SHAPIRO: He told his wife he had to go to a meeting. SHAPIRO: When did you realize you were not cured?īLACK: I was at the nursery and dealing my plants and all that - there was a young fellow who was sort of giving me the eye, you could say. I don't think I'd have done it otherwise. They fell in love, married and had children.īLACK: I felt that I was cured. SHAPIRO: He moved back to the United States. And so I took that until I started growing breasts. So like many gay men in the middle of the last century, Hector agreed to undergo treatment.īLACK: It was the treatment that people felt was the right treatment in those days - you take estrogen. That interest carried him to a commune in Paraguay, where there was zero tolerance for homosexuality. He was interested in social justice, pacifism and communal living. SHAPIRO: Hector served in the Army in World War II but soon realized he couldn't kill another human being. And then, you know, after a few months, I started thinking about it and then I realized that I'd wanted to experience this again. That's also where Hector had his first sexual experience.īLACK: I thought this is not me. The first time he realized there were other people like him in the world was at Harvard in the 1940s, where he studied social anthropology. I sat with him in the flagstone patio overlooking his garden, wind chimes joining in behind us, under a canopy of trees that he planted decades ago. He lives in a valley in rural Tennessee, where his family runs a plant nursery.īLACK: This is a mulberry - delicious mulberry. He's been on Stor圜orps, Radiolab, The Moth. Hector represents thousands of men and women whose names we will never know, a generation of people who were forced to live in secret. SHAPIRO: We should warn you that a more offensive term for gay people shows up later in this story. When Hector Black was born in 1925, the phrase gay rights didn't even exist.īLACK: The word gay was never even mentioned, or even homosexual. Same-sex marriage is now legal in all 50 states. SHAPIRO: 2015 was a revolutionary year for gay rights. All I knew was that I was attracted to men. SHAPIRO: Did you even have a word for it?īLACK: No, no word for it at all. HECTOR BLACK: I felt like I was nobody in the whole dang world - was a weirdo like me. So we decided to talk to him about his life anyway. But he hasn't written one yet, and he's 90 years old. If Hector Black had written an autobiography, we would interview him about it.