Denny Jacobson realized he was gay at a young age \u2013 five or six, he says \u2013 but in the 1950s, that wasn\u2019t something people talked about. Despite having a supportive mother, he was assaulted multiple times as a child, later struggled with substance abuse, and witnessed his friends dying of AIDS while the president wouldn\u2019t even acknowledge the crisis. Somehow, through these experiences, Denny has remained exceptionally positive, a firm believer in love and the goodness of humanity. Today you\u2019ll find him in the Stevens Square neighborhood, where he\u2019s lived for about fifteen years, doing his best to brighten everyone\u2019s day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Denny has been with his husband, Daniel Jackson, for almost fifty years. \u201cI met him in 1973 when I was about 22,\u201d he says. \u201cI had told my gay friends, \u2018I’m tired of dating, I feel like a hoe.\u2019 So they introduced me to Daniel. Within a minute of meeting him, I knew he was special. There were, like, little sparkles around him and I was just overcome with \u2018Yes, this is the one.\u2019 I just knew it was him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe first three times I met him, he didn’t want me sexually – not that he wasn’t interested – but I made a point, and wanted to see how he was going to react. So we kind of dated, but I was still dating other people. After three or four years, I decided, \u2018What are we doing?\u00a0\u00a0Here is the person, who when I was 22, before I met him, I had prayed to God [for].\u2019 I had said, being religious, I want to meet someone who I can be with for the rest of my life. And it happened!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSo by the time I was 27, we had sealed our love and relationship, and it just got better and better. We could have been married in 1977 when I finally realized the relationship was what it was going to be.\u201d Officially, Denny and Daniel were married in 2013.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While they were falling in love in the seventies, Denny was also working on his own trauma healing. \u201cIn 1977 I went through a program \u2013 it was called Christopher Street, it was over on 22nd and Hennepin. It was a counseling place for gay people to go. Michael Roebuck was one of my counselors. They began talking about [AIDS]. They were saying gay men are dying in New York and Los Angeles, they\u2019re dropping dead. They called it the gay cancer. By the early 1980s, Michael Roebuck [and several of my other friends] had all died of AIDS. It was really fast. Back then they didn\u2019t know what to do, so people were just dying. It was a very sad time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AIDS now, of course, is manageable with the proper treatments, and the stigma has lessened. We as a community lost so many of our elders during that time. When asked if he had any advice for young LGBTQ people today, Denny sighed and said, \u201cI don’t know. Just be careful, because things right now are crazy, and they could get worse for GLBTQ people. You can’t solve the hatred, so I think you do need to be careful, but if you can be out and be open, that\u2019s the best thing to do. Just keep watching what\u2019s going on in the world. Because people can change our rights, people could do that really easily coming up. I want us to band together and be as supportive as we can, and I mean to everybody, not just GLBTQ, but to everybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI like being more positive, because the negative stuff can just drag you down. I always take those negative things and flick them up into the air, little boxes of icky stuff, just flick them up there and say goodbye. The one thing God\u2019s son says is, \u2018love one another as I have loved you.\u2019 Yeshua never said who! He just says to love one another \u2013 so that\u2019s everybody. That\u2019s how I look at it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wise words to live by.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thank you, Denny, for being who you are, and for helping us do the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Denny Jacobson realized he was gay at a young age \u2013 five or six, he says \u2013 but in the 1950s, that wasn\u2019t something people talked about. Despite having a supportive mother, he was assaulted multiple times as a child, later struggled with substance abuse, and witnessed his friends dying of AIDS while the president…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":187478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","wds_primary_category":146},"categories":[146,170,278,140],"tags":[17581],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavendermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187409"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavendermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavendermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavendermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavendermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187409"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lavendermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187785,"href":"https:\/\/lavendermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187409\/revisions\/187785"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavendermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavendermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavendermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavendermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}