"YOU BE YOU"...I MEAN IT.

I have rocks in my head today. It’s a good thing.

 

These rocks are the colorful creations of children’s book writer and illustrator Linda Kranz. She takes flat rocks and paints them so they transform to vibrant fish which remind me of Mexican folk art. The fish illustrate some of her picture books. 

 

As a school principal, I got in the tradition of kicking off each school year by reading a picture book during the first day assembly and then working with staff to create a week’s worth of activities linked to that book. One of those books was Only One You by Kranz. It’s all about celebrating individuality, the lifelong learning journey and make the world a better place. (It makes a great graduation present, a nice complement to the multiple copies the cap and gown wearer receives of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go!)

 

Kranz followed Only One You with a companion picture book, You Be You. It’s sparser in terms of words and more cliché in terms of text. (“Some fish swim up. Some fish swim down. Some fish swim quiet. Some fish swim loud.”) I prefer the former book, but I credit You Be You with helping the title’s familiar message stick. We’re all different and that’s okay. For the past decade, I’ve often heard people spout the sentiment and I’m so glad it’s out there in a world where social media holds up influencers and selfies seem to have morphed from self-expression to a de facto ranking of people’s appearance. Shirtless buff guy gets thousands of likes while “Average” Joe gets seven with shirt on, three without.

 

The book gives me a visual image to go with the expression. Somehow painted fish make it real. I can say that “you be you” has done wonders for my outlook. Partly on account of my personality and partly due to the time when I came out as gay, I grew up extraordinarily critical of not just myself but others as well. I beat myself up over every one of my perceived flaws…and I perceived so many! It may have been a dysfunctional self-defense mechanism. To quote Taylor Swift’s song “Mean:”

You have pointed out all my flaws again

As if I don’t already see them.

 

Stick and stones couldn’t hurt me if I hurt myself first. I think so many gay men of my age bracket grew up with loads of self-hate and crap absorbed from all the haters we encountered in school, on playgrounds and sometimes even in our own families. Ideally, we would have lifted ourselves up, individually and as a community. Isn’t that the basis of Pride? But what I observed in gay bars, which seemed to be ground zero for all-things gay, was gays putting down gays. Just like our high school nemeses, we lifted ourselves up by putting others down. It was survival of the cutest/hottest/buffest.

 

Putdowns were woven into our campy humor. Long before “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” we were reading each other in jokes told at some unsuspecting patron’s expense.

“Oh, check out that tired, old queen.”

“Eww. Look at the twink over there.”

“She’s just a big, ol’ bottom.”

“That one shouldn’t wear a tank top. Her best hope is covering up…everything.”

 

Yuk, yuk.

 

Yuck.

 

Don’t believe me? Watch any version of “The Boys in the Band.” The characters are insufferable. Even listen to the banter between Will and Jack on “Will & Grace.” I love the show, but there was a running joke over Will being overweight. I may have been overly sensitive as someone with anorexia but there was no basis in fact for the putdown. That was the point. It reflected how harsh gays were in assessing their bodies and, yes, the bodies of their peers. 

 

I mastered this kind of “humor.” Sometimes I relied on it. If I could dismiss a handful of gay men in the bar, I might feel I belonged. I might have felt worthy (or worthier than them at least), despite the fact the models/actors/caterers of West Hollywood looked right through me. 

 

Critiquing others carried over to other places in my life. While my car idled at a stoplight, I might glance at someone in the crosswalk or popping out of Starbucks and I’d think something harsh about a mistaken mascara application, a misstep in choice of footwear or a hairstyle from the “wrong” decade. The assessments came easily. Joan Rivers, the “fashion police” and “Ab Fab” were also part of my pre- and prime gay years. 

 

It was a psychiatrist who made note—repeatedly—of how harsh I was about myself. My self-hate was deep, intense, unwavering. I couldn’t shift my frame of mind. What I felt was real and indisputable. 

 

A medical diagnosis paved the way for a shift from pervasive negativity. After a decades-long battle with what I thought was an eating disorder, I was finally diagnosed in late 2017. It came as a relief. The assessment meant access to supports and I spent all of 2018 and 2019 pursuing and receiving treatment. The interventions came too late. My behaviors are entrenched. As of 2023, things are status quo. I’m a functioning anorexic. 

 

The one silver lining from all the time I spent in programs was that one course I took was called “Self-Compassion.” On the first day, I was not impressed. My critical brain dismissed and tore up everything the facilitators said, every activity we did and every response from others in the program. It felt too woo-woo, too Oprah. And yet, I found myself relenting each passing week. I went from going through the motions as I’d done with every other group and individual intervention to relenting and coming to find purpose in imagery that calmed my brain and rooted me to positive places and people from my past. I caught some of my negative self-talk and shut it down instead of letting it snowball.

