by Dave Holmes
Steve had hopped off the soul train by the time he got back from his freshman year; Magic 108 was starting to work some rap songs into their rotation. Anyone can rap, we thought. That’s not music. We agreed it was a fad that wouldn’t even make it to 1983. The only thing keeping him in the fold was a young artist out of Minneapolis named Prince, and his protégés The Time. Filthy dirty funk music. Exactly what the country’s Catholic white boys didn’t know they needed.
When they moved out, cable TV moved in. We didn’t get it for a few years, despite my begging—“Filth! Vulgar! N.O. spells NO,” Mom said—but my friend Pete down the street did, and we organized a barter system: he could come to my house and play the video games his parents denied him, and I would be able to spend an equal amount of time sitting in front of MTV at his. I remember the first time we flicked over to that channel together and were greeted with the sexily menacing pleather-and-neon jungle of Total Coelo’s “I Eat Cannibals.” We sat back in slack-jawed satisfaction and didn’t move for months.
What to the untrained eye looked like vegging out in front of the television was actually me silently plotting a way to crawl inside.
Looking back, I think my family raised me right. There were probably some lessons about decency and fairness and manners in there somewhere—who can remember?—but the main thing my parents and brothers taught me by example was how to appreciate pop culture and music. I want to thank them and also explain to them that I am their fault.
At the time of writing, both of my brothers listen to Toby Keith and my parents pretty much exclusively watch Fox News, at the volume level of a My Bloody Valentine concert. It’s heartbreaking, but at least they left me something valuable before they checked out.
* * *
*1 My mom’s a magnet for boldface names, in a way that might qualify as an actual medical condition. Recently, Steve and his wife, Betsy, went on a last-minute ski vacation, and with no time to shop for her own, Betsy borrowed my mother’s ski vest. The first ski lift they got on, their seatmate was golfer Phil Mickelson. Steve and Betsy looked at each other and said the same thing: “It’s a pheromone.”
*2 And I mean bitter: the show ended its four-decade-plus network run on a cliffhanger in which a drunk and rageful J.R. shot blindly into a party. Who did J.R. shoot? was the question they intended to leave us with, hoping we’d forget that at least a third of the guests at this party had already died on camera. Some had actually returned as ghosts for holiday episodes, or donated organs to other characters who were also at that party, but somehow they had been found in the basement of Dr. David Hayward, who had been keeping them alive this whole time—even the ones who had died when he would have been, like, eleven years old. Who cares who gets shot when there’s a guy in town who can cure death? (You guys, I might still be holding on to some anger and frustration about the way All My Children ended.)
The pop culture of the mid- to late 1970s had no interest in entertaining children, which worked out beautifully because I had no particular interest in being a child. I was a sponge for all the music, TV, and movies I could get my eyes and ears on, and even the silly shit left a mark forever. Here are a few of the reasons I can’t hold down a regular job.
Grease, The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
I begged for and received the soundtrack to Grease (a movie I had seen and not understood) in the summer of 1978 and swiftly went about the business of learning every single word, which required me to stop my father in the middle of his lawn mowing and ask, “What’s a tit?” Grease was a pretty filthy soundtrack—much filthier than the presence of a pre-“Physical” Olivia Newton-John would suggest—and while it may have worried my parents to hear me singing “she’s a real pussy-wagon” and “get your filthy paws off my silky drawers,” what really should have had them concerned was such early, prolonged exposure to Stockard Channing.
The Carol Burnett Show
If subtlety had been invented in the mid-1970s, it did not get through the doors of CBS Television City. Carol and the gang were turned all the way up all of the time, which for a child’s first exposure to sketch comedy is actually perfect. They did show-length parodies of Mildred Pierce and Gone With the Wind—movies I had not seen—and yet I ate it up. Could Harvey Korman have pulled it together once in a while? Sure. But it was the first time I saw grown-ups goofing off in an effective, efficient way, and I wanted in. (Honorable mention goes to Cher. In the early ’70s, we said to Cher, “Listen: we know that you have a lovely, husky singing voice and a body for Bob Mackie gowns, but can you also do broad comedy?” And she said: “You know what? Let’s find out together.”)
“Hot Stuff”—Donna Summer
Children don’t really get euphemism—sexual euphemism, particularly. So when this song came out, and Donna Summer was on the radio pleading for some hot stuff baby this evening, I assumed she was asking for a soothing bowl of clam chowder. I thought: Donna Summer is enthusiastic about a hearty soup, and she doesn’t care who knows it. As with most truths you learn in adulthood, this one really disappointed.
“Lay Down Sally”—Eric Clapton
What I loved about this one was the emotional bait and switch Eric plays with Sally. He spends most of the song begging her to stay the night, and then once he’s convinced her, he’s all: “Don’t you ever leave?” Man, isn’t that adulthood right there, I thought. Just when you think you know where you stand with someone, they toss you right out on your ass. And then an older kid in the neighborhood set me straight. It’s more like: “Don’t you ever leave,” like, “Keep staying here, the way I’ve been telling you to do,” which is pretty straightforward, as love messages go. Basic.
