A Queer and Meaningless Bark

Being queer in high school in the early 80s was probably unpleasant for most queer guys. Of course most those queer guys weren't openly queer but, teenagers being the beasts they are, it really didn't matter if the targets of rumors, or worse, were definitely queer. Especially if it meant attention was drawn away from rumor mongers' and attackers' own queer secrets. For the most part being secretly queer in high school really wasn't all that bad for me because I'm one of those guys who has always “passed” for straight. Even though I was one of the few guys in my high school drama class, was known as an artist, and was a vocal hater of high school sports, I never, for most of high school, encountered any queer slurs or was aware of rumors.  I also wasn't romantically attracted to guys which spared me the queer adolescent anguish of “a love that dares not speak its name.” I definitely liked seeing guys naked, fantasizing about gettin...

Some years ago a couple of my sisters and their kids were visiting Seattle and we all ended up at a street fair or something on Capital Hill, Seattle's tragically hip and heavily gay neighborhood. One of the community info stands, something to do with the gay community, was giving away balloons so my sisters stopped for the kids. A guy working the stand looked at me and said “Didn't you go to Mason High School?”  I looked at him and recognized him. His name was Dean and he'd been a year or two behind me. Dean and I had no dealings in high school though we'd both been in a volunteer program that worked at the local nursing home and hospital, mainly filling water jugs for residents and patients. (I'm not sure why I was in that program, probably because someone claimed it'd look good on a college application. Or maybe I was a slightly better person than I recall being.) Despite Mason High school not having been enormous (around 600 students t...

The Entertainment industry sort of sucks when it comes to queer male characters, particularly TV. Yes, it's great that TV puts gay characters out there for everyone to see. But even in more recent enlightened times it seems we still see the same cliche gay characters. TV is all about extremes. There's no interest in subtly. Just ask the owners of A&E, a network that used to show recordings of Shakespeare plays. Now they show a nonstop stream of shows like Dog the Bounty Hunter . Shakespeare was shoved off stage and for good measure they sent a bear after him. In the extreme world of TV there's little room for ordinary guys who happen to be queer. Which sort of sucks for the young queer guy or older guy who's just figuring out he's queer. Guys like that  pretty much only get the message: Gay is...Drag, divas, fashion, drag, celebrity worship, clubbing, drag, endless one night stands, bitchiness, and drag.  A guy pondering his identity who doesn't i...

My childhood and teen years weren't nightmarish, but they weren't great, either. For the most part it would have all been the same if I hadn't been queer, in fact I think if I'd been 100% straight things might have been worse.  I don't dwell on my life before age 20, I rarely even think about it. At age 20  I went to college where my brain emerged from a weird fog of sorts that it had been in during my teen years. At college I had the best time I'd ever had in my life and I made friends who decades later are still my friends. I almost never think about high school. On rare occasions I ponder certain guys I had a thing for or I'd fooled around with.  I've never attended a high school reunion because I have no interest in what my former classmates are up to. I had a couple friends in my class but mostly I had friends a year or two older or younger than me. (One friend, Lydia, is still a good friend. No, she wasn't my special hi...