ILLINOIS - The love of Victor Engandela's life was a Czech immigrant, an older, square-jawed man, olive-skinned and Hollywood handsome with a shock of white hair and an unfailingly gentlemanly manner.
Joseph was his name. There are pictures of him pressed in a yellowed photo album buried on a shelf in Engandela's room at an Evanston home for seniors.
"I was with him," Engandela said, "until he took his final breath."
He shares these photos, and stories of a rich life, with no one but the occasional visitor, spending most of his days isolated from his past, surrounded by contemporaries born in an age when homosexuality was taboo.
"I'm one of the few people here that's out, and I feel the weight of that," said Engandela, 85. "I don't advertise it, but I feel people know I'm homosexually oriented. They like me, but they don't like me as a homosexual. I feel shunned."
Engandela realized he was gay when he was about 13. His parents were Sicilian immigrants, and he was raised Catholic, one of four siblings.
Rather than play with other kids, Engandela preferred sitting on the porch in his Chicago neighborhood watching the older Italian men talk and smoke cigars.
As he got older he began going to Bughouse Square, listening to poets and Marxists atop soapboxes on hot summer nights. That spot in Washington Square Park was also a covert meeting place for gays, and it was nearby, under the elevated train tracks, that he had his first homosexual experience.
"It was, really, quite beautiful," he said. "But at that time it was a real no-no. I couldn't talk to anybody about it."
Figuring he could live more freely away from his family, Engandela graduated from high school early, went on the road as a professional pianist and eventually joined the Navy, serving in the Philippines during World War II.
After the war and after graduating from college, Engandela met Joseph in New York City and, in the 1950s, brought him home to Chicago. They set up together in an apartment on Cornelia Avenue.
"We had a nice, happy home there," Victor said. "My mother came to like Joseph and realized he was good for me, that he loved me. She'd invite us over for Sunday dinners, and he learned to like spaghetti."
Engandela worked for the state of Illinois as a social worker focusing on care for the elderly.
He didn't talk about being gay among his co-workers, and would even bring women as dates to social functions.
"I always said when I retired, when it was no longer dangerous, I was going to come out." And that's what he did, retiring in the 1970s and telling everyone he knew, including members of the YMCA men's club where he was president, that he was gay.
It felt good to finally be fully open, and he savored those years.
But now Engandela feels as closeted as he's ever been. He often sits alone in the dining room, and has little to do with the various groups and clubs at his long-term care facility. He has a friend who comes by twice a week. On Saturdays they sit in his room and listen to opera on the radio.
Engandela has been to the seniors program at the Center on Halsted a couple of times, but it's hard for him to arrange transportation. Once, another man from the nursing home took him, but when the man realized it was a gay organization he stormed off to the Center's lobby, refusing to dine with Engandela and the other seniors.
"At this point in my life, I can't believe I have to feel this way," Engandela said. "I have a lot of memories I'd like to share, a lot I'd like to talk about. But I feel like I can't, and I shudder when I think I have to spend the remaining years of my life in this place."
from The Chicago Tribune
