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"Morgan Summer" was the pen name used by a beautiful, brave, gentle, talented, passionate gay teenager from South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, who wrote a series of 53 syndicated newspaper columns between late fall of 1987 and July, 1989 chronicling his life and thoughts as a high school senior and as a college freshman, alternately closeted and un-closeted. These columns were published under the title, "A Boy of Summer," appearing first in the gay newspaper Wisconsin Light, then in Gay Chicago Magazine, and finally in publications in Oregon and Southern California, for a total of at least four different venues. Morgan's work also hit the east coast briefly within the year after his column's demise, when at least two of his columns were printed non-chronologically in KRP2 Report, a small Paramus, New Jersey publication aimed directly at gay teenagers.
The column ended, abruptly and tragically, when an unknown person or persons sent copies of a few of Morgan's columns to his grandparents (his legal guardians), who immediately gave him an ultimatum: stop being gay, stop thinking you're gay, stop any association with anyone or anything gay, and stop writing on the topic of homosexuality, or else forfeit all financial support from us, and with it the opportunity of attending college. So Morgan stopped being gay, and stopped thinking he was gay, and stopped associating with anyone or anything gay, and stopped writing on the topic of homosexuality. In the 20 years since then, as far as I know, Morgan's writing has been available to the public only in back issues of the publications in which they originally appeared in the handful of gay and lesbian archives and libraries scattered across the United States (and perhaps the world), and, for a time, on the little-known original version of this website at angelfire, where, nine years ago, I got only as far as posting Morgan's first two columns. The present website is intended finally to make Morgan's work easily available to anyone who wants to read it or re-read it.
I am presenting the texts of Morgan's columns as they originally appeared in Wisconsin Light and Gay Chicago, except for the correction of obvious typographical, typesetting, or copy-editing errors, and the resolution of discrepancies between these two sources (when both are available) according firstly to what I believe most likely to be in Morgan's original manuscripts, secondly to what seems to clarify the text, thirdly to the rules of standard English grammar, and when all else fails, to my unavoidably arbitrary personal choice. I've described the textual issues in some detail in the "notes" for each column, however. Since I have had to re-key every word, space, and punctuation mark of every document on this website, inevitably some of my own typographical errors may have crept into the texts. If you discover any of these, please contact me here so that I can correct them.
The "related materials" include every published reference to Morgan Summer of which I am aware. These are drawn primarily from Gay Chicago: several columns by a fellow columnist, a number of letters to the editor, and a concluding editorial by GC co-publisher Ralph Paul Gernhardt. Some of the letters don't really deserve the honor of appearing on the same website as Morgan's columns. I have included them only because they convey an important part of the atmosphere in which Morgan's work was originally published, and as such are part of his story. To maximize the present-day reader's understanding of the progression of events at the time, most of the related materials are presented chronologically, interrupting the succession of Morgan's columns exactly as they did when they made their initial appearances. I will consider adding similar materials from any of the other publications in which Morgan's columns appeared, or from any other publication in which Morgan or his columns were mentioned at any time, if anyone can provide them. If you have any such materials, or if you have copies of Morgan's columns from the other publications in which they appeared, or if you have any other Morgan Summer-related documents or information that you are willing to share (or simply want to comment), please contact me here.
Because the photograph of Morgan which appeared with many of his columns caused him a great deal of trouble during his column's original run by making him too readily identifiable to people who wanted to hurt him, no photograph of Morgan will appear on this website without explicit permission directly from him. If you are the person who wrote the Morgan Summer "Boy of Summer" columns, please contact me here.
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