By the time Arthur Harris turned 17, he had already endured a childhood of grinding poverty in Hartford’s North End, the death of his mother, and the rejection of a community that viewed homosexuality as a sin.
It should have come as no surprise to anyone, then, that he went searching for love and acceptance wherever he could find it — a search that landed him in the arms of a man nearly twice his age and, later, in the kinds of risky situations he’d been warned about in his high school health class.
“I was looking for love like everybody else,” says Harris, now 26. “I thought the gay lifestyle would be a safe place.”
