It wasn't hard to trick when hanging out at camp, if that's really what you wanted to do. The problem was getting guys to notice you. Unfortunately, if you were hanging around having fun with a group of other gay kids, few of the men cruising camp would stop to talk. In fact the unofficial motto on camp was "united we stand, divided we get picked up one by one." If you wanted to get laid that night, you didn't hang around with the group.
But normally, we met on camp just for kicks, to see friends, and to meet other gay kids. I ended up meeting both a future boyfriend and people who would eventually be life-long friends.
One night while riding around camp with Stanley and Chuck (Stanley was a high school friend who had come out by then and Chuck was another friend that I had met on camp several months earlier) we noticed a new face on the corner. Chuck, never shy about picking up boys, leaned out of the backseat window of Stanley's 1936 Buick and flirted shamelessly with the fellow. We cruised around the block several times before convincing the guy to get in the car with us and go for something to eat. Dennis turned out to be both cute (think of a young Omar Sharif) and sweet.
Dennis had just begun to come out. He was a college student, attending Reed College, and had had no idea where the gay bars were or where younger guys went to meet other homos. So he did what a lot of gay men do when trying to find other gays, he let his gaydar pick out a couple of guys he thought to be gay and discreetly followed them. They lead him straight to what turned out to be camp.
Dennis always said that he had felt a little awkward standing there on camp that night so he grabbed the first opportunity he could to get off that corner. Chuck's charming pick-up act finally convinced him to join us for the evening. Chuck and Dennis' affair lasted quite a while before eventually breaking up.
Dennis was a long-term survivor of AIDS until he succumbed to the disease in June of 1999.
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