Creating Your Own Identity

He was going through the process of accepting that he was gay, and his friend Jack Ross, who was openly gay and the toast of the town, going to Tramp, the hedonistic Mayfair nightclub where they met movie stars and rock gods including Joan Collins and Roger Moore.

A rumor started that my brother had married Jack Ross, and they were adopting children. The rumor went from London to Israel to my aunt Olga who told my mother. She immediately took a plane and went to London to find out what was going on. When she arrived at my brother’s apartment, Maria Badeaux has greeted a top model for Vogue who was staying with my brother. They were sleeping in the same room to give my mother Jack Ross’ room as he had moved out to make my mother’s stay more pleasant.

At the time, my brother was starting a modeling career, and they had to go to Paris for a photoshoot. My mother went along and was convinced that what she had heard was only envious gossip. The party at Chez Régine in Paris and then they return to London. My brother was driving an MG convertible and was stopped at the border. He had to call my mother from the border to confirm that the MG was his car and all my mother’s shopping was in the car.

He had registered an offense when the police came to his flat when neighbors complained about the noise and found marijuana. They had to pay a fine, but it was registered in the courts. That same year my brother Jimmy arrived as a surprise to Acapulco on New Years' and showed up at Armando’s Le Club with Maria and another top Vogue model mesmerizing everyone in the club.

Jimmy told me while he was studying in Switzerland in the 1970s, one of his friends from school was a descendent of an Italian Baron. Even though he had the title and nobility, his family was not rich. He was dating a beautiful Countess that had a lot of money and was ready to ask her to marry him. He was invited to her birthday and wanted to impress her with a beautiful present. He goes to an antique store, and as he is looking around, one of the store owners has an accident, stumbles, and breaks an antique very expensive vase.

The guys get an idea; tells the owner to sell him the broken vase even though it had lost all its value. He asked him to please wrap it as a present. The owner tells him he had to contact his insurance to report the loss, and after they had seen the broken vase, he will be happy to rap it for him. To please come back later on.

The guy gets the present and goes over to the countess palazzo. As he is walking up the marble staircase, he stumbles and falls. The girl runs to his rescue as he hurt his knee. They sit in the living room. They get a glass of champagne, and she opens the present. He is expecting to react distressed as the vase had broken. However, when she opened the box, the antique store had rapped each broken piece separately. He runs away as fast as he could and never called her again.

My mother came to visit me in Philadelphia before the end of the first semester. My girlfriend Lilly had come to visit me a few weeks before my mom with her sister Lucy. While having a boyfriend in Mexico City whom she married a few years later, Lucy had a very special admirer who also joined us for a long weekend in Philadelphia.

His name was Lamonte McClemore, and he was one of the members of the Fifth Dimension. He returned our visit from a few years before when we visited Los Angeles, where he introduced us to his new “artist revelation” Donna Summers and the song he felt was going to become a hit: “Love to Love You Baby.”

Lamonte was very good friends with charismatic soul singer Teddy Pendergrass, one of the biggest stars of Philadelphia's Sound. He would pick us up at my place in Spruce Street and drive us around in his silver with navy blue detailed Rolls Royce. Unfortunately, a few years later, in 1982, while he was at the peak of his career, he was involved in a car crash that left him paraplegic.

There was a passenger in Pendergrass's car, an absolutely beautiful transgender woman. They had just left Elan when they crashed in Lincoln Drive in the Philly suburbs. Elan was the most exclusive disco club and restaurant in Philadelphia, located in Rittenhouse Square a few blocks from my apartment, where my long-term boyfriend Bob worked at the time. Bob worked at Elan while taking some business courses at Wharton and a culinary course at “Le Bec Fin,” the most exclusive French restaurant in Philadelphia. He didn’t finish his BA and became the Manager of Catering at the Warwick Hotel, which was run by the same outside company managing “Elan.” Around the same time, the world had been struck by the AIDS/HIV that took the life of Billiy Winko a coworker and one of Bob’s best friends. Bob decided he needed to do something about the new virus that was affecting the gay community. He spoke with the company at the Warwick Hotel who donated their large banquet room facilities to develop and create the successful annual fundraising event titled “Cha Cha” in his honor. Bob’s worked continued for a few years while working as a Producer/Reporter and Host at NJN when we bought our first property together in the Logan Square area in Philadelphia.