Q. Does preferring Gordon Lightfoot to Mick Jagger make you an idiot?

Bing: No, it doesn’t make you an idiot. Music is subjective and everyone has their own preferences. Gordon Lightfoot and Mick Jagger are both great musicians in their own right. It’s okay to like one more than the other.

Artificial intelligence reassures me of the soundness of my own mind, forty-odd years after the fact. I don’t prefer Lightfoot to Jagger now—it seems like apples and oranges to compare them—but at one time I did. That preference led to a confrontation that, even after more than four decades, plays unpleasantly in my memory.

It was the weekend of my twenty-fourth birthday, in 1979. I was living in Akron, Ohio, and my hometown friend, whom I will call Kyle, had driven the three hours to Akron to help me celebrate. Kyle took me to a downtown record store, a few blocks from my office. I forget the name of the store, but it was a handsome and elegant one, not part of a chain, with copious stocks including jazz and classical as well as the day’s biggest hits. These were still the days of vinyl, and brightly colored album covers beckoned to browsers from every corner.

Inside the store, Kyle announced that he would buy me the latest Rolling Stones album.

The problem was, I wasn’t a Stones fan at the time.

I forget which album Kyle wanted to buy me. Release dates suggest it was Some Girls, but that doesn’t sound right to me. Anyway, this was my reply, as closely as I can remember it:

“I’m sorry, Kyle, I don’t care much for the Stones. Could I have Gordon Lightfoot’s greatest hits instead?”

In our house growing up, my sisters and I never listened to hard rock. The Beatles were as close as we got. The rest was folk-rock: John Denver, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and of course Gordon Lightfoot.

I don’t precisely remember what happened next. Perhaps I was less pleasant to Kyle than my memory allows. What I do recall is that I found myself defending Gordon Lightfoot against Kyle’s advocacy on behalf of The Greatest Band Ever.

“I grant you that the Stones are a great band,” I said, or something like it. “But isn’t it possible that Gordon Lightfoot is as great in his style of music as the Stones are in theirs?”

Kyle stared at me. My imagination has him lighting a cigarette, although he couldn’t have then because we were still inside the store.

“I’m really surprised,” he said, “that you could say something like that.” He smiled as he said it, but in that smile I saw—and still see—the trace of a sneer.

I hadn’t thought much about the Stones-vs.-Lightfoot argument until earlier this year, when I saw the Gordon Lightfoot documentary on Prime. Songs such as “Early Morning Rain” and “If You Could Read My Mind” sounded as fresh and soulful as they had fifty years before. Scores of musicians, including Bob Dylan, attested to Lightfoot’s superior talents as a singer-songwriter. I enjoyed the film, but as I watched it I couldn’t help imagining Kyle smiling at it, with the trace of a sneer.

After my argument with Kyle, it was many years before I could listen to a Gordon Lightfoot song without a queasy, embarrassed feeling. The memory of the fight with Kyle never let me forget that Mick Jagger was the preference of anyone with the slightest speck of good taste and common sense.

Most people who know me would be surprised to read this. I have written a regular film review column for nearly twenty years, and my friends and family know better than to get me started on politics. Sometimes I must seem like a spewing compendium of opinions. So why do I feel so vulnerable in situations like the one with Kyle?

I wonder how common it is—this uncertainty, this fear of being mocked and shamed for the way you think and feel. I can’t remember when this wasn’t true for me. Whenever I have a difference of opinion with anyone, I feel reflexively that the other person must be right, no matter the person or the subject. It isn’t just my opinion, but the way I express it, that can make me feel shame if someone upbraids me for it. I think of a time in college when I was with another friend, whom I will call Jared. Jared was a budding conservative intellectual, which comported with my own opinions then. We were talking about something we both disliked—I don’t remember what—and I said it was trash. Jared immediately objected, lecturing me for several minutes that “trash” was an effeminate word, and that I should say “garbage” instead. The thing was, I had heard my father say “trash” throughout my childhood and youth, putting fierce and muscular emphasis on the word. The masculinity gulf between my towering, rugged, basso profundo-voiced, World War II combat soldier father and scrawny, diminutive Jared was risible, yet it took me decades to think in response to Jared that my father said “trash” instead of “garbage.” Jared was right, I was wrong, and so I thought for years.

