Party of One (5 page)

This is one of my most vivid memories from childhood: I'm in the backseat of the family station wagon. My father is driving, telling my mother about something that happened in the office that day. He's a gesticulator, my dad, and he's really going to town on this story. His face is serious as the tale unfolds—something about spreadsheets? Portfolios? I don't know—yet my mother's face beams. She is smiling like he is telling her she's just won a cash prize of a hundred thousand dollars.

“What?” my father asks her.

“What
what
?”

“Why are you smiling? This story isn't all that funny.”

“No, I know. I just don't want them to think you're yelling at me.” And she gestures around us at the other cars on Highway 40.

In Catholic St. Louis, it is customary to put on a show for the rest of the world. You need to tell everyone around you that you are normal, and that everything is just fine. It is vital to keep up appearances, even for strangers, who, like you, are traveling at seventy miles an hour on a major highway.

You don't want to stand out. You want to be just like everyone else, maybe just a little bit better.

You for sure do not want to be what I was starting to figure out I was.

Gayness was a thing that people recognized by the early 1980s, but if there were any actual gay people among us, they kept it to themselves. Homosexuality was no longer illegal and underground, but it wasn't cool yet; Neil Patrick Harris was a toddler. We were in between, where gay people were mostly just there to be the butt of a massive percentage of the jokes in movies and on television and in real life, and not only could you not point this out or act like it bothered you, you did your best to avoid the word “butt” altogether, because the way you said it might give you away.

“Gay” was the preferred put-down among boys at the time, as it had been for years and would continue to be for many more, and it was a bit of a catchall. While on paper it was very simple—anything that is cool is
not gay,
everything else
is
—in practice it was extremely complicated. Here is an incomplete list of things you could do to get yourself called a faggot as an American thirteen-year-old boy in 1984:

In this environment, if you do not fit into the narrow, ever-shifting definition of what is masculine and therefore acceptable, life becomes a constant, exhausting effort to stay on what you are told is the right side of the cool/gay divide. You study older, more secure-looking boys for cues on how to talk, how to walk, how to yawn and cough and laugh, so that you will be acceptable. You make a hundred thousand micro-decisions about your behavior before lunch. You never exactly get it—you can't wear coolness and masculinity as effortlessly as the boys who are born with it—but you can fool some people. And when you can't, when you hear things like “man up” or “quit being such a faggot,” you don't recognize these comments as bullying, you take them as you would notes on a performance.
I should be better at not being me,
you think.
Thanks for the reminder.
^*1

To be a young gay kid is to work around the clock. You start to feel feelings and you immediately get to work telling yourself that you're not feeling them, or that they're a phase, or that they're motivated by some part of you that's not the real you—a curiosity that's spun out of control, a sickness, a demon, if you're religiously inclined.

And the work never ends. The foreman never rings the dodo bird, you do not slide down the tail of the dinosaur, you never get to shout “Yabba-dabba-doo.” You work and you never stop working and you never tell anyone, even yourself, that you're working.

You develop crushes, but you don't recognize them as crushes. You just find yourself drawn to that boy who talks and walks and yawns/coughs/laughs like he's never had to think about how to. You think about him all the time. You want to be him and you want to be with him, but you immediately tell yourself that you don't. You feel love and then you feel shame for feeling love. You pretend none of this is going on, because if anyone suspects that something is wrong, they might figure out exactly
what
is wrong, and then it's all over. So you push it down. You push it down and you smile, but not too much, because, again, smiling's pretty gay.

You put yourself through this process over and over, in the years when you are learning how to be a human being, and you get so good at it that it becomes involuntary. It's like a computer process, and like computers, you're getting faster and more efficient. You get so good and so quick that after a while you don't even notice yourself doing it.

The process really got moving for me in seventh grade, the year all the boys from my class got dropped into a new all-male Thunderdome of testosterone, an all-boys Catholic school called Priory that was run by Benedictine monks from England. Each form—grades seven through twelve were
forms one through six
there, because of the Britishness—contained fifty boys in jackets and ties and khakis, learning Latin by memorization. The “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video, without Bonnie Tyler as headmistress.

