I need to make this point first: I had it good. I had it very good. Compared to other kids I had it golden. Mom loved me, I never doubted that. But there were others on her side of my family tree who would have been happy if I’d never been born. Not all of them…I need to emphasize that too…but enough of them that I felt the static over being my father’s son all the time I was growing up. Here’s the thing: you grow up in these situations others might consider strange and it doesn’t seem strange to you at all. It seems normal. Because for you it is normal. I didn’t get to meet my dad until I was 15 and that had to be on the down low because otherwise mom’s family would go nuclear. Which…they eventually did anyway. But that was normal for me. Your mileage may vary.

Part of the reason I was able to handle my emerging sexual orientation as well as I did was I’d already accepted by then that there would be people in my life who would hate my guts for something I couldn’t help being, and which all by itself wasn’t anything for me to be ashamed of. But it left its mark all the same, and at age 72 I’m still picking out pieces of the scabs.

So if it seems strange for a guy my age to be completely taken by a series of books aimed mostly at teenagers and young adults, it’s because that background premise in those books of “Forbidden Children” and “Children Who Should Not Have Been Born” and its main character telling the gods at the end of the first series to recognize all their children from now on so no one ever feels unwanted again, really hits me in a very deep place where I didn’t expect the books to take me.

I started reading the Percy Jackson books when I saw the cover art pop up in one of my feeds for The Sun And The Star and realized looking at it that it was a story about a young same sex couple in some sort of fantasy/adventure story.

I have been devouring those kinds of stories ever since Mercedes Lackey wrote her Last Herald Mage books, as a way of vicariously having/reliving an adolescence reading boy meets boy, have adventures, win their battles, defeat the bad guys and fall in love stories I never had a chance to have growing up in the late 60s/early 70s. So I bought a copy and started reading, and then fell into Rick Riordan’s universe of forbidden demigod children, unknowingly born into world where they are misunderstood weird kid outcasts at best, targets for monsters at worst, and half their family tree is dysfunctional, and they have to fight for acceptance and find and defend their chosen family.

I was only able to get halfway through the first Harry Potter book before I got bored with it and put it down. It was at the quidditch match part and I put it down to my reliable allergy to watching sports, and bad memories of being forced into it in grade school. This was well before I saw her dark side online. At the time I thought I should at least try to finish it because it seemed like everyone was thoroughly enjoying the books and the story of an outsider kid growing up in a family that raised him in a little closet away from the world of his birthright should have appealed to me. But once I put it down I moved onto other things, and then later I saw her dark side. It was probably less traumatic for me than others since I’d already become bored with her world. In retrospect Rowling had all the tropes and the skill to use them better than most, but not enough to make them rise above themselves. It’s like the difference I found reading Zane Grey versus Louis L’Amour, or Tom Clancy versus Alistair MacLean.

Looking forward to watching the second season of Percy Jackson And The Olympians, and then season three where we finally get to meet a young Nico di Angelo. Alas at the rate they’re going it won’t be for another six years after than before we get to Nico’s fight with Cupid and it comes out he’s gay and he had a crush on Percy. Maybe in seven years Disney Corp will have enough backbone to actually tell its audience that no kid should ever feel unwanted again.

Even if they’re gay and their father is Hades.

[Edited a tad…]

Back when I was a teenager and big box department stores were a thing, I used to go shopping, mostly for LPs at the E.J. Korvette’s across Rockville Pike. It was classic suburban car culture retail, with a massive, and I mean Massive, parking lot surrounding a huge store that sold everything from lawn mowers to blue jeans to jewelry and watches to TVs. They had a legendary record department, and I would go there often to browse the movie and TV soundtrack titles. In their day they had a bigger soundtrack selection than anyone else.

I would also browse the book department. One day I saw this paperback title on the shelves and my jaw dropped, completely taken by surprise and completely embarrassed.

I don’t think I was more embarrassed by the Sticky Fingers album cover when I first laid eyes on it. I could not believe a book with thAT title was allowed on the shelves, even if I knew it was obviously not, could not possibly be about…er…those kinds of dicks. I picked it up and looked at the back cover blurb and saw that it was, yes, a collection of pulp detective stories, which I wasn’t much interested in at the time.

I briefly considered buying a copy as a joke. But I was probably still struggling with my emerging sexuality and didn’t want mom seeing it because she was already questioning my lack of interest in girls and my stash of 16 and Tiger Beat magazines.

Time passes, the universe expands, and along comes the Internet and email and social media and and smartphones and this cover became something of a running gag with me whenever the topic of sexting and dick pics came up. The little inner Baptist boy in me will in no way allow the grown up me to engage in online conversations like that. But the Mad Magazine inner tweenager in me loved joking about it with photos of Dick Tracy, Dick Nixon, Dick Clark, and this book cover.

Once, a certain someone down in Florida told me during one of our conversations not to be sending him any dick pics (I’ve often wondered later if he wasn’t actually trying to give me ideas) and I made the usual jokes back at him. Maybe that’s what started our downhill slide. My sense of humor often irritated him, which irritated me.

So when the other day a friend joked when I was bellyaching about Facebook unilaterally removing one of my posts, that I was posting too many dick pics, and I replied with the cover of this book. He laughed, I laughed. And then I began thinking about it more.

I never really got into hard core noir detective fiction but I have loved some of the movies in that genre. After watching and loving the 1975 Robert Mitchum version of Farewell My Lovely, I decided to pick up a random Raymond Chandler book…he was said to be the gold standard of detective noir…and see if I might want to read him.

At the Crown Books in Congressional Plaza I saw and picked up a copy of one of his novels, I forget now which one, and I Just Happened to flip it open to a scene in it where Marlow is roughing up a young homosexual for some information. Chandler writes that the kid tries to swing back but those little queer boys just don’t have the muscle or the skeletal hardness to put up much of a fight.

The contempt was just dripping off the page and I put it back, and never picked up another Raymond Chandler book. But I still love that film version of Farewell My Lovely. I even bought a copy of the soundtrack by David Shire, which set the tone for the movie perfectly.

But the book I often joked about still intrigued me for, perhaps, a different reason: it’s alleged pulp fiction roots. I have long been a big fan of a particular pulp fiction character: The Shadow. I have a bunch of paperbacks, written by Walter Gibson under the pen name Maxwell Grant, with those amazing pulp art covers.

The only other artist to do the character justice was Michael Kaluta in that amazing series of DC comics that are now collector’s items, and really every time he does the character…

The Shadow was the only pulp character I ever enjoyed reading. For some reason I never got into Doc Savage stories, although those are also said to be a gold standard in pulp fiction. But given how much I’ve enjoyed pulp stories about The Shadow I knew I could actually digest pulp fiction…it just had to be good pulp fiction. If that’s not a contradiction in terms.

So after Yet Another dick pics joke about that book I thought, let me actually try reading it. It’s an anthology so maybe I end up hating some of it, but liking others. So I did a little digging and came up with this hardbound first edition in like new condition, for not very much money.

I posted a version of this to my Facebook page, because most of my friends and classmates still don’t seem to get blogs. Now I wait to see if Facebook deletes this post too. Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of social media…hahahahaha…