 

A law school classmate once said to me during a mixer our first year, “You have a lot of quirks.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. I got the impression our ten-minute conversation exhausted him. He excused himself—more alcohol, a much-needed escape—and we never had another conversation during our three years of study. All the ways I’m different used to be handicaps, things that gave me a permanent home on the Island of the Misfit Toys. Now I think of them and roll my eyes, sometimes even smile. “You be you.” Sometimes that “pride” concept feels real. 

 

I’m prouder still that I’ve shaken off that tendency to critique passersby. Whatever the body, the clothing, the hairstyle, I let it be…as I should have done all along. If I catch myself leaning toward throwing shade (in my head), I cut myself off and mentally nod to the person in orange Crocs: “You be you.” 

 

To be sure, I have lapses. Facial tattoos and Botoxed lips are particularly challenging. (You be less you?) I continue to be a work in progress. I hope “reading” people fades from gay culture. It’s the opposite of flattering. Considering so many of us felt rejected and disconnected at times in our lives when we yearned to be accepted and loved for all that we are, “You Be You” should be embraced and practiced in our community as much or more than waving the rainbow flag and revering our divas du jour. I’m always going to be TeamOlivia but I have no problem with queers who are TeamMadonna, TeamGaga, TeamKylie or TeamSam. It’s all good. You be you.

"BARBIE" FATIGUE

So apparently there’s some movie about a doll coming out this week. Seven-year-old me would be very, very excited. Seven-year-old me would have known to suppress that excitement and go back to sorting my hockey cards which I spent all my allowances on—a photo, a bunch of player stats and piece of gum that looked and tasted like pink cardboard. That was the only pink a young boy could indulge in. 

 

For months now, we’ve been inundated with “Barbie” hype, the Warner Bros. marketing team sparing no dime and no tie-in to get us psyched to see it. When the trailer came out, every gay guy I follow on Twitter had to tweet about it. (Likes matter.) I may be confused due to the incessant Barbie blitz, but I think there was a day or two when you could photoshop yourself into a Barbie doll box and/or give your face that coveted, tanned plasticized look. So much cheaper than Botox and facelifts.

 

Don’t mistake me for a sourpuss. I’m fine with a “Barbie” movie. Like most gay men, I’m even finer with Ryan Gosling in a “Barbie” movie. Those abs, that snark. Much better than sitting through his attempts to sing in a musical. I don’t know anyone other than me who was gaga over “La La Land,” but my saying his voice was better than Pierce Brosnan’s in “Mamma Mia” is not high praise. I assume the Barbie movie’s PG-13 rating is artificially inflated from a G rather than edited down from an R so hip Gen Xers and all those gens that follow don’t think it’s kiddie fare for American Girl doll lovers. How much sexual content can there be when neither Barbie nor Ken has private parts?

 

When I was growing up, the closest I got to dolls was eyeing my sister’s collection. Sometimes she’d have a group of girls over and they’d show up with dolls for an afternoon of dolly drama. I was known to spy from the hallway which seemed more fun that taking my baseball glove outside and wondering what I was supposed to do with it. 

Thankfully, whenever I hovered near Barbie base camp, I was constantly told, Don’t touch. Being as I was a middle child who reveled in being a pest, I touched. I took. I didn’t have time to fit Barbie into different dresses or accessorize her with purses and high heels. Sure, I wanted to. I settled for the thrill of hearing my sister and her friends screaming my name. It was their tiresome tactic, designed to get my mother to intervene. Both my sister and brother matched my level of teasing with their reliance on tattle-taling. Just as I learned to hide my gayness—after I learned what that was—I masked my doll envy. I was a terror rather than a Tinker Bell. Just touching Barbie gave me a lift I couldn’t explain; the fact it never evolved to intricate doll play also made me inexplicably sad. I wanted to play with the girls. I wanted to be a girl. But no one talked about that. I was being ridiculous.

