What was going on when I was born?

''I sometimes think it's more difficult to get an American Express card than a security clearance.'' - Senator William V. Roth Jr. of Delaware. [D18:6.]

Schools Chancellor Nathan Quinones said yesterday that the New York City Board of Education had sponsored a school for homosexual adolescents because it was the only way to provide them with the education that state law requires. ''These are youngsters who, in most instances, would never have been allowed to remain in a high school setting previously,'' Mr. Quinones said, in an apparent reference to harassment from other students. The alternative, he said, was to abandon the students and allow them to ''cruise the West Side of Manhattan in order to get money or some attention for themselves.'' ''We have a responsibility to all youngsters to the age of 21 to provide them with an education,'' Mr. Quinones said. ''We cannot say that we are responsible for reducing dropouts and then focus our attention on only one dimension of the school population.''

IF anyone asks whether New York's museums are taking it easy now that summer's near, the answer is ''Not so as you'd notice.''

Buried among 200 pages of the 1986 military programs bill that the House of Representatives will debate this month is a Congressional instruction that is rare in the annals of Air Force procurement. It calls for direct competition between two warplanes - the General Dynamics F-16 Falcon, of which the Air Force has already acquired more than 1,300, and Northrop's F-20 Tigershark, a plane that nobody has bought so far. The directive does not guarantee that Northrop will sell even a single F-20 to the Pentagon - and it may be, as some in Washington say, that the plane is being used simply to beat down the price of the F-16 - but the F-20's prospects have nonetheless suddenly blossomed. In addition to the military-reform movement in Congress, the plane has been given an assist from budget constraints on the Air Force, a drive by the Air National Guard to win new aircraft instead of traditional Air Force hand-me-downs and Northrop's own lobbying and marketing skills. And there may also be an export market. National security officials disclosed on Wednesday that Jordan appeared to be moving toward accepting Washington's preconditions - negotiations with Israel - for purchase of the F-20.

In the first hint of what may be a budding Democratic strategy on tax legislation, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee suggested today that his committee might favor a tax rate for wealthy Americans higher than the 35 percent rate proposed by President Reagan. ''There is talk of an additional bracket,'' the chairman, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, said at a breakfast meeting with reporters. The Illinois Democrat's remarks and testimony today from the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., about the tax burden on the poor during the Reagan Presidency were indications that many Congressional Democrats would try to construct tax legislation that is more favorable to the poor and the middle class and less generous to the wealthy than the President's plan. From a political standpoint, that might let them lay claim to the theme of ''fairness'' Mr. Reagan has underscored in promoting his tax plan.

An article in Metropolitan Report on May 29 about Ethiopian Hebrew congregations in New York City misidentified the rabbi who said he had been inspired by a visit to a Harlem congregation.

THE classical music of India is the oldest unbroken musical tradition in the world, a body of compositional materials and guidelines for individual expression and improvisation that has been passed down from guru to disciple since before recorded history. This weekend, two concerts will give New Yorkers a chance to hear some leading exponents of this age-old tradition. Tonight at 8, the Alternative Museum, 17 White Street, is presenting a concert featuring the virtuoso Pandit Sharda Sahai on the Indian tabla drums. Tomorrow evening at 6:45, at Alice Tully Hall, two of India's most celebrated violinists, V. G. Jog and L. Subramaniam, and the tabla master Alla Rakha are headlining a concert celebrating the beginning of the Festival of India in the United States. The evening will also include the first major concert appearance in this country of Aloke Dasgupta, an outstanding young performer on the sitar, the Indian lute popularized by Ravi Shankar.

Resorts International Inc., the hotel and casino operator, has joined the bidding for Trans World Airlines, a company that is seeking to avoid the clutches of Carl C. Icahn, according to Wall Street sources. The sources, who asked not to be named, said Resorts was considered one of the prime candidates to acquire T.W.A., if that company does not instead choose a management-led leveraged buyout. The Texas Air Corporation, which owns Continental Airlines, is also believed to be very interested in T.W.A., the sources said. But Eastern Airlines is said to have cooled to the possibility of linking its fleet with that of T.W.A.

WE still tend to think of Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) as a one-painting artist. When his name comes up, our minds flash to ''The Raft of the Medusa,'' an immense extravaganza that melodramatically depicts a ghastly cargo of shipwreck survivors on a makeshift raft. The masterpiece of his short career, it overshadows all his other work in size and in the grandiose intensity of its composition. His much-praised ''Medusa'' made Gericault a cult figure in 19th-century France; after his death at the age of 33, it was, along with two other large-scale finished paintings and a group of lithographs, virtually all that the public knew of his output for nearly half a century. The rest of his work had disappeared into private hands. It surfaced gradually, and today more than 200 paintings - most of them small - and nearly 2,000 works on paper have been attributed to him.

Friday FOLK-ROCK FROM ENGLAND Contemporary interpretations of traditional English folk tunes will be on the program when three well-known English folk-rock groups join forces for a triple-bill concert tonight. Steeleye Span, one of Britain's most popular folk-rock groups of the 1970's, mixes acoustic and electric music, drawing on traditional folk songs and poetry for its source material and featuring the vocals of Maddy Pryor. Renaissance, another popular group in Britain, will perform an entirely acoustic program for this engagement. Despite some changes in personnel, Fairport Convention continues to perform its electric versions of traditional tunes, as well as original material. The concert gets under way at 8 o'clock in the Beacon Theater, Broadway and 74th Street on the Upper West Side. Tickets are $14.50 and $17.50. The information number is 787-1477.

The Brazilian police today exhumed the remains of a man who was said to have died here six years ago and who the police say could be the long-sought Nazi death camp doctor, Josef Mengele. The Federal Police Chief, Romeu Tuma, said the tomb had been identified by an Austrian couple who he said had claimed to have sheltered Dr. Mengele in the 1970's. The couple, he said, asserted that Dr. Mengele drowned in a swimming accident in 1979 and had been interred under another name. Dr. Mengele would have been 68 years old. [Investigators from the United States, West Germany and Israel left hurriedly for Brazil. The report that Dr. Mengele may have died there drew reactions of skepticism from officials and independent experts in several countries. Page A6.] ''On the basis of the documents and photographs they have shown me, I'm 100 percent convinced that it was Mengele,'' Mr. Tuma said, ''but I'd prefer to await the results of the medical examiners.'' Jose Antonio de Mello, the assistant director of the police forensic laboratory, who collected the bones at the cemetery at Embu, a small town 20 miles southwest of here, said identification might take two weeks.

''MARK ROTHKO: Works on Paper,'' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, makes us feel as if we were inside Rothko's studio watching him build and coax and fret. It is the first major exhibition of works on paper by an artist who was at ease with paper and knew how to feed and stoke it so that it could swell with light. The exhibition is also something of a mini-retrospective that encourages us to reflect again upon one of the most difficult and complex of the Abstract Expressionists. Rothko is an admirable, compelling and also a disconcerting figure. He wanted to reduce painting to a language of essences, but he was anything but a classical artist. His paintings are intensely physical, yet they are driven by discomfort if not disgust with the material world. They are obsessive and even dogmatic, but they are devoted to flexibility and movement. They are anchored by a sense of inviolable, controlling structures, but they also yearn for an expansive, transcendent space from which time would be bannished forever.