by Guy Branum
And it was. The Dick Van Dyke Show is totally the thing that taught me what a comedy writer is. It was probably one of the key early steps in directing me to my current professional path. It also, along with the dozens of other sitcoms I was watching at the time, slowly began to teach me about the suburbs.
The suburbs, it seemed, were a place of infinite access. The schools were well funded and full of clubs and programs. You could take French in high school. There was no dog shit, there were no miscarried puppies in the front yard.9 Dads in the suburbs had these cool professional jobs: They were doctors, architects, and therapists. There was no gunplay. There were no almonds that required care. Children never had to hear stories about how recent rain patterns had depressed construction employment, making their request for a G.I. Joe an assault on the family’s stability. The families were pretty and happy, and their homes were devoid of the lurking fear of Dad’s anger.
My favorite old sitcom of all time is one of the suburbiest—Bewitched. If you don’t know what Bewitched is, I’m super-sad and think Nick at Nite has failed you. Bewitched was a pleasant domestic sitcom about a good-natured ad man and his loving wife, and it represented the most compelling fantasy of what I, as a child, wanted life to be like.
Samantha and Darrin Stephens live in a suburb so suburby it isn’t even named. They have a charming home with a yard, but Darrin works in the city. (The connection and access to the city are important.) Furthermore, their lives are chic. Sam makes Darrin drinks when he gets home, and they are often entertaining clients at home or in the city. This means that Sam has to dress up cute all the time. Finally, their children, when they come, are small. These are not stories about management of their brood but about their own adult lives. Also, this meant that I had no children near my age to be jealous of.
Oh, and by the way, Sam is an actual witch.
What I love about Bewitched is that it never needed the witch stuff. It could have just been a little domestic comedy about a couple like in I Love Lucy, but it was so solid without the magical material that the witches seemed all the more relatable. Sitting atop this well-oiled machine of 1960s American suburb were two witches and a warlock: Endora, who wore flowing robes of unnatural secondary colors and makeup a drag queen would find unsubtle; Aunt Clara, who was daffy but formidable; and Uncle Arthur, who was funny but prickly. Each represented a powerful force for impracticality and skewed perspective. There were going to be arguments about appliances, misunderstandings with neighbors, and awkward dinners with clients, why not let some fabulous people come in and use their unholy powers to make the conflict even queerer?
While the suburbs of The Dick Van Dyke Show represented an important place to which I did not have access, the witches of Bewitched allowed me to enter it. Though I loved the three-bedroom palaces of typical sitcom families, I nevertheless worried that there was no space for a boy as fat, poor, and “different” as I was. But Endora—Endora was fabulous and did not give a fuck. Her spells could turn Darrin pregnant, emasculating the patriarchal head of the family, or transform her into Samantha’s seductive double to confuse the sexual order, or turn one of Darrin’s clients into a cat, confusing class distinctions. From these old sitcoms, I was learning how adult society worked, but Endora was the one character who could consistently upset the fundamental forces of that order. As much as The Dick Van Dyke Show made me want to be a comedy writer, Bewitched made me want to be a witch—someone who used her powers to make her environment extraordinary instead of stifling.
I guess it might have been easier if I’d just wanted to slip through the bonds of class and become a suburban dad. And I half did. Up through law school, my life choices centered around doing everything I could to secure the safety and stability of a white-collar job. On some level, I always dreamed of sliding into a life of uncomplicated suburban domesticity, although I could never entirely tell where I would fit.
Deeper within me, the lust for power wanted more. I wanted to be the creature from outside who, through wit and style, had the power to vex the lives of the happy suburban men who ruled the world. I wanted to make entrances and to entrance. I wanted to ridicule people to their faces and get away with it. I could never be Alex P. Keaton or Theo Huxtable. I thought maybe I had it in me to be Endora.
