So, who is Ralph, anyway?
Ralph is a Minneapolis-based essayist and blogger. He came out as a gay man in 1970, and was part of the first generation to live in the wide-open LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco as it dared to aspire to full American citizenship.
He hopes that his voice reminds readers of the voices that shouted themselves hoarse at the Stonewall Riots and the voices silenced too early by the AIDS pandemic. As LGBTQ+ survivors, he feels that the gay men and women of his generation still have a lot to say … and let’s face it, Boomers have always had big mouths.
Besides LGBTQ+ experiences, his personal musings and stories portray the challenges of a life deeply affected by familial dysfunction, terminal illness, and multiple addictions … and the journey on the path of long-term recovery.
Before coming to writing, Ralph worked in various high-level creative positions in retail, including Creative Director of all Gap and Gap Kids stores in San Francisco. He also ran his own visual marketing consulting firm in Minneapolis for over 20 years.
Today Ralph lives in Minneapolis with his husband, Sean, and his much-adored Shih-Tzu mix, Nick. Since finding a healthy love life after retirement, Ralph embraces the strange, new joys and challenges of domesticity and continues to write about his experiences past and present. He enjoys travel and frequent trips to Oaxaca, Mexico to escape winter, visit friends, and undergo self-imposed writing retreats.
“Besides relating his own harrowing yet uplifting saga, Winkelmeyer also gives brilliant, vivid eyewitness descriptions of gay San Francisco during the 1970s (celebration) and 1980s (devastation). This is first-person, ‘I was there’ history at its finest!”