 

When Aqua released “Barbie Girl” in the ’90s, it was a huge hit. The dancefloor filled whenever it came on at Odyssey, the Vancouver gay bar I’d go to back in the day. (It’s gone. Same with The Royal, Denman Station and The Dufferin. Thanks, Grindr.) Still, the song did not suddenly make the Barbie doll hip to anyone older than a tween. It was a bouncy novelty, but it wasn’t an overt attempt to assert Barbie’s global domination. In fact, it displeased Barbie’s maker, Mattel, which sued for trademark and copyright infringement in Mattel, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc. (Mattel even owned a trademark for the color “Barbie pink” (Pantone 219D, color coordinates: #DA1884…the essential sort of gibberish for getting a TM).) Mattel alleged the song damaged Barbie’s reputation since she’s referred to as a blonde bimbo and sexualized (“Kiss me here, touch me there, hanky-panky,” along with other bland, suggestive references, typical of the average pop song). In the typical tit-for-tat arena of legal maneuverings, MCA counterclaimed, contending that Mattel defamed the company by comparing it to a bank robber. Shudders! Ultimately, the case was dismissed, the judge straying from legalese and opining, “The parties are advised to chill.” The decision came almost five years after the song’s release. Like most parodies, it had gone cold by then, relegated to the Land of Forgotten Ditties, bunkmates with Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” and Weird Al’s “Eat It.”

 

Since I only had fleeting moments of Barbie bonding during my childhood, I resorted to finding my own play figures. There was a small window of time in which Matchbox cars subbed in, but pretending they talked was lamer than an episode of “Knight Rider” or “My Mother the Car.” Enter: Red Rose Tea. No, I didn’t play with tea bags. Let’s not make my youth that tragic. Instead, the tea company included a small ceramic animal figurine in its tea boxes. People started collecting them. I spent hours playing with a zoo’s worth of precious beasts, letting my beaver chat up my giraffe, sometimes using one of my Matchbox cars to transport animals from North America to Africa. That’s right, my cars floated and flew when they weren’t driving off my desk which served as a precarious cliff.

 

So, yeah. Playing with dolls was not okay, but my parents let the figurine fun go. What could they say? They’d fostered it via family viewings of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” every Sunday night. I honestly think all that play contributed to my becoming a vegetarian years later. I was a veritable Dr. Doolittle. I talked to the animals! How could I turn around and eat them? 

 

I’ve been waiting for some pushback over the “Barbie” movie. Perhaps Warner Bros. has too. Controversy, after all, is good for ticket sales. Maybe they need to YouTube a stage full of drag queens, donning their own interpretations of Barbie. Maybe one queen needs to have a dildo she pulls out of her Barbie pink (TM) purse or read the picture book, William’s Doll, to a four-year-old planted in the audience. That’ll rile the rabid anti-wokers (who fail to see they’re a major cog in the reviled Cancel Culture). “Boycott ‘Barbie’!” Kid Rock will shoot up a pile of dollies. The three people who hadn’t heard of the movie will get their tickets. (Pity the poor theater owner who doesn’t get to screen the film.)

 

Wasn’t there a time when there was a societal Barbie backlash? Didn’t we turn against vapidness and glamorized whiteness? Didn’t we blame that damn doll for helping Paris Hilton rise to fame? That has to be worth at least a few demerits. I haven’t seen any feminist outcry. Part of it is on account the film is directed and co-written by a woman, the accomplished Greta Gerwig. I presume there’s a wink-wink to Barbie’s glamor, a reincarnation of those old Enjoli perfume commercials with a feel-good message about how a woman can have it all (except for equal pay…let’s be reasonable).  

 

I’ll be glad when the movie finally rolls into theaters Friday, Barbie taking her place in Barbie-pink(TM) convertible Corvette, all my gay followers on Twitters rushing to gush or gut the flick based on whichever way the court of popular opinion blows. I’ll watch it at some point. I don’t feel an urgency to be the among the first. Heck, I might even wait until it finally makes it to the only streaming channel I wish to pay for. 

 

Fun fluff, I hope. Perhaps it’ll be filled with stinging barbs about global warming, galoots who salivate over conspiracy theories and America’s devotion to gun culture (a cameo by GI Joe?). Profound “Barbie”? Relax, I didn’t get my hands anywhere near the script. 

 

Frankly, I just want the marketing blitz to stop. I’m passing on Barbie ice cream, a Barbie backpack from The Gap and a possible Airbnb stay at Barbie’s Malibu DreamHouse. I don’t need an Instagram boost that badly. (Follow me @gregoryjameswalters! I’m almost at four dozen followers!) I think the needless Nicki Minaj & Ice Spice song, “Barbie World,” with its heavy sampling of “Barbie Girl” has already fizzled. I suspect Burger King’s Barbie Combo (burger with pink sauce (eww!) and a strawberry milkshake) won’t spread beyond its base in Brazil. 

 

I’ll let “Barbie” be. If anyone wants to get me really excited, tell me there’s a Red Rose Tea animal figurine movie in the works. I see it as a raucous action-adventure film, with compelling commentary on endangered species, veganism and, yes, global warming. I googled and got nothing. Go figure.

