Bill Boushka was born in 1943 and raised as an only child in Arlington, Virginia. He became a good student and started piano at age eight. But he fell behind in physical and social development. He was expelled from college after saying that he was gay in late 1961. Nevertheless, he graduated from another school and earned an MA in mathematics and was drafted in 1968. When the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy emerged in 1993, he leveraged his own irony to become a writer and blogger.