Which was, possibly, why I loved Samantha Stephens so much. She was trapped in a world that did not respect or appreciate all she had to offer, but she was trying to fit in to it for the sake of family. She had all the magic and attitude of an Endora but was holding it in check to keep her household stable, just like me. I lived for those moments when she let loose and used her powers, be they magical or verbal. I was dying for my chance to try out mine.
And hey, if I was going to have to break out of my home and economic class, leave behind everything and everyone I’d known to be a person who mattered in the world, why stop at snagging a white-collar job? If you’re going to risk it all, why not try to be magical?
* * *
1. To provide some empirical support to my repeated assertions of Yuba City’s shittiness, I should note that when Rand McNally compiled a ranking of American cities in 1985, Yuba City was named the worst city in America.
2. The segment is currently available on YouTube. It is four and a half minutes long. That’s a long time for grade school me to have to be worrying about whether that poor baby was going to get milk or die of starvation. I encourage you to watch it to witness just how emotionally draining a film it is.
3. My comfort zone was learning about places I did not live, preferably fictitious lands full of sorceresses.
4. This is a hilarious Anne Frank joke.
5. I never realized until this moment what a deeply Jainist sentiment this is.
6. Shows with singing and dancing are Ally Sheedy in WarGames, a nice break from all that conflict.
7. We’re being so generous.
8. Perhaps he subconsciously sensed Mr. Van Dyke’s own drinking problem and could relate to him as a kindred spirit.
9. I once ran across a miscarried Chesapeake Bay retriever fetus in the front yard. It looked like a terrifying little monster, and I was pretty sure I was in the first five minutes of a Stephen King movie. I didn’t tell anyone, and it took me years to figure out what it was.
CAMOUFLAGE AND PLUMAGE
I AM A GAY man, and that means I do not like the sound of my own voice.
I do not know when my voice diverged markedly enough from that of other children to be noteworthy, but to say that it’s “always” been like that would be intellectually dishonest. Also, all children sound like faggots. When you’re three, you’re allowed to talk about how soft rose petals are, really romance the idea, and everyone’s going to be cool with it. At three, you’ve spent so much of your life with people describing you and everything you own as “cute” that you don’t think twice about describing your beloved stuffed horse or your own romper with that highly problematic word. At three, you’re still learning how gender works, so it takes a bit longer before anyone figures out you’ve learned it wrong. What I’m saying is it’s too early to hope that all those photos of Prince George enraptured by bubbles mean anything.
I remember, at age eight or so, actively thinking, “Ladies talk nicely.” I didn’t think “Ladies talk nice” because I understood grammar. I had not learned grammar wrong. I understood grammar as it was supposed to be used, not as it was actually used. I was a proscriptive, not descriptive, eight-year-old. I didn’t use constructions that the kids around me did for the sake of fitting in. I suppose in my later life, not fitting in with people my age would be an issue and a struggle, but for me at the advent of my personhood, it wasn’t a concern. I wanted to fit in, just not with the people everyone else wanted me to fit in with. I wanted to sound like a mom. I wanted to drink coffee. I wanted to not yell—because in my ideal world, I wouldn’t need to.
Soon I was stuck with a larynx full of problems. I’d open my mouth and kids would know there
was something wrong with me. I mean, adults did, too. From the first sound, they understood that I wasn’t playing by the rules. It was tone, it was syntax, it was grammar, it was content. There was no portion of my speech that fit with my unusually large male frame. They let their distaste be known.
It was at this point in my life that I was first diagnosed as gay. Not by a physician or a drag queen or whomever the state-certified professional would be to make such a ruling.1 It was my classmates. My parents, you see, had been foolish enough to name me after my paternal grandfather. They didn’t intend to call me by his name, Guy; they intended to participate in a strange southern custom where you give a kid a preposterous first name, then call him by his middle name or some weird nickname like Butch or Tubby. However, my parents were deeply unimaginative on the middle-name front, selecting one of the most blandly popular boys’ names of the 1970s: Michael. For the first four years of my life, I was known as Mikey to all. However, when I arrived in kindergarten, the teacher summarily informed my mother that with five other Michaels in the class, Michaeling for me would not be an option. I was to be Guy. From archangel to generic man in under a day.
