont house, $1,500-a-month spousal support and other allowances.
When Rosalie died, Rawlings says now in amazement, her estate was worth more than $1 million. Rawlings' own estate, it seems, will be worth far, far less.
In 1986, he became the executor of the estate of Helen Meryl Lee of Spotsylvania, who, among other bequests, left money to a New York chapter of the NAACP. Rawlings paid Lee's other heirs, but didn't notify the NAACP of its gift. He began to use the trust funds as his own.
In 1996, he sold his interest in a Lawyer's Title agency and paid the trust fund back $73,000 he had taken from it. But he was soon raiding it again.
Rawlings told all this to an investigator of the Virginia State Bar. He said he didn't make enough money in his legal career, that he didn't charge his clients high enough fees and that they often didn't pay him for his work.
He said he used some of the trust money on personal matters, including trips. He used more of it to make loans to friends who didn't pay them back, he said. One $59,500 loan went to a 34-year-old male client whom Rawlings defended several times on traffic and drug charges in city courts in the 1990s.
Rawlings' legal career came to an end in December 2000, when a check bounced that he had written on the trust account. A copy of the overdraft notice went to the Virginia State Bar and an investigation ensued. Rawlings surrendered his law license at once.
He pled guilty to embezzlement and received a suspended five-year prison term. His bonding company paid the NAACP $66,000 plus interest.
The whole affair was "regrettable," he says today. "It was a bad way for my legal career to end."
He had practiced law in the city for 53 years.
***
An unexpected visitor knocks on the door of Rawlings' apartment at Madonna House. Rawlings answers the door in his T-shirt and briefs. He sits on one of the red chairs in his little parlor beneath elegant old portraits of his sons and grandparents. In his bedroom, a pastel of a male nude hangs on the wall at the foot of his king-size, four-poster bed.
As always, his talk is about politics, about campaigns long ago and about people long dead--Howell, Smith, Godwin, Dan Chichester, Scott and a host of other friends and foes now, like him, largely forgotten. Why, not long ago, he says, he saw Ben Woodbridge in a grocery store and they had a nice conversation.
Conservatives still raise his hackles. These days, the right-wing villains are President George W. Bush and the Republican Party, whom he accuses of "playing up to racist, anti-black whites in the South. That's why they're winning."
"What Bush is trying to do is take us back to the 1930s. The want to eliminate all government from life and that's not possible. That's what they're trying to do with Social Security. They believe government should not be involved in that sort of thing. They're not trying to reform Social Security, they're trying to get rid of it.
"People need to remember the 1920s and 1930s when the Republicans were running the country. Things went straight to hell and that's where they're going now. Somebody needs to stand up and say that."
It won't be him. He says he feels "a little debilitated now and then."
In January, he went to Louisiana to visit his old friend Ed Fairleigh and wound up in a hospital suffering from symptoms of congestive heart failure. The physical therapy that followed, he says, "was the worst experience of my life."
He doesn't drive now and doesn't take taxis on Saturday nights to the gay bar downtown that he used to frequent. His health and his confinement, however, have focused him on a new project.
More than anything now, he says, he wants his story told. He thinks his life was important. He wants people to remember him and what he fought for.
Since he returned from Louisiana, he has filled up two legal pads with his own handwritten memoirs. He writes new pages every day. The pen and the manuscript rest on a table beside the red leather wing chair where the old man sits in his underwear.
"A Virginia Liberal," he says, will be the title.
FRANK DELANO is a staff writer with The Free Lance-Star. Contact him at 804/333-3834, or fpdelano2@verizon.net.
