David Perry recalls being young and gay in 1980s Washington D.C. and having "an absolute blast." He was fresh out of college, raised in Richmond, Virginia, and had long viewed the nation's capital as "the big city" where he could finally embrace his true self.
He came out of the closet here, got a job at the National Endowment for the Arts where his boss was a gay Republican, and "lost my virginity in D.C. on August 27, 1980," he says, chuckling.
The bars and clubs were packed with gay men and women - Republican and Democrat - and almost all of them deep in the closet.
"There were a lot of gay men in D.C., and they all seemed to work for the White House or members of Congress. It was kind of a joke. This was pre-Internet, pre-Facebook, pre-all of that. So people could be kind of on the down-low. You would run into congresspeople at the bar," Perry says. "The closet was pretty transparent. It's just that no one talked about it."
He also remembers a billboard near the Dupont Circle Metro station with a counter ticking off the total number of of AIDS deaths in the District of Columbia.