When I was 16 I had a dark secret.  Something that embarrassed me deeply.  Something I knew I could never tell my friends about.  No…not my sexual orientation, although this secret of mine really should have spelled it out for me in neon lights.  But I was young, and naive, and full of all the myths, lies and superstitions about homosexuality that the adults in my life had fed me, so I was sure I wasn’t one.  I didn’t swish…I didn’t lisp…I enjoyed most of the typical boyhood pastimes and had little to no use for girl things.  Well…except one.  My private stash of Tiger Beat and 16 Magazines.  That was my embarrassing secret.

Every month when the new issues would come out, I would sweat blood walking to a drugstore miles away from the nearest ones to my apartment, to get my fix where hopefully none of my school mates would recognize me.  Once there I would load up on several other magazines and stuff the ones I really wanted in the middle of the stack and hope the checkout clerk wouldn’t notice too much that a teenage boy was buying teenage girl magazines.  Occasionally an eyebrow would arch in my direction, and I would lamely say I was buying them for a non-existent sister.  More often then not, the statement was greeted with smirking disbelief.  Checkout clerks probably know more about human nature then priests do.

I would take my swag home and immediately open the teen mags and go right to the pages with photos of my favorites on them…my teenage heart-throbs if I had enough courage back then to acknowledge it.  But I didn’t.  I’d been told all my life that homosexuals were dangerous psychopaths who killed and mutilated strangers while having horrible, perverse sex.  And I, being a bit of a late bloomer actually, was still too young to have all that much interest in sex.  But I knew I liked looking at beautiful guys.  I knew that something about them made my heart sigh.  I would lay awake some nights imagining how it would be to be their best friend.

Looking back on all of it, in a different world I could have had my own sweet little teenybopper adolescence.  It would have been nice to be able to grow up like most other kids without fear or shame of my own sexuality, and just grow into it naturally.  I picture myself sometimes at that age, sitting at my desk, pen or brush in hand, working on a cartoon for the school newspaper, or alternatively soldering iron in hand, circuit boards and a tray of components in front of me, working on a new Heathkit stereo, photos of my favorite funny cars on the wall in front of me, side by side with those of my current male teen heartthrob, the radio next to me playing bubblegum pop.  But for a change it’s something that isn’t afraid to speak to the gay teens in the audience too…

David Cassidy…man oh man…what a bitchin’ Fox!!!

I picture myself being open and cheerful about my developing romantic interests in guys.  At home and at school, among my friends, among my family.  Bruce is growing up…and, oh look, he’s discovered…boys.  Well, well…  His friendships always were a bit intense…  So different I would have been from the shy, quiet boy who kept himself slightly apart from the others, because he didn’t understand himself, and was so afraid how people would react to him if he let his guard down.  I would probably have been just another bubbly adolescent…a bit artistic, a bit of a techno geek, typically boyish but with a positively girlish streak in him whenever it came to boys I found too cute for words.

But I wasn’t allowed that adolescence.  Instead I hid my teen magazines under the bed, and listened to my bubblegum pop alone, never really realizing that I was on the threshold of one of this life’s most wonderful moments…the time we discover what love is all about.  I could have walked into it happily…joyfully even.  Instead I struggled, stumbled, and hid my heart fearfully.  My mom would remark with great sadness in her diaries (which I inherited after her death) how I had changed from a cheerful young boy into one of sullen moods, and a sudden angry temper.  It makes me cry to read those entries.

I look at my record collection from back then…mostly the 45rpm singles I bought in my middle teen years because back then I wouldn’t spend the price of a whole album unless it was a band I really liked a lot, and I see almost nothing but love songs among them.  Granted, that’s mostly what rock has always been.  But there was a lot of it back then about life and politics, the war and the struggles our generation was going through.  Songs I loved like For What It’s Worth, and Incense and Peppermint…and interestingly enough in retrospect, Hold Your Head Up.  

I don’t think I need to analyze very much why I liked that one.  But the songs I turned to again and again alone in my bedroom were the love songs, and what is amazing to me about that in retrospect is that at that age I really didn’t care much for all that gushy love stuff.  I was going through my stacks of 45 rpms  the other day and it just floored me how much of it was surgery sweet love songs.  As I remember that part of my life, I didn’t have much interest in all that love stuff.  But then, nobody told me I could fall in love with a guy either.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the lyrics in those songs, but something in the music itself spoke to me, in a way that the lyrics, speaking only to the straight boys in the audience, never could.  I would connect with it instantly when I heard it on the radio, and like a flash I was down to the record store to by the single.  It would be years before I would find myself listening to the lyrics.  I had to grow into myself as a gay man first, and then learn the trick a lot of gay guys have to learn in this world, of mentally changing a pronoun as I listen…

I never really paid much attention to those lyrics at first.  Just the music, and the sultry sound of Morrison’s voice.

Something in the music spoke to me, in a way the lyrics just didn’t.  My record collection is full of these kinds of songs.  Bubblegum pop mostly, as they called it back then.  In another world, there would have been some that spoke directly to gay guys, or at least was gender neutral enough that I could have taken the lyrics to heart as much as I did the music.  But even back then, well before I came out to myself as a gay man, I had a soul for sweet love songs.  Perhaps…a tad too sweet. 

Which brings me to the one other thing that embarrassed me slightly back in those days, but not so much that I felt I had to go to great lengths to hide it from my friends.  That was my taste in music.  On the one hand, it was The Doors, and Airplane, and Led Zeppelin.  On the other, it was The Monkees, Buddha Records, and Crimson and Clover.  In retrospect I’m surprised more of my classmates hadn’t figured me out long before I’d figured out myself.  But as it turns out, even were I straight I’d have had to hide most of my record collection from my friends.  In another world, I would have been allowed to enjoy that music.  In this one only teenage girls are allowed to like those kinds of songs.  Because…well…they’re girls.