“Same Old Lang Syne”—Dan Fogelberg
The first 45 I ever bought. It’s about a guy who runs into his old lover in the frozen foods section, and they reminisce and lie about how happy they are over a six-pack of beer in the backseat of her car. I want to say it’s Christmas Eve, but maybe that’s just my memory adding more drama. Then he gets out and she drives off into the night and the snow turns into rain and nobody gets what they want and now Dan Fogelberg is dead. I was nine. This song posited adulthood as a series of disappointments I couldn’t wait to grow up and face.
“I’ve Never Been to Me”—Charlene
In which a dissolute woman bothers some lady on a bench and launches unbidden into the story of her life. She’s seen it all: she’s been to the Isle of Greece, she’s sipped champagne on a yacht, she’s done it with a priest—outside on someone’s lawn, even. Charlene has been there and back. And in the middle of the song, she stops singing entirely and just starts talking to the poor lady, who by now I imagine has driven off, with Charlene following on foot: “You know what love is?” she asks, and we know she’s going to tell her: “Love is that husband you fought with this morning, the same one you’re going to make love with tonight,” she says. Charlene is dropping some truth bombs, and, not knowing many Charlenes—or many grown-ups, for that matter—I assumed she was Charlene Tilton, famous at the time for her work as loose cannon Lucy Ewing on Dallas (and for being a room-temperature mess in the front rows of music awards shows with her then-husband Johnny Lee). And then she gets back to singing, this time about the unborn children who might have made her complete, and my mother would tsk and say “Oh, for God’s sake,”—O, fer Gad’s seek—and change the channel because we are Catholic, and abortion in pop music is not going to fly. But such drama! If the people in my subdivision seemed to have it all together, Charlene was coming the fuck apart, and I wanted to listen again and again.
“Magic Man”—Heart
This song has it all: passion, poetry, that synth break in the middle that makes you feel like you’re on a spaceship. Plus it came out right in that 1970s moment when cults were at their peak, so I could imagine that it was about some mysterious figure in a white robe who came into the Wilson sisters’ lives and hypnotized them, permanently transforming them into pure beings of rock and roll by sheer fo
rce of will and charisma. That guy could be around any corner. He could mesmerize you, too.
Now of course I realize it’s probably just about getting finger-blasted.
This is one of my most vivid memories from childhood: I’m in the backseat of the family station wagon. My father is driving, telling my mother about something that happened in the office that day. He’s a gesticulator, my dad, and he’s really going to town on this story. His face is serious as the tale unfolds—something about spreadsheets? Portfolios? I don’t know—yet my mother’s face beams. She is smiling like he is telling her she’s just won a cash prize of a hundred thousand dollars.
“What?” my father asks her.
“What what?”
“Why are you smiling? This story isn’t all that funny.”
“No, I know. I just don’t want them to think you’re yelling at me.” And she gestures around us at the other cars on Highway 40.
In Catholic St. Louis, it is customary to put on a show for the rest of the world. You need to tell everyone around you that you are normal, and that everything is just fine. It is vital to keep up appearances, even for strangers, who, like you, are traveling at seventy miles an hour on a major highway.
You don’t want to stand out. You want to be just like everyone else, maybe just a little bit better.
You for sure do not want to be what I was starting to figure out I was.
Gayness was a thing that people recognized by the early 1980s, but if there were any actual gay people among us, they kept it to themselves. Homosexuality was no longer illegal and underground, but it wasn’t cool yet; Neil Patrick Harris was a toddler. We were in between, where gay people were mostly just there to be the butt of a massive percentage of the jokes in movies and on television and in real life, and not only could you not point this out or act like it bothered you, you did your best to avoid the word “butt” altogether, because the way you said it might give you away.
“Gay” was the preferred put-down among boys at the time, as it had been for years and would continue to be for many more, and it was a bit of a catchall. While on paper it was very simple—anything that is cool is not gay, everything else is—in practice it was extremely complicated. Here is an incomplete list of things you could do to get yourself called a faggot as an American thirteen-year-old boy in 1984:
Display enthusiasm
Wear your backpack over both shoulders
Walk faggy (precise definition is fluid)
Wear argyle socks
Use big words
Not care much for The A-Team
Say the answers to things in class
Have a female friend
Know the words to Matthew Wilder’s “Break My Stride”
Smile
In this environment, if you do not fit into the narrow, ever-shifting definition of what is masculine and therefore acceptable, life becomes a constant, exhausting effort to stay on what you are told is the right side of the cool/gay divide. You study older, more secure-looking boys for cues on how to talk, how to walk, how to yawn and cough and laugh, so that you will be acceptable. You make a hundred thousand micro-decisions about your behavior before lunch. You never exactly get it—you can’t wear coolness and masculinity as effortlessly as the boys who are born with it—but you can fool some people. And when you can’t, when you hear things like “man up” or “quit being such a faggot,” you don’t recognize these comments as bullying, you take them as you would notes on a performance. I should be better at not being me, you think. Thanks for the reminder.*1
To be a young gay kid is to work around the clock. You start to feel feelings and you immediately get to work telling yourself that you’re not feeling them, or that they’re a phase, or that they’re motivated by some part of you that’s not the real you—a curiosity that’s spun out of control, a sickness, a demon, if you’re religiously inclined.
