{"id":2146,"date":"2008-11-08T11:22:07","date_gmt":"2008-11-08T16:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=2146"},"modified":"2022-11-08T14:10:37","modified_gmt":"2022-11-08T19:10:37","slug":"the-side-of-the-comic-book-rack-i-always-stayed-away-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/2146","title":{"rendered":"The Side Of The Comic Book Rack I Always Stayed Away From…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…had a lot of these in it…<\/p>\n

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When I was a kid, I just couldn’t imagine how even girls liked these.\u00a0 Although I never actually saw any browsing that side of the comic book racks anyway.\u00a0 Maybe they were too embarrassed to be seen looking at these.\u00a0 Or maybe they just waited for the boys to leave first, before approaching them.\u00a0 I can imagine the snickers coming from the boys side of the rack were a girl to wander over and pick one up…<\/p>\n

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But there must have been a market for these, because the comic book publishers kept grinding them out.\u00a0 Some of the most famous names in comic book…er…excuse me…Graphic Novel history did these. \u00a0 Here’s one by Jack Kirby…<\/p>\n

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At the age I was buying a lot of comics, I could barely stand to look at these.\u00a0 They just completely creeped me out.\u00a0 That whole icky love stuff just totally mystified me.\u00a0 Who cares?<\/em>\u00a0 I used to fidget in my seat at the movies whenever the love interest parts of the story were going on.\u00a0 I’d be sitting there thinking to myself, Ah Jeeze…come on, come on, let’s get on with it…<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Had I bothered to sneak a look inside one of these, I might have found something like this inside…<\/p>\n

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…which would have just confirmed my suspicions for me.\u00a0 All that love stuff was for the birds.\u00a0 Who cares?\u00a0 Leave me out…please.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I just couldn’t fathom it.\u00a0 As I said…those things really creeped me out.\u00a0 Why would anyone…even a girl…bother with crap like that.\u00a0 Especially when you could buy a really neat comic like…oh…this one…<\/p>\n

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Or…this one…<\/p>\n

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Man…I couldn’t get enough of that when I was a kid.\u00a0 For some strange reason.\u00a0 Even though the stories were usually pretty lousy.<\/p>\n

They say girls mature a tad sooner then boys in the romance department, and maybe that’s true to a degree.\u00a0 Also, I was a bit of a late bloomer.\u00a0 But there was a section missing from the comic book racks back then too, and had it been there, maybe I could have grown up understanding all that gooey, icky love stuff a little bit better.\u00a0 Maybe by the time my hormones really started to percolate, I wouldn’t have been so fumbly, clumsy and deathly shy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I grew up in a world where homosexuals were twisted monsters who lurked behind schools waiting to pounce on kids my age.\u00a0 The messages we all got back then to beware of strange men fell on the ears of gay kids too…and looking back on it, I can clearly recall flinching away whenever my thoughts began to stray toward how…attractive…some of the characters in my comic books were.\u00a0 I didn’t want to be a monster.\u00a0 I didn’t want to be sick.\u00a0\u00a0 So I just kind-of let my eyes wander over whatever it was something deep down inside of me had jerked them towards…<\/p>\n

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…and then wander away again without thinking about it too closely.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

What I really needed in my young teenage life was something that spoke to me.\u00a0 Well…what I really needed was to grow up in a time when adults were willing to talk to teenagers honestly and rationally about sex and sexuality.\u00a0 The girls weren’t getting any of that either back then really.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Even so…as horrible as it was back then, to even contemplate being homosexual, had I seen something like this on the comic book racks, I would have snatched one up instantly…<\/p>\n

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I don’t know if I could have worked up the courage to actually take it to the cashier or not…but I’d have gotten it out of the store one way or the other…<\/p>\n

Well…of course there would have been no “explicit content” allowed.\u00a0 But just the idea that boys could fall in love with other boys, and that it was okay, and that you weren’t a monster if you felt sexually attracted to one, would have made so much of a difference in my life later on…\u00a0 So very, very much of a difference…<\/p>\n

Romance.\u00a0 Maybe it wasn’t so icky after all…<\/p>\n

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…maybe I could find one of my own someday…<\/p>\n

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Every time I buy one of these now…and I have several bookshelves full of them…I have to laugh at how contemptuous I felt toward those girl’s romance comics way back when.\u00a0 Yes…they were horribly sexist.\u00a0 But at least love always won in the end in those things.\u00a0 It was something you could hope for, for yourself too.\u00a0 Here’s a portion of the back cover of Constellations In My Palm<\/em>…<\/p>\n

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What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because of your own pride and selfishness?<\/em> \u00a0 What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because you were taught to be afraid of it?\u00a0 What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because you were never taught how to reach for it like the other kids were?\u00a0\u00a0 What would you do if you had another chance and lost it again?\u00a0 And again?\u00a0 And again?\u00a0\u00a0 What would you do if you spent your whole life trying to get beyond that fear and confusion they put into you when you were a kid, and you couldn’t?\u00a0<\/p>\n

My generation, and the one just before us, the pre Stonewall generation, began this movement to break down those barriers of self loathing, fear and confusion, and reclaim our human right to love and be loved.\u00a0 And this is our great victory:\u00a0 that gay teens no longer have to live in a world where all they ever hear about themselves is that they are sick, broken, twisted, monsters. They can grow up now, believing that they are fully human too.\u00a0 They can grow up now, believing in the promise of love too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was, and still regretfully is, a hard and bitter fight.\u00a0 But every day now, more and more of us are finding our way to the promise land.\u00a0 Even, thankfully, some of us older gay folk too.\u00a0 Some of us will only stand on the hillside just beyond, never to find our way in after all, stricken by how much more beautiful it really was, how much more beautiful then we could have ever imagined, back when we first started fighting to win it back.\u00a0 But we can take heart in this, and carry on:\u00a0 so no kid will ever have to grow up in a world that tells them they will never find love, never be loved, because they are gay.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…had a lot of these in it… When I was a kid, I just couldn’t imagine how even girls liked these.\u00a0 Although I never actually saw any browsing that side of the comic book racks anyway.\u00a0 Maybe they were too embarrassed to be seen looking at these.\u00a0 Or maybe they just waited for the boys […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[14,70,12],"class_list":["post-2146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-uncategorized","tag-gay-youth","tag-sexuality","tag-the-struggle-for-our-lives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}