I was flipping channels before bedtime the other day and came across one of those Time/Life CD collection ads.  This one was for classic love songs from the 60s and 70s.  I saw a few titles and heard a few tunes that struck my interest and so I jotted them down and began looking for them on iTunes and Amazon.  Joe Cocker’s You Are So Beautiful…  I Just Fall In Love Again by The Carpenters…  That kind of thing.  What the Germans would call schlager if it was played over there.  Schmaltzy, sentimental, florid, some would say maudlin tunes.  Perhaps it’s a sign of aging that I get into that more.  On the other hand, I got into it a lot actually when I was a kid, though I wasn’t really big on the romance thing at the time.  But sentimental, evocative melodies always got to me and I had to buy them, even if I wasn’t really paying attention to the lyrics…

…which was probably because none of that spoke to gay kids back then.  Gay was a horrible, dirty, vile perversion and gay men were dangerous sexual psychopaths and I knew I wasn’t any of that.  Just that this whole dating thing was nothing I wanted to have anything to do with.  Except…except…there was this beautiful guy in my high school I just couldn’t take my eyes off…

The joke is that even in a more accepting time, I would have probably had the same empty love life I had then.  And…now.  It wasn’t all just that I was gay.  I was…well…one of those ugly duckling types.  And from the other side of the tracks at that.  Low income kid…living with his divorced mom…  Clothes don’t quite fit right…and the styles are ten years old.  Awkward.  Shy.  Thin and geeky.  Book-wormish.  That was me.  Some small creative talent you could tell was just waiting to blossom…if only someone would pay attention to him.  But that never happened.

One of the songs I caught a hint of on that Time/Life ad was a song I’d heard fragments of all though my adolescence but somehow never bothered with…probably because the singer was a woman singing about her girlhood and I was decidedly not interested in girls back then.  But on a lark I went and downloaded it along with the others I’d noted from the ad.  It was sung by a lady named Janis Ian, who has a beautiful voice.  The song was At 17…

To those of us who know the pain
Of Valentines that never came,
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball.
It was long ago and far away
The world was younger than today
And dreams were all they gave for free
To ugly duckling girls like me.
We all play the game and when we dare
To cheat ourselves at solitaire
Inventing lovers on the phone
Repenting other lives unknown
That call and say, come dance with me
And murmur vague obscenities
At ugly girls like me
At seventeen.

I’m sitting here typing this…and I can’t stop crying…