Aqualung: a Memoir

by Bill Kowaleski

Ian Anderson has led a band called Jethro Tull since at least 1970. I’m sure of that, because I attended a Jethro Tull concert at the Kinetic Playground in Chicago, Illinois in the summer of that year. I bought a tab of acid there and tripped to the music. Thank heavens a friend had driven me, or I may have never found my way home.

Did I mention that Led Zeppelin also played at that same concert? I sat right up against the stage. I could have touched Robert Plant if I’d wanted to.

My favorite Jethro Tull song was and still is Aqualung. I heard it just today, in 2025, and memories flooded back, nostalgia overcame me, my eyes teared up. Marcel Proust’s madeleines are no competition for Aqualung! It was as if I were there, in 1970, when I heard that song again and again. Images that I had no idea were still buried in dark corners of my brain marched before me. People I’d forgotten reintroduced themselves. And old pain rose to the surface of my consciousness. It’s that old pain I want to explore here.

For many, time at university is a happy time; that is, if they don’t flunk out or get arrested too often. But, for me, it was a time of emotions suppressed, of longings unfulfilled, of too much time wasted on pointless obsession. Oh, I did have my moments. I played in two different rock bands, and we weren’t that bad. I had friends, and we did things anyone would have called fun. They’re mostly dead now, but then they were full of life. I got good grades and graduated with honors. I should have been happy with the good things I had. But no, not me. I was miserable.

I blame it all on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow devised a list of human needs ordered by importance. Most important were food, shelter, clothing, and physical security. After that came love and acceptance. If you don’t have enough food or are living in a homeless camp, you most probably are not focused on finding the love of your life. But if those base level needs are met, you probably are looking for some form of love, and you will be restless and unhappy until you find it. At least that’s what Mr. Maslow postulated.

For me, Maslow’s hierarchy applied perfectly. I was fed, clothed and sheltered, and nobody was out to kill me, so my brain wanted me to focus on love. But there was a problem: I was gay at a time when that state of being was widely viewed as aberrant, even disgusting. I wanted the love of a handsome young man. But I had no idea how to find it, and there was no Internet, no easily available resource of any kind to help me find someone. I was so naïve, so unaware, that I had no idea how to find someone like me.

Of course, that didn’t stop my needy brain from attaching itself to attractive guys that I met in my everyday life, and being a college student at a large university, many such guys were walking around wherever I looked. Unfortunately, I consistently batted zero when it came to finding one who might have an interest in me. Within minutes, if not seconds, some handsome young guy I’d just met would bring up his girlfriend or stop to ogle some young lady passing by. That was frustrating enough but, at the beginning of the fall term in 1970, something even more frustrating happened.

I was just settling into my newly assigned dorm room when I heard a key in the lock. My new roommate walked in, smiled and said hello. All I could do was stare. Before me was probably the most beautiful human being of either sex I had ever seen. On top of that, as I got to know him, I discovered that he was a really nice guy who shared many of my interests. He was considerate, patient, and seemed to genuinely like me. There was just one problem which by then hardly surprised me: he was one hundred percent heterosexual.

I’ll call him Keith out of respect for his privacy, though he’s been dead for more than a year now. We had many friendly discussions in that room, played together in a band, listened to a lot of music of the day including, of course, Jethro Tull, and developed a warm friendship. For me, there was a lot more going on, though Keith never really detected it until later. I had fallen deeply in love.

Because I could not express that love, I became more and more frustrated. Over time, love passed into dark obsession. I fantasized a relationship that had no chance of existing. My personal life froze up. I was incapable of connecting with anyone else because I was so focused on Keith.

I roomed with Keith for three years. It was a matter of convenience for him, obsession for me. Over that time, my mental health deteriorated badly. Because of Keith’s stunning good looks, he always got all the attention when we were in public together. I felt ugly, unwanted, and inferior in every way to the shining star beside me. Sensing this, Keith would try to cheer me up by telling me how smart I was, or that his girlfriend’s friend thought I was hot. But this only made matters worse, because it forced me to face Keith’s utter indifference to me as an object of affection.

Friends diagnosed my problem early on and tried to encourage me to get out and keep trying to meet someone who might return my affection. But my obsession allowed no such considerations. Instead, I contemplated suicide and wallowed in a profound depression. My physical health deteriorated at the same time and, in the end, it was my body that finally broke the iron grip of that obsession.

Immediately after I graduated, I began having terrible gastric pains. I couldn’t eat and lost weight rapidly. Doctors diagnosed a large duodenal ulcer, and after more tests, they became very alarmed. My duodenum was almost completely blocked, and I was in danger of a life-threatening hemorrhage. On a frigid March day, shortly after a twenty-five inch snowstorm, I entered the hospital for surgery.

During my recovery, I had a good number of visitors. My friends and the people who worked with me at my campus job were wonderful; they visited me frequently and some brought me small gifts. My parents were even more wonderful: my father took time off from work, and they both came to town and stayed in my apartment, sharing it with Keith, for whom my mother cooked meals. They visited me every day and drove me back to our suburban Chicago home when I was discharged. Keith I saw exactly once. He seemed eager to leave the whole time we talked. He hardly asked me anything about my condition and instead mostly talked about himself.

After that visit and in the days that followed, I got very tough with myself. It had finally become crystal clear who really cared about me, and Keith was definitely not on that list. I made a promise to myself that as soon as I was healthy I would start my real life. No more fantasies, no more false hopes. I was going to jump into the deep end and hope I could swim.

During the next year I transformed into an entirely different person. I bludgeoned and buried the pathetic, fantasizing loser I had been, met an entirely new group of friends and indulged in everything I’d so long denied myself. I never saw Keith again and never wanted to.

Once the Internet appeared in the mid-1990s, I found photos of him: a fat, middle-aged man often holding a beer. From his blog I learned that he had married and had children, then divorced. In 2023, I read that he’d had a major heart attack and soon thereafter died. I felt no schadenfreude, only sadness.

Like a famous athlete, his glory days came early in life. Where everything was difficult for me, everything seemed so easy for him. Yet that adversity made me stronger and more resilient, while the ease that Keith experienced made him nothing more than fat.

Do I wish I’d behaved differently? Do I have regrets? Of course, but, with the aid of the detailed memories aroused by Jethro Tull, I can put those mistakes I made in the context of the times. Being gay, in fact any kind of being different, was harder then. The prejudice and pressures to conform came from a thousand different places and were often quite subtle. Worst of all was the isolation I and others like me felt. There were so many risks in seeking each other out. Making an accommodation with a hostile world required deception and caution. Today, it’s so much better for people like me, though I can’t resist adding that the music is so much worse.

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Author’s Note: Several details about Keith have been changed or omitted to protect the privacy of his surviving family.