And the work never ends. The foreman never rings the dodo bird, you do not slide down the tail of the dinosaur, you never get to shout “Yabba-dabba-doo.” You work and you never stop working and you never tell anyone, even yourself, that you’re working.
You develop crushes, but you don’t recognize them as crushes. You just find yourself drawn to that boy who talks and walks and yawns/coughs/laughs like he’s never had to think about how to. You think about him all the time. You want to be him and you want to be with him, but you immediately tell yourself that you don’t. You feel love and then you feel shame for feeling love. You pretend none of this is going on, because if anyone suspects that something is wrong, they might figure out exactly what is wrong, and then it’s all over. So you push it down. You push it down and you smile, but not too much, because, again, smiling’s pretty gay.
You put yourself through this process over and over, in the years when you are learning how to be a human being, and you get so good at it that it becomes involuntary. It’s like a computer process, and like computers, you’re getting faster and more efficient. You get so good and so quick that after a while you don’t even notice yourself doing it.
The process really got moving for me in seventh grade, the year all the boys from my class got dropped into a new all-male Thunderdome of testosterone, an all-boys Catholic school called Priory that was run by Benedictine monks from England. Each form—grades seven through twelve were forms one through six there, because of the Britishness—contained fifty boys in jackets and ties and khakis, learning Latin by memorization. The “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video, without Bonnie Tyler as headmistress.
By form one, most of my male friends had magically transformed into young men, seemingly all at once. They filled out, grew taller, gained confidence. In our free periods, about forty-five of the boys in form one would run outside to tackle and throw balls at one another. The rest of us would do things like talk at length about Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video.
The clubhouse for those who preferred Culture Club to contact sports was the Candy Store, the snack window overlooking the Junior House field. We volunteered to work the register because they had a boom box with a cassette player in there, and for us, proximity to a cassette player was crucial. Me, Ned, Derek, Tim, and Tom, and Phong No, the wildly effeminate Korean American kid. We played Duran Duran. We played Wham! We taped the Hot 9 at 9 off KHTR every night, and then played it in the room and debated each song’s merits. (Stevie Wonder’s success with “I Just Called to Say I Love You” felt unearned; he was coasting.)
The roughhousers and horseplayers would come to our window, hair slicked to foreheads with sweat, Toughskins grass-stained. They’d order their Andy Capp’s Hot Fries and Vess Whistle Orange Sodas and little tiny powdered doughnuts. (Phong No would insist on proper nomenclature when orders were placed. “Gimme the little tiny powdered doughnuts,” a kid would say. “The Donette Gems…?” Phong corrected, with just a trace of his mother’s accent: Donette-ah Gems-u? “Yeah,” the kid would concede. “Gimme the Donette Gems.”)
It was in this room that we witnessed the Thompson Twins’ commercial breakthrough (“Is he saying ‘Hold my cold Italian heart’ at the end there? Are they Italian?” Tim asked, and we all agreed they look more British. Scottish, maybe). It was here that we compared Swatches (while the all-black one was impossible to read, it was preferable to the white one with the polka-dots, which showed dirt almost immediately). It was here on Monday mornings that we would relive Friday Night Videos, which we all watched and recorded and studied like our Latin conjugations (what exactly was this underground lair to which Simon Le Bon descended in the “Union of the Snake” video? In “Dance Hall Days,” were Wang Chung saying they were “cool on Christ”? How would one do the Neutron Dance? What did it all mean?).
Michael Jackson was everything back then, and the strangest thing about him was that his speaking voice seemed sort of high. To have had the pop perfection that was singles four through six of Thriller—to review: “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Human Nature,” and �
�P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” (single number seven, “Thriller,” uncoupled from its truly epic and groundbreaking video, is garbage and in your heart you know it)—as the soundtrack of early puberty and entry into junior high is a privilege for which I am grateful every day of my life. I mean, some poor suckers got Alannah Myles.
We Candy Store Boys threw ourselves and our energy into pop culture, which, as luck would have it, was going through its most stealthily gay phase ever. Boy George performed in dresses and Annie Lennox in suits. George Michael urged us to wake him up before we went-went, and he did so in shorts that were very small, and when he promised us it would be warm in bed, his eyes rolled back in his head in sheer gay ecstasy. Nobody was out of the closet. The gay was all in the subtext, which most kids missed entirely, though in many cases we could go ahead and round it up to text. (I mean, “Relax don’t do it when you wanna come”?) We unconsciously responded to it.
We also consciously responded to it. Over Donette Gems in the Candy Store the day after Madonna’s “Material Girl” world-premiered on MTV, Derek and I relived every moment. I said, “He sends her these flowers, which she doesn’t even want,” and Derek said, “And then suddenly she’s on this movie set.”
“Right, with this gown.”
“Yeah, and all these cute guys…”
Derek could stop time, too.
“…I mean cool-looking guys on either side of her, anyway, it’s a great video, right?” and we just looked at each other for a long few seconds, him silently mortified, my eyes saying, “I’ve got you now, and if you cross me I will destroy you, and also which one’s your favorite? Mine’s the one two from her left.”