By form one, most of my male friends had magically transformed into young men, seemingly all at once. They filled out, grew taller, gained confidence. In our free periods, about forty-five of the boys in form one would run outside to tackle and throw balls at one another. The rest of us would do things like talk at length about Bonnie Tyler's “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video.

The clubhouse for those who preferred Culture Club to contact sports was the Candy Store, the snack window overlooking the Junior House field. We volunteered to work the register because they had a boom box with a cassette player in there, and for us, proximity to a cassette player was crucial. Me, Ned, Derek, Tim, and Tom, and Phong No, the wildly effeminate Korean American kid. We played Duran Duran. We played Wham! We taped the Hot 9 at 9 off KHTR every night, and then played it in the room and debated each song's merits. (Stevie Wonder's success with “I Just Called to Say I Love You” felt unearned; he was coasting.)

The roughhousers and horseplayers would come to our window, hair slicked to foreheads with sweat, Tuffskins grass-stained. They'd order their Andy Capp's Hot Fries and Vess Whistle Orange Sodas and little tiny powdered doughnuts. (Phong No would insist on proper nomenclature when orders were placed. “Gimme the little tiny powdered doughnuts,” a kid would say. “The Donette Gems…?” Phong corrected, with just a trace of his mother's accent:
Donette-ah Gems-u?
“Yeah,” the kid would concede. “Gimme the Donette Gems.”)

It was in this room that we witnessed the Thompson Twins' commercial breakthrough (“Is he saying ‘Hold my cold Italian heart' at the end there? Are they
Italian
?” Tim asked, and we all agreed they look more British. Scottish, maybe). It was here that we compared Swatches (while the all-black one was impossible to read, it was preferable to the white one with the polka-dots, which showed dirt almost immediately). It was here on Monday mornings that we would relive
Friday Night Videos,
which we all watched and recorded and studied like our Latin conjugations (what exactly was this underground lair to which Simon Le Bon descended in the “Union of the Snake” video? In “Dance Hall Days,” were Wang Chung saying they were “cool on Christ”? How would one do the Neutron Dance? What did it all mean?).

Michael Jackson was everything back then, and the strangest thing about him was that his speaking voice seemed sort of high. To have had the pop perfection that was singles four through six of
Thriller
—to review: “Wanna Be Startin' Somethin',” “Human Nature,” and “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” (single number seven, “Thriller,” uncoupled from its truly epic and groundbreaking video, is garbage and in your heart you know it)—as the soundtrack of early puberty and entry into junior high is a privilege for which I am grateful every day of my life. I mean, some poor suckers got Alannah Myles.

We Candy Store Boys threw ourselves and our energy into pop culture, which, as luck would have it, was going through its most stealthily gay phase ever. Boy George performed in dresses and Annie Lennox in suits. George Michael urged us to wake him up before we went-went, and he did so in shorts that were very small, and when he promised us it would be warm in bed, his eyes rolled back in his head in sheer gay ecstasy. Nobody was out of the closet. The gay was all in the subtext, which most kids missed entirely, though in many cases we could go ahead and round it up to
text.
(I mean, “Relax don't do it when you wanna come”?) We unconsciously responded to it.

We also consciously responded to it. Over Donette Gems in the Candy Store the day after Madonna's “Material Girl” world-premiered on MTV, Derek and I relived every moment. I said, “He sends her these flowers, which she doesn't even want,” and Derek said, “And then suddenly she's on this movie set.”

“Right, with this gown.”

“Yeah, and all these cute guys…”

Derek could stop time, too.

“…I mean
cool-looking guys
on either side of her,
anyway, it's a great video, right?
” and we just looked at each other for a long few seconds, him silently mortified, my eyes saying, “I've got you now, and if you cross me I will destroy you, and also which one's your favorite? Mine's the one two from her left.”

We never talked about it again.

Phong No was the most effeminate kid of the bunch, and he didn't seem to care about it. He was obsessed with
Dynasty.
His
s
's were so sibilant you could hear them two classrooms over. He wrote a song about fruit salad, to the tune of Bananarama's “Cruel Summer,” that he would sing at lunchtime: