On Facebook, Valley Motors (my Mercedes dealer) asks, Who remembers Herbie the Love Bug? Do you have a favorite television or movie car?

Well…I did once upon a time, sure.   Mine were, in some sort of order, Supercar…

Well…that one wasn’t really a car as such…   James Bond’s Aston-Martin DB5 in Goldfinger…

Amos Burke’s Rolls Royce Silver Cloud…

(it was what I watched the show for),   The Monkee Mobile…

…a highly modified Pontiac GTO…legendary car customizer Dean Jeffries did it and I thought it was the coolest riff on a production line car I’d ever seen.   I still think that GTO is the coolest looker of all the custom cars California custom shops churned out back in the 60s.

…and finally The Green Hornet’s Black Beauty…

…a 1966 Imperial Crown sedan, also customized by Dean Jeffries.

That was kidhood.   I never really saw anything in the movies or TV that caught my imagination after the sixties.   I liked the look of the Batmobile in the 1960s TV series, which was built by the legendary George Barris from a Lincoln concept car, but hated the TV show so much I couldn’t separate it from the god awful camp of that show.

Back in those days most of my favorite celebrity cars were actually quarter mile funny cars like The Little Red Wagon…

…and the Hemi Under Glass…

…not exactly something you’d drive to the grocery store in, which is not to say that wouldn’t be fun.   I had an eye for exotic cars too, like the Rolls Royces and Lamborghinis.     But when it came down to serious dreaming, somehow in the latter part of my teenage days, when a driver’s license in my wallet was on the cusp of becoming a reality, the dream machine…the one I would actually own someday…maybe…I hope…was always a Mercedes diesel sedan.   So I guess that really says it all about me and cars.

And last December I finally did get my teenage dream car after all…

It’s not an Aston-Martin DB5 with an ejector seat and tire flattening wheel knockoffs, but there’s a difference between having a dream and having a fantasy. Which isn’t to say the ability to flatten someone’s tires wouldn’t come in handy every now and then.

The space age may end up looking like I used to think it would after all…

NASA is looking hard at a way to blast spacecraft horizontally down an electrified track or gas-powered sled and into space hitting speeds of about Mach 10. The craft would then return and land on a runway by the launch site.

The rail launcher, known Advanced Space Launch System is one of a few new launch systems a team of engineers from Kennedy Space Center and several other NASA centers are looking at that would use existing cutting-edge technologies to offer the space agency a next generation launcher to the stars, NASA stated.

Ah…   Just like us space cadet kids always knew it would be…

Oboy…my copy of “Flying Diskman From Mars” came in the mail yesterday!

My collection of Republic Serials I Used To Raptly Watch On Saturday Mornings is almost complete now.

To this day the techno-nerd in me marvels at the special effects magic of the legendary brothers Howard and Theodore Lydecker.   And perhaps the reason I still like working in black & white photography is so many of my Saturday morning adventures were in black and white.   No…I am not having my second childhood.   Ask anyone who knows me.   I’m not finished with the first one yet.   Tico you were wrong…my heritage isn’t Baseball, Mom, Apple Pie and Mickey Mouse.     It’s Invaders From Mars, Atomic Ray Guns, Mysterious Caves and Bad Guys Wearing Fedora Hats.

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…

Andrew Sullivan noted a few days ago, a letter Stephen Fry addressed to his 16-year-old self…

Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognize that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.

Sullivan adds his own reaction to the film, History Boys…

A line it from the lonely gay schoolboy was almost too much to hear: "I’m Jewish. I’m homosexual. And I’m in Sheffield …  I’m fucked." Somewhere in my mind in those teenage years was a similar refrain: "I’m Catholic. I’m homosexual. And I’m in East Grinstead … I’m fucked."

But I wasn’t fucked, of course. And not-to-be-fucked, not to turn into the tragic homosexual figure, memorizing "Brief Encounter," constantly chasing unrequited love, seeking refuge in the great worlds of Hardy or Larkin or Auden as a substitute for life: that was my goal.

See…I didn’t make that my goal.  I just assumed it wouldn’t happen to me, because I didn’t buy into all the crap I was told about homosexuality.

That was a mistake.  It was nearly impossible to grow up in that world, and no absorb some of its contempt for gay people.  And it did its work on me all the same I realize now.  Which is what makes it a good idea for gay folk to write these sorts of things…these bear your soul to the world letters.  It seems very self absorbed, but it isn’t necessarily.  It can be useful, not just for making peace with your own past, but also as a kind of message in a bottle to other generations in other times. 

Gay kids have very little to no blood connection to past generations.  You kind-of pop up in your family as gay, and everyone else isn’t.  Maybe if you’re lucky you have a kind gay older uncle or aunt who can tell you a thing or two about what it was like for them, how to protect yourself from the tribulations they faced, and work toward the better world for us all.  But more likely if you do have older gay relatives they are terrified to be seen as being too interested in you, lest they be accused of pedophilia.  So you find yourself disconnected from the past, other then as history.  And that history is still mostly being taught to each new generation of gay kids, by heterosexuals. Some gay-friendly, some not.  We need to tell each other our own stories, in our own words.

So a letter to your younger gay self can be useful, not just to you, but to others who need to know what it was like for those of us in the previous generation.  So that, hopefully, no gay kid will have to grow up in a world ever again, where everywhere you turn, literally, someone is putting a knife into your heart…telling you that you are pathetic…ridiculous…grotesque…sick.

I’ve had a letter to my younger self percolating somewhere inside of me for quite a long time now, so it’s probably time to get it out of me.  But I have a few other letters to post before I get around to The Kid I Was.  I’m going to start, with a Letter To A Straight Friend.  I have some others that need writing too.  And then I’ll write to Bruce.  There’s a lot I’d have liked to tell him.

[Edited a tad…]

I was wandering through Disney-MGM Hollywood Studios yesterday when I saw him again for the first time in years. I almost didn’t recognize him.  Then I knelt down and gave him a great big hug and told him it was all okay…

The Hollywood Studios park entrance way is playfully similar to the Main Street U.S.A. walkway everyone must pass though on entrance to the Magic Kingdom…only this is Main Street Hollywood, circa 1930s and it is as if you’d traveled back in time to when everything was art deco.  For someone like me who adores the art deco style, in part I am sure because in my early childhood there were still a lot of buildings standing that were like that, it was like a kind of paradise.  For like, the upteenth time here in Disney World, I could only just wander around with my jaw hanging open.

There’s a plaque in central park that explains what they were trying to accomplish with Hollywood Studios, but by the time I had walked up to it, I already knew…

This is similar in kind to the poster for Tomorrowland which reads: The Future That Never Was Has Finally Arrived.

I entered a replica of Gorman’s Chinese Theater and took a ride through the movies.  You get on in a old sound stage set and a cast member dressed up as a 1940s stereotypical Hollywood talent scout hops on and informs you that you’ll not only be taking a tour through the great Hollywood films, but actually go inside them.  And then you’re off…first through a Busby Berkeley dance film and then into Hollywood gangster land where the talent scout is chased off the ride by a gangster who informs you that he’s taking over the ride and oh by the way, please had over all your valuables.  It goes on like that for a while and I won’t give it all away…there were the usual Disney animatronics, but of a better quality then the older Magic Kingdom rides…there was a trip through the Alien movie and for a moment you’re completely socked in a fog bank waiting for the beast to jump out at you.  Eventually you end up back at the soundstage where a voice yells "Cut…that’s a wrap…" and you get off the ride and go back out into Disney Hollywood…which is not all that different from Disney Tomorrowland.  It isn’t real.  And yet, for the moment anyway…it is.

