I grew up Grant because Ulysses was too dangerous a name to call a kid in the 1950s, when conformity ruled, and Ulysses S.
My story is their story, yet entirely my own..
They\'re all there in me.
Among them were farmers, leather tanners, inventors, slaveowners, abolitionists, soldiers, industrialists, politicians, lawyers, a Nobel Prize winner, a president and even a princess.
They danced on the edge of the Gilded Age after the Civil War and helped define the American dream for three centuries.
The people who made me who I am today are always on my mind.
The distillation of the lives of all those people who preceded me is the story of a baby boomer and a child of Stonewall; a Yalie who marched for gay pride in the 1970s, survived the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, adopted children in the 1990s, and finally married his Jewish partner of thirty-eight years in the twenty-first century.
My world was a snapshot of prosperous, suburban Post-War America for a baker\'s dozen of years, until two of my siblings died and I realized, at sixteen, that I was gay.
On my father\'s side, an Alsatian immiGrant to Colonial New York and, on my mother\'s, a Puritan dissenter seeking freedom on the Mayflower, added romance to my bland Leave it to Beaver Life in Syracuse, New York in the 1960s.
My given name Ulysses, however, ended up defining me as I was coming out in the early 1970s, altering my relationship with the world.
Grant\'s reputation was in the toilet.
I grew up Grant because Ulysses was too dangerous a name to call a kid in the 1950s, when conformity ruled, and Ulysses S