I don’t know where this all started, but I have my guess. Growing up gay and introverted in a rural area, I was always the odd man out. I didn’t care who Carl Yastrzemski was, I did care who William Butler Yeats was, and I didn’t know how to hide it. I did know to hide my feelings about the boys I was attracted to, but that wasn’t enough. Everything about me militated to make me unpopular. I was a loner, uninterested in watching or playing sports, and I was so naïve that I thought I was being helpful when I corrected my classmates and even my teachers. Once all the boys in the school were called to an assembly at which the principal announced a new program of intramural sports. Any boy who wanted to opt out, he said, could get up and sit on the left side of the auditorium. I was the only one who did.

I had a target painted on my back for every schoolyard bully to see, and even kids who weren’t normally bullies were bullies toward me. One kid, whose name I forget, spat in my face, but insults and derisive laughter were daily occurrences. On occasion I have attempted to write about the things my classmates called me, using exactly the language they used. On one or two occasions I made the mistake of reading those poems in public, and was greeted with outrage for years afterward by listeners who thought I made it all up. “Oh, you’re the dirty poet,” said one woman whose smile contained much more than the trace of a sneer.

Even the nice kids at my school did not tolerate divergence. I remember the annual marching band banquet one year, at which one of my bandmates, giving the after-dinner speech, told of a letter she had received. It was from a boy who had graduated a couple of years before, explaining why he had become a hippie. She read, not his letter, but her reply. “You can go your way,” it ended, “and we’ll go—God’s way.”

The standing ovation lasted several minutes.

I know now I should have shut up and let Kyle buy me the Stones album. On the other hand, if he was so determined to give me that one record, I don’t know why he didn’t just bring it with him to Akron and give it to me at my place. I would have thanked him politely enough to avoid dispute. And eventually I would have come to love it.

Kyle ended up buying me Gord’s Gold, though he complained about it. For the reasons already stated, I rarely listened to it. I listened more often to Some Girls, which I received the following year from a sister who had turned on to the Stones before I did. I like Some Girls a lot, but my favorite is Hot Rocks, the compilation of the Stones’ early hits, including my nominations for the greatest rock songs ever, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Gimme Shelter.”

My friendship with Kyle survived the Lightfoot-Jagger dispute. It wasn’t the only time we argued over the arts. Once we disagreed on what constituted authentic country music; my choice was fiddles and hammer dulcimers, his was Gene Autry. Another time—a much more heated argument—he was offended to the depths of his soul that I dared suggest Orson Welles’ performance in Citizen Kane could be mentioned in the same sentence as even the least significant work of Marlon Brando.

Whenever I went back to Ohio, I made it a point to see Kyle. That ended in the early 2000s. It was nothing he did; after my father’s death, any time I spent in Ohio away from my mother I regarded as wasted time. My friendship with Kyle dwindled to an annual Christmas card, and finally not even that.

My friendship with Jared ended much sooner. In the mid-1980s he came to visit me in Washington. He had no interest in museums, historic sites, restaurants, or theaters. All he wanted was to have me drive him around the city during the day, lecturing about theology all the while, and prowl for hookers at night. (I still cringe at the memory of the uneasy conversation I had with a stripper while Jared was off transacting business.) At the time I was on the brink of coming out, and Jared’s visit was a reminder that he was the most homophobic, misogynistic person I have ever met. He sent me a letter a few weeks after he left; I never answered it.

One of the least pleasant but most unavoidable features of my later life is grieving over the harm I have done to others. Much of this has consisted of demanding my own way, insisting on my own opinions, against all common sense or the feelings of others. I cringe at those memories, especially now when I have no idea how I could have thought as I did. I have used my tastes and opinions as a shield and not always recognized when they became a weapon. Perhaps I should consult AI on how to deal with that. The thought that truly hurts is that I might not be like others in this way, but uniquely supercilious and mean. All I can say is that the world teaches us not to be ourselves, to deny who we are to avoid being savaged, and if we can claim something we genuinely love, rather than saying we love it to get along with others, we have won a victory.

To streamline my thoughts—or to get away from them—I listen to music in the mornings. I like classical music, jazz, and golden oldies. In the last category, two of my favorites are “Gimme Shelter” and “If You Could Read My Mind.”