Through this unexpected chain of events, I was positioned in third grade at a California public school with a name that was one letter away from the word “gay.” My classmates very quickly parsed this out for themselves and began a rich, exciting tradition of calling me “Gay Guy” on the playground. If educators could only structure more deductive reasoning to end in the ridicule of a classmate, student engagement would skyrocket.
Now, let’s be clear: As an eight-year-old, I wasn’t having that much recreational sex. I hadn’t bottomed, almost never went to gay bars, had no Streisand albums, and had seen Judy only in The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me in St. Louis. These kids weren’t calling me gay because of whom I was having sex with, or because of my participation in a subculture, they were calling me gay because of my gender expression. These days we love to describe sexuality and gender as independent, unrelated axes: Gay is about whom you have sex with; trans is about how you express your gender. It sounds like an intelligent construction but was proved to be sorely misguided by the fieldwork I did on the playground of Tierra Buena Elementary School between 1984 and 1989.
I told my parents about the bullying. They told me I wouldn’t have these problems if I acted more like a boy. For so many kids, that is the real fear when it comes to being bullied about being gay. It’s not that other kids around you are mocking you, it’s the fact that you know if you go to the authority figures, they will not sympathize with your situation. Actually, I don’t know if that’s the real fear for other people, I just knew it was for me. When I told my parents, “They called me a fag,” my parents didn’t say, “That’s horrible. We will stop them.” My parents said, “That’s horrible. Stop being a fag.”
I was supposed to hit Joe Mendoza, the central fag-caller: This was my parents’ proposed solution. You were supposed to start a fight when someone called you gay, and if you didn’t start a fight when someone called you gay, there was clearly something very wrong with you. You were probably a fag.
I tried. Joe just danced out of my way, then ran back in and punched me. Joe was gifted with excesses of speed and strength long before such skills were augmented by the powers of puberty, and he had older brothers who beat the shit out of him all the time, teaching him the refined, nuanced points of the shit-beating-out arts. I had no idea what I was doing; fighting was the least natural thing for me. If you could silence a bully by drawing a family tree of the Greek gods, or synopsizing the plot of Time Bandits, I would have been really good at that. For fighting I had nothing. I thought we weren’t supposed to fight, I thought we were supposed to discuss our problems. The way I thought the world was supposed to work and the way it was working were at a significant disjuncture.
And let’s make something else clear: These cruel, evil children in the schoolyard, these heinous bullies, all they were doing was calling me something that I was. They lived in a world where media told them gay people existed, and gave them adequate tools to be able to locate me as a gay when I was just eight years old. They received essentially no guidance about how to deal with gay people from their parents; they relied upon a pop culture that told them gay people were ridiculous and risible. Those bullies in the schoolyard weren’t monsters or even bullies, they were children trying to make sense of the world. They called me the thing I am; the teachers, administrators, and parents around us just couldn’t bring themselves to respond to it.
Mrs. Carol Sanger was my third- and fourth-grade teacher. She was the best teacher. No teacher ever liked me more than she did, and when she realized this was going on, we had a classroom discussion about it. She was going to fix it. Guy being made fun of was brought out in the open, and she said it wasn’t acceptable. Guy being made fun of for being fat. That was what we talked about in class, how people were calling me fat. No one ever called me fat. I was super-fat, but a lot of them were, too. No, what they called me was gay, but Mrs. Sanger couldn’t say that. I don’t think anyone in 1985 was culturally equipped to deal with the possibility of a nine-year-old being gay. We just had to collectively pretend that gay people emerged fully grown from pods cultivated at liberal arts colleges, or were formed from Judith Light’s tears.
