Kiss and Make-Up by Gene Simmons Page B

place I became aware that the world also has homosexuals. There were public latrines, where everybody would line up and then do their business. There were no walls between the boys, just this trough. Next to me was a guy who I think might have been my age. He kept looking over at me, and at my member, andasking what bunk I was in, and commenting on this and that, and asking me if I wanted to come over to his bunk. I said, “Do you have any comic books?” This took him aback a bit. He didn’t have comic books, he said, but he was there. “Well,” I said, “I don’t want to go if you don’t like comic books. Unless you know where I can get some TV?” This totally threw him. TV? Why? “Because I want to watch
Superman
,” I said. This was a classic example of miscommunication: he was trying to pick me up, and I was trying to watch TV and read
The Fantastic Four.

     
    Even though I was playing music at home and at camp, in Queens and all around Long Island, it didn’t occur to me that I might be able to make a career out of being in a rock band. I had always worked, making deliveries or in the butcher store, and I saved like a madman. I never spent a dime on anything. I took great pride in the wad of cash I had accumulated. So I was never afraid of finding a job or making money. I knew how to do that. But as the band began to take up more of my time, it seemed like I might be able to find some way to make a go of it professionally. To make sure I didn’t do anything stupid, Mom agreed to let me pursue my band, or whatever else I wanted, as long as I had something to fall back on. She told me that I would need to go to college and get some kind of degree, in case my other plans didn’t work out. It never occurred to me to challenge this condition. My mother’s approval was extremely important. She was the reason I never smoked or drank or got high—not when I was a teenager, not to this day. Because of her horrible experiences in the concentration camps of Europe, I was always very clear on the fact that I didn’t have the right to break her heart. She had suffered enough. As a result, I’d always try really hard in whatever I did to never embarrass her or in any other way hurt her. She gave me life. The least I could do to repay her was to give her happiness.

flaming youth:
     

my college years 1970–1972
     
    I could have gone to school downstate or stayed in the city, but all my life I had grown up surrounded by Jews and the Jewish experience. On television I saw a much broader and more diverse world, with blacks and Christians who were from different places and spoke differently and wore different clothes. Up until that point, I hadn’t been out of Israel and New York, except for my brief trips to summer camp, and everyone there was Jewish, too. The few experiences I had had with other kinds of people, like the black friends I had in sixth grade, were all positive experiences, and I wanted to explore them some more after I graduated from high school. I packed up and went upstate to South Fallsberg, New York, where I attended Sullivan County Community College.
    When I got to Sullivan County, I made sure that both my roommates there were black. My mother was scared something would happen to me, not because they were black, exactly, but because she had lived through the Holocaust, where she had almost been wiped off the face of the Earth. Anyone from the outside was a threat to her. She tried to strong-arm me; she said that if I didn’t move out, she would disown me. Eventually she came upstate, and we had a heart-to-heart conversation. “Mom,” I said, “I know you love me. I know you’re trying to protect me and do what’s best for me. But I have to try to figure this out on my own.” It wasn’t easy for her, but she let me go my own way. Once I was there at college, I tried to confront my own racism, or what there might be of it, by seeing whether I could live with these two guys. Were they any