In most respects I was your usual adolescent male.  But there was this definite girlish streak in me that would just pop out at various times.  And well before I came understand myself as a gay man, I knew better then to let people see it.  I kept it to myself alone in my bedroom.  That knowledge had been driven into me in the usual way it is with boys like the one I was, on the school yards and in the hallways, and around corners where no one could see, I would get beaten…badly sometimes…by other boys who thought it was so much fund to beat the crap of out kids like me.  But let’s face it, they’d been given permission to by the adults in their lives, and by the culture they lived in.

Girly boy.  Consider that phrase for a moment.  The knuckle dragging morons who throw it around can be driven by homophobia at times…maybe even most times…but not always.  Even among gay males, you see the occasional contempt for those among us who are not 200 percent masculine.  There is more misogyny in that phrase, then homophobia.  I wouldn’t call myself effeminate.  I don’t think any of my friends would either.  A bit nerdish, yeah.  A bit wonkish.  I am no John Wayne by any means, but no Liberace either.  But there is this definite girlish streak in me and I have struggled for most of my life now to let it just be itself because I repressed it so deeply when I was a teenager, and then again as a young adult male.  Never mind being gay.  Gay or straight, guys are not supposed to be sweethearts.

Which brings me to a post a read just yesterday over at Pam’s House Blend…

The Ugly Homophobic Truth About the Rickroll

The writer gives an interesting history of Rickrolling, and then this rather poignant little personal story…

I was introducted to Rickrolling by my teenage nephew about a year or so ago. My nephew told me that he and his friends amuse themselves by sending music and video clips of Rick Astley via e-mail, and cellphone.

When my nephew showed me the video of Rick Astley singing Never gonna Give You Up on YouTube, he laughed out loud uncontrolably. Then, I asked him, "Why do you think this is so funny?"

Silence.

Uh, oh. I’d seen that silent response before. My nephew suddenly remembered that his favorite uncle is gay. He was at a loss for words as to how to explain why he finds Rick Astley to be funny.

I had to press him for the truth, "Is it because he looks gay?"

"Uh, it isn’t that he looks so gay, Uncle Fritz. It is because, uh, his voice doesn’t fit the way he looks."

"Gay?"

Silence.

Of course, ‘gay’ has been turned into an all-around put-down in schools these days…sort of like the way ‘Jewish’ used to be used as a synonym for someone who was cheap or stingy or selfish.  I was Rickrolled a few days ago…by a gay friend no less…and I picked up on what was going on immediately.  It’s not homophobia specifically.  The joke isn’t that Astley or his music is gay in the sense of…well…homosexual.  It’s gay in the general put-down sense.  It’s gay as in lame.  It’s gay as in wimpy.  It’s gay as in weak.  More to the point, it’s gay as in Sissy. 

Now people have been putting down each other’s music since humans were making tunes with drums and sticks, so I don’t think it’s all about gender bullying.  Music just reaches in to a place deep inside of us, past our logical rational parts, and strums our feelings directly.  Music that rubs our emotions the wrong way can be really, really annoying and it’s no more a rational distaste then seeing someone you find unattractive naked is.  I’m sure Never Going To Give You Up gets on a lot of people’s nerves.  But enough people liked it that it became an international hit.  How many songs do that?  Why the disrespect?  Simple:

Here’s the thing I want you to notice: it wasn’t Eltonrolling.  Say what you want about Elton John, but that he’s a large presence in the pop music world is undeniable.  He’s made millions, and that gives him a measure of power and respect.  Rick Astley is the too cute for his own good boy-next-door who likes to bring his girl flowers and write her pretty songs and gets the crap beaten out of him by the other kids on a regular basis.  That’s why it’s Rickrolling and not Eltonrolling.  It isn’t about gay.  It’s about wuss.

Sissy is in fact, a put-down applied to gay people out of contempt.  The stereotype is that we’re all limp-wristed, swishing lisping effeminates.  And yes, you meet some pretty girlish gay guys.  But then you also meet some pretty girlish straight ones too.  Sometimes those are called Effete Intellectuals.  Sometimes they are Bleeding-heart Liberals.  This chest thumping de-masculinization of the hated other is about as primitive as it gets, which is why you see a lot of it in school yards and hallways.  But more then that, it is a deeply perverse attack not just on the humanity of the target, but on humanity itself.  Cold hearted brutality does not build civilizations, it only and gleefully destroys them.  It is our ability to love and trust one another, cooperate and protect one another, that keeps the jungle from our streets.  The deeper, more ancient animal parts of us may be our bedrock, but it is our capacity to love and cherish that takes us out of the ancient wilderness and into civilization. 

But that’s a world the gutter cannot cope with.  A world where the smaller gentler boys aren’t afraid, are happy and carefree, is a world where the survival skills of thugs don’t get them anywhere, and that’s a world they will not endure the sight of.

It was more then a cheerful adolescence that was taken from me.  It was a part of me that I lost in those years.  So different I would have been from the shy, quiet boy who kept himself slightly apart from the others, because he didn’t understand himself, and was so afraid how people would react to him if he let his guard down.  Instead I struggled, stumbled, and hid my heart fearfully, and changed from a cheerful young boy into one of sullen moods, and a sudden angry temper.  This is how the gutter wins.  I’ve been trying to reclaim this part of myself ever since.  Maybe some day the human race will stop allowing its children to be abused.