Jason and I rented an adorable film called, “Little Manhattan.” It's like “The Wonder Years” in New York. The kids are so good in the movie, especially the guy who plays Gabe. It was extremely simple, very real and relatable to a point. Unlike the character in the movie, I grew up as a closeted gay kid, I ofcourse didn't have crushes on girls, but found myself having crushes on my guy friends. One in particular, lived over the hill from my house and so much of the tension the kid felt in this movie, I could relate to. The only difference is that in MY movie, I ofcourse can never let my first crush know how I feel.
That is a difficult thing to endure. I mean, feelings like that NEED to be expressed. In the film, the father and mother are divorcing and the father explains to Gabe that one of the reasons they are divorcing is that for many years alot of unspoken things were left unsaid and so they piled up and cluttered up their relationship and it forced them to go in different paths. So the kid vows to not let that happen and instead of keeping his feelings to himself, he decides to let his feelings be known to the girl.
In MY case, had I done that back in 1973 I would have been beaten within an inch of my life, humiliated beyond belief and to that little twelve year old version of me, that was just something I didn't even fathom doing.
And that is hard to deal with. I am still feeling repercussions of that time in my life.
I find it difficult to deal with jokes about being in the closet and I find myself enabling those jokes all the time. In reality, it was truly a very twisted experience. I was putting on a mask that was pretty much my opposite and had to hide behind that mask, the mask of approval, the mask that people liked that covered who I really was.
There is a scene in the film where they are practicing karate and the girl, Rosemary has Gabe pinned, looking down at him with a smile and you can feel the tension of what might be the first kiss. In MY case, I would wrestle around with my buddy and he would have ME pinned and he could sense something odd happening, he could see that I wasn't struggling or fighting him off, I was letting him pin me down. He got up and with an expression of disgust say, “you LIKE that don't you?” God! I will never forget how that made me feel and I remember that that pretty much killed that friendship. It also started the rumor mill that only escalated when I got to High School. So I had to do damage control and THAT is where I began dating girls and making out with a girl especially at a party so that everyone could see and it would hopefully dismiss any gay rumors. (Not unlike present day Hollywood!)
There was one guy in my eight grade class who was built like a brick shithouse. He was the object of many a fantasy, as my puberty took hold. When I was a freshman in High School, that fall, he had emerged even MORE mature, MORE muscular and I stared as much as I could. He dated some slutty girl and they both always had huge hickies on their necks. I was so envious. I so wanted to be this girl. I wanted to have his hickies adorning MY neck.
What I did was unbelievable to me as I remember it. This was the glorious age of no caller ID. You could be as anonymous as you wanted to be and what I did was CALL this guy and pretend to be a teenage GIRL from a neighboring school. I told him that I had seen him at one of the football games and that I had a crush on him. I told him that I had found out his name from other kids and looked him up and called him. We phone “dated” for awhile and he would tell me what we do if we actually got together. It was like phone sex except only getting to maybe second base.
He was romantic. He would tell me that if we got together in person that we would lay out under the stars and make out.
The subject of being gay came up. I brought it up. I was truly going for broke here. I asked him if he knew of any gay kids at his school. To my horror, he mentioned my name along with another kids name, a kid I was friends with. But then he said, “Yeah, well, maybe not Dorn but definitely (the other kid).”
That amazed me. That would make me think for some odd reason that maybe I had a chance with him. The fact that he DIDN'T think I was gay. I was getting some kind of approval from him. At that time and still to this day, I have an internal core belief that I am inferior because I'm gay. I know. I'm working on it. Writing this helps...
I would see him the next day at school with his slutty girlfriend. I would think, “HA! Little does she know, he is cheating on her with ME on the phone.”
He never knew it was me. I would see how he would be if he walked past or glanced at me. That was always a rare occasion. He never blinked in my direction. He had no idea that the girl he was flirting with on the phone was none other than me.
Wow. I was a neighboring teenage girl with BALLS! Can't believe I did that.