I am not one to be easily amused, and yet the whole time I am thoroughly enjoying myself…and I find my whole attitude is different here.  I’m smiling at people.  I’m patient with idiots.  Small screaming children don’t irritate me.  Morons who block the road as if they own it don’t bother me (When did America get so goddamned fat?) I just walk around them and the happy little smile never leaves my face.  I’m living in a world that never was, that’s finally here. I can be a happy little nerdy kid here and It’s Okay.  In fact, it’s Expected of you.  All those relentlessly cheerful Disney cast members who are nowhere and everywhere with their perpetual smiles and earnest desire to make sure you "have a magical day" aren’t annoying me nearly as much as I was afraid they would.  In fact they are a blessing.  They’re my barrier between me and the world not two feet from the gates here, that voted last November to cut my ring finger off.  They’re here to keep it off me for a little while.  I wish I could give them all a great big hug.

And now the kid I used to be long ago, the one who smiled at everyone, the one with the big imagination, who wore his heart on his sleeve never thinking that people would take that as an invitation to cut it to ribbons, who trusted the world and in the goodness of people, has come back out of me.  At least for a while.  I thought he’d been beaten out of me in junior high school.

So what did the rest of you kids get…?

Still have my Shootin’ Shell cap gun. It’s down in one of the storage bins in the basement, along with a couple of the spring loaded brass cases. Alas I lost all the little plastic bullets long ago, and they don’t make the stick-on caps anymore. And that gun is in no way collector’s grade. I played with my toys and it shows on the ones I kept for memories. The cylinder on the little cap gun (it’s about half the size of a real single action Colt) barely turns anymore.

I still have two of my two boyhood rifles. One is a boy’s sized Winchester lever action replica that took the old cap rolls and had a trigger catch on the lever you could flip out so that every time you worked the lever action the gun fired. Somewhat like Chuck Conner’s was tricked in The Rifleman. The other is a Daisy 660, which wasn’t a BB gun, (I might shoot my eye out) but made a loud pop whenever you pulled the trigger via a strong spring loaded mechanism inside the gun. You cocked the spring via the lever action, but the spring in that thing is so darn strong that to this day I cannot work the lever holding the gun in my arms. A kid had to put the gun muzzle down on the ground and push the lever forward with all his weight to get it cocked. Which was probably how I discovered dirt clods made entirely satisfactory projectiles.

That was a different world. A kid could arm himself to the teeth back then and nobody gave it a second thought. Wish I still had my Man From U.N.C.L.E. gun….

…and my James Bond Attache Case…

That thing had tons of nifty finger candy. The code book had an invisible ink pen. The wallet with the fake money and passport came with little business cards…Bond’s cover was he worked for Universal Import/Export…that had 007 printed on them in a yellow ink that you couldn’t see when they were tucked in the wallet (note the translucent red plastic card holder). Not sure what that was supposed to accomplish, but it was fun. The case itself took the standard roll caps. That’s because it was booby trapped. If you opened it with the wrong combination a cap would bang. It was an open question among us kids whether that was cooler then the Secret Sam attache case, which could shoot plastic bullets and had a real camera concealed inside you could snap pictures of people with surreptitiously. Or as surreptitiously as a nine year old kid walking around with an attache case could be.

In retrospect, you have to wonder about selling kids James Bond toys considering that your typical kid couldn’t get in to see the Bond movies back then because of the scant (by today’s standards) nudity. Being on television, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. couldn’t do that. But I guess you could sell kids James Bond guns so long as you didn’t sell them the sex that usually went along with the guns in the movies.

And then there were these little nightmares for today’s school administrators. Behold…the original Transformers…

Dig it… A transistor radio that became a rifle when you pressed a little button by the handle. There was also a camera that became a pistol and a jack knife that became a pistol…

They all took the standard cap rolls I think. And to make matters worse, the jack knife actually had a little plastic blade on it two you could flick out. Looking back on it you have to wonder what the adults were thinking watching the neighborhood kids run around blasting each other, playing dead for a while, then getting back up and blasting each other some more. But in those days it probably wasn’t the sight of kids playing with guns so much as the civil defense siren silhouetted in the sky behind us that would have worried them. We had one of those right in back of our garden apartment complex and you could see it from just about everywhere we played. Leading us through our duck and cover exercises probably disturbed the grown-ups a lot more then our playing with cap guns.