Despite being culturally straight and a man out of the 1950's in his looks, the white guy who drove me past San Bernardino onto Interstate 40 and further eastward in California and closer to the Arizona border was a friendly guy. He was some kind of a civilian worker who was employed at one of the military bases in eastern California or western Arizona. But he wasn't gung-ho military or right-wing extremist politically; and he seemed to be working at the military base as a civilian mainly because it was just the highest-paying job around that he could find.
Since he didn't live in any of the towns right near the military base on which he worked, each weekday he had to commute back and forth to his job by driving on interstate and state highways for an hour and a half to get to work and for an hour and a half to get back home from work. So before we reached the exit on Interstate 40 that crossed the state highway which led to the military base where he worked, we had an interesting and friendly conversation.
I no longer can recall exactly what we talked about, although I suspect that my rap around that time about how the computer technology should be used to create a leisure-oriented society in which all of us in the USA would only have to work a few days a week at boring jobs, without any cut in our current pay, appealed to him. And I think he saw me as living in a way that was less enslaving than his current job situation at the military base enabled him to live, yet living in a way that he was fearful of, himself, living in the same way. And, when he realized that, like him, I wasn't married or interested in being married, he seemed to understand why I did not wish to be tied down to one person romantically for life.
But I was still somewhat surprised, since he still looked so culturally straight in a 1950's way, when, a few miles before his car reached his exit on Interstate 40, he suddenly asked in a serious tone: "Have you ever had sex with a man?"
In the 1970's, despite the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion and the rapid growth and visibility of the Gay Liberation Movement in cities like New York City and San Francisco and in many U.S. university campus towns, in more socially conservative parts of the United States and at most culturally straight workplaces, like in military bases, corporate offices and factories, homophobia was still widespread; and, if you were a gay man trapped economically in some socially conservative area of the USA, there was often not enough of a gay bar scene around where you lived and worked to make it easy for you to find men who shared your sexual orientation that you could hook up with easily locally. Nor was there any computer-based internet, facebook or gay singles website way of meeting potential sexual partners in the 1970's. So checking out whether the hitchhiker he picked up might be interested in having sex with him, in the socially conservative region where the driver who picked me up lived, was probably not an anymore unusual thing for a culturally straight gay male driver to do than it was for a culturally straight heterosexual man who picked up a woman hitchhiker to check out whether she might be interested in having sex with him, in that same socially conservative region.
"No, I'm more into just getting back to New York City now," I replied in a matter-of-fact and good-natured, friendly way. And although the driver looked a bit disappointed, he didn't try to verbally or physically pressure me to stay in his car and have sex with him during the remaining few minutes before we reached the Interstate 40 exit where he dropped me off, wished me "good luck" and continued driving on a state highway that led to the military base where he worked--after I thanked him for the ride and also wished him luck. (end of part 12)
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