In reference to
an entry at Joe. My. Blog., Laurie Mecham sent me the following question:
Now you tell me....what's the gayest thing YOU'VE ever done?
Hm -- these days every damn thing I do is so gay Pat Robertson is running out of forehead veins to burst.
But for some reason this question reminded me of some of my odd, exploratory indiscretions in 9th grade -- at a time when I knew very well I was gay and was not only eager to come out of the closet, but also desperate to be liked. These two motivations, particularly in the early '80s, were more in conflict than I wanted to believe at the time.
Each year there was a game between the basketball team and the faculty. It was always great fun, and in a weird way fulfilled the same function in our school as Walpurgisnacht or various other "backwards days" did in highly structured medieval Germanic and Celtic societies -- inverting the universe and allowing chaos and foolishness to temporarily rein in a time outside of time's normal strictures.
At sporting events, the amount of pep eminating from the spectators must always be maintained by cheerleaders, highly trained masters of their craft. Allowing pep levels to sink dangerously low can result in game loss, injury or even death. The aspect of the faculty/student game that most captured my queer young imagination was that, instead of the regular squad, the cheerleaders were 9th grade boys in bad camp drag.
In those days, and in Carbon County, only girls could be cheerleaders, so you can imagine that the boys in drag got a lot of laughs, a fact which appealed to me greatly. In previous years, I had admired the 9th graders' campy antics and came to see this cheerleading business as my only possible contribution to the school's sporting program. So this year, on the big day, I brought makeup, a skirt and a wig to school. I suppose I had spent enough time in the bathroom making myself "pretty" that most of the school was already in the gymnasium by the time I emerged.
As I was walking toward the gym, pleasantly anticipating all the hilarity that was sure to follow, I was stopped in the near-empty corridor by one of the girls from the real cheerleading squad.
"What the hell are
you supposed to be?" she demanded, displaying the charm and compassion with which cheerleaders typically address nerds. I explained to her that I was going to be a cheerleader, and, oh, could I borrow a pair of pom-poms?
"What?! YOU can't be a cheerleader!" Her voice was colored with undisguised wonder as she arrogantly tossed her perfectly-feathered hair. Apparently, the boys who traditionally led cheers at this event were the stars of the football team. She seemed shocked at my effrontery, my sheer ignorance of the established order: "Didn't you
know that?"
Well, no, I hadn't guessed that from previous years, since the boy cheerleaders had never presented their bios for my inspection. I didn't even know who the "stars" of the football team in my own grade were, for god's sake -- I was bored to tears by the whole cult of personality that was school sports, and as far as I was concerned those jock types were indistinguishable from each other as the somewhat crude and inexplicably stupid boys who would occasionally and for no reason slam me up against corridor walls and issue unprovoked threats. Perhaps my refusal to recognize their self-evident superiority was what galled them. It's even possible the cheerleader had rightly guessed that every year I was secretly rooting for the faculty -- who were generally easier to get along with than the students.
But it was clear I was not going to be allowed my bit of campy fun. So I skulked back to the bathroom, changed back into my normal geekwear, and washed my face with gritty, powdered school soap. I've wondered what would have happened if I had made it all the way to the gymnasium and appeared before the entire faculty and student body wearing mascara, a skirt, and a wig -- without having been a football player. Would the universe simply have imploded? Would I have been sent home, attacked, placed under protective custody?
Who knows? The whole episode, now, seems to have enough humor mixed with pathos that it seems very gay somehow, if you know what I mean.
On yearbook signing day, I decided to append "... Love, Brandon" to all my little "Stay cool, and have a nice summer" (or whatever) entries -- which ended up making my male classmates very uneasy. I didn't see what the problem was, but for some reason I was amused to watch them furiously scribbling over my indelible signature before any of their friends saw it.
I hadn't anticipated any particular reaction; in fact, I think I was really just enjoying the idea of being full of love for mankind, or some romantic notion like that. I suppose out there in redneck land, things could have turned out badly for me. Fortunately, it soon became clear that the boys were unable to launch any kind of coordinated, retaliatory attack, because each was terrified his yearbook was the only one I had signed that way. Only one ever mentioned it, and that was in shocked, secretive tones, to tell me, "You can't DO that!"
But of course, I could. And I got away with it, too.
State B (normal, several frames):