In fourth grade, I learned that there was something about me that made me audibly different from the other boys my age. I could not mask it, I could not change it, I couldn’t fight so well that I could earn the respect of my classmates. So I became quiet, very quiet, for a long time.
That’s not what everyone does. Some people get really good at making the right noises. They listen closely, they shape and shade their words, becoming a perfect sign and semblance of a man. When you are prey, you learn to camouflage.
Much is made of the fact that gay people do not look distinctly different from straight people. The idea that we can pass is supposed to make our marginalization easier. Oh, if you can hide, why not just hide? Well, first of all, who wants to send their personality to live in a secret annex above the pectin company?2 The idea that gays would be fine if we just hated ourselves into zombie facsimiles of straight people is gross.
Also, it’s what we do a lot of the time. Some people get really good at it. The ability to shift between codes is common in many minority groups, but when you’re an invisible minority, some people turn into chameleons. That’s what Matt Bomer is. Do you know Matt Bomer? He’s that gay actor who stared on the USA series White Collar and looks like if someone imagined what being a happy, handsome, well-adjusted straight guy would look like. I’m willing to bet that at some point in time in Matt Bomer’s origin story, he was so deeply ashamed of who he was that he vowed to be the perfectest, normalest image of man possible. And he succeeded. Now he can be anyone.
It’s the speech that Mystique gives in X2, the terribly named 2003 X-Men movie. Mystique is a mutant with the literal power to chameleon into any shape or voice she chooses, so Nightcrawler says to her, “I heard you can imitate anyone . . . then why not stay in disguise all the time?” Mystique says, “Because we shouldn’t have to.” I know we’re supposed to hate Bryan Singer for his various sexual improprieties, but I nevertheless treasure the amount of real queer sentiment hidden in that film. Few lines have so incisively characterized the rage I feel that we’re expected to spend our lives hiding.
But I don’t really mean “our,” because the other side of “You can’t expect us to spend our lives hiding” is that some people can’t hide. I am one of those people. I wish I’d spent all of my closeted years of self-hatred turning into a perfect simulation of a masculine, muscular straight guy. I wish I’d learned their ways enough to manipulate them. I didn’t. I’m one of the gay guys whose voices always marked us as men outside masculinity. I came to understand it as a test. I would open my mouth, speak, then wait to see how the room reacted. A gay voice, a truly, magnificently gay voice isn’t just a weakness, though. Plumage is a
n adaptation just as much as camouflage.
Before 2010, people loved to say, “They can be gay; I just don’t want them to shove it in my face.” First, no one is shoving their gayness in your face. Unless you’re on the street watching a parade in a major American city in June. Then it’s entirely possible someone’s shoving their homosexuality in your face. If you don’t like it, go half a block away and return to the nice, boring world of straight people shoving straightness in your face. What they were really saying is that they don’t want to hear the audible parts of being gay. This is people policing expressive gayness. This is Mitt Romney and friends holding down a gay classmate in 1964 and cutting off his too-noticeable bangs. Plumage is all of the parts of male homosexuality that culture wants to tell you are unnecessary. Films and TV are always showing you gay guys like Adam Pally on Happy Endings or Andy Samberg in I Love You, Man or Woody Harrelson in Friends with Benefits or any number of other gay characters who aren’t like those other gay guys. They exist to remind gay guys that a virtuous path exists if only they can manage to ape the behaviors and culture of straight men. That is why they’re not fun or cool.
I have one question: How is any gay guy supposed to know if some other guy is gay?
Yes, we have telephones now with nice apps like Grindr, but before that, outside of that, how were these gay guys supposed to locate and identify other gay guys?
No one thought about that when building these characters, because they weren’t characters. They were props, symbols of gay men that exist only to serve a straight story, performed by straight men who haven’t really thought about what it’s like to be gay. No one ever thought, “What will it take for this guy to be happy?” They just thought, “Why do gay guys have to sound all faggy like that?”3