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bars at midnight, and drink and party until dawn. “When I started drinking, I didn’t just drink to feel good. I got toasted. I got plastered, all the time. I turned out to be a blackout drinker for over twenty years.”
Around this same time he also started using drugs, lots of different drugs: LSD, Seconal, marijuana. It was the late ‘60s, and there were plenty of drugs available, even in conservative Kentucky.
And he started taking lovers, many of them. “At the time, drinking and doing drugs was a way for me to go out and meet other people like me. If you were young and gay in northern Kentucky, you’d go to bars. That was about all there was to do.”
School, work, drink and party. It went on like that for more than three years.
Finally, when he was seventeen, Jeff graduated from high school – just barely. He took off for San Francisco with his best friend, “for two reasons. One, obviously, it was the place to be if you were gay. You could really feel at home there. Two, I wanted to stay in the restaurant business, and in San Francisco you could get paid a lot more than anywhere else, since it was unionized.”
It was like night and day. He left the black hole of his life in Kentucky and found exactly what he was looking for in San Francisco: love, peace, fun, and friends. It was 1974, and there was a lot going on in the Bay area, even after the hippie movement had peaked in Haight-Ashbury.
In addition to working at a restaurant, Jeff took a second job as the desk

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