 

 

"HI HONEY, I'M HOMO" (Book Review)

Subtitle: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture

By Matt Baume

 

(Smart Pop Books, 2023)

 

Once upon a time, I lived in front of the TV set, that big old blocky thing with three main channels and a few others if the TV aerial was having a good day. For an anxious, introverted kid, this was a great form of play, no ball skills required, no need to brush up on and quote hockey stats. I stuck with my imaginary friends who were fleshed out with voices and images inside the box in the den—Peter Brady (a curly-haired middle child like me—and cute too, though I was a little confused about why that mattered), Scooby Doo, Gilligan, a Jeannie in a bottle and, most of all, Mary Richards. The ’70s was a golden TV decade for me. But then, so were the ’80s and ’90s. Television viewing offered safe exposures to humans, along with animated talking dogs, an alien from Ork and a banjo-playing frog puppet. 

 

Since I ate up TV trivia more eagerly than goals and assists for Guy Lafleur and much (but definitely not all) of my childhood confusion turned out to be about the fact I was a nascent gay, I grabbed a copy of Hi Honey, I’m Homo! Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture when I saw it on display at The Strand’s flagship bookstore in New York City. Even better, its author Matt Baume was scheduled for a book talk the next night. I sat in the front row—unabashedly outing my TV geekdom along with sixty other attendees. 

 

I’ve now had the time to finish the book, carefully guarding my consumption, limiting myself to a chapter per day. (Funny how my parents never monitored my TV time.) First, a small quibble with the title. I don’t love the main title, but I suppose it’s an homage to family sitcoms and the breadwinning father’s return after a day at the office. It’ll do. The subtitle, however, should be tweaked by deleting “Specials” since the book focuses on a dozen sitcoms, appearing chronologically from “Bewitched” to “Modern Family,” each allotted a chapter.

 

Baume does an excellent job weaving American political and cultural history from the time that each sitcom ran, to help show how gay references on TV comedies reflected society and, sometimes, were ahead of their time, perhaps even prodding America toward greater understanding and acceptance. If sometimes in the first half of the book it seems a stretch to devote an entire chapter to a show like “Alice” with a single gay-themed episode or “Barney Miller” having a recurring character appear on eight episodes out of a 170-episode series run, it’s because it was that difficult to get any sort of gay content on network television. In addition to gay culture still being closeted everywhere but the biggest cities, there were TV censors, the Family Viewing Hour and grassroots conservative organizations such as the National Federation for Decency that threatened boycotts and pressured advertisers. A television producer invited migraines when flirting with putting a gay character in the cast of “Soap” or by choosing to have a drag character named Beverly LaSalle on three episodes of “All in the Family.” Fortunately, the creators of these shows were committed to being topical and edgy.   

 

Baume had to make choices that other TV nerds like myself can quibble with. I would have gone with a single episode of “Mary Tyler Moore” over “Alice.” I loved both shows but the MTM depiction is more positive than the “Alice” episode wherein the titular character spins on the notion that gay men are pedophiles as she wonders whether she should allow her son to camp overnight with a gay man (and her macho, seemingly straight diner boss, Mel). I also found Baume’s gay interpretation of an episode of “Dinosaurs,” a show I’ve never seen, to be unconvincing. The Ice Age raptor son is going against parental and societal values by wanting to be vegan. Parallels can be made but there is no evidence the writers were touching on gayness. I believe the show’s writers simply thought it would be funny—and different—to have a hardcore carnivore go against his family and declare he fancied broccoli, but this really seems like standard situational comedy, a teen trying something that wigs out the parents.

 

I can’t figure out why Baume didn’t include a chapter about the Tony Randall-Swoosie Kurtz sitcom, “Love, Sidney,” which aired forty-four episodes over two seasons from 1981-1983 and, according to Wikipedia “was the first program on American television to feature a gay character as the central character.” (Randall’s Felix Unger on TV’s “The Odd Couple” (1970-1975) also came off as gay to many viewers based on neatnik, effeminate stereotypes.) 

It’s also a mystery why Showtime’s “Brothers” (1984-1989), about three brothers, one of whom is gay, gets short shrift. That sitcom illustrates how the burgeoning cable channels could take more chances which, ultimately, moved the bar for the major networks as well. Furthermore, the entire chapter on “Cheers” feels like a cheap attempt to attract readers being as it was such a ratings success. The show’s gay content is scant whereas another ratings juggernaut, “Roseanne,” was far more gay-friendly, featuring Sandra Bernhard as a bisexual friend and Martin Mull as Roseanne’s boss, Leon, who eventually marries Fred Willard’s attorney character, Scott. (These supporting characters, while groundbreaking, didn’t make up for the fact that neither Roseanne’s sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalfe), or daughter Darlene (played by lesbian actress Sara Gilbert) weren’t written as queer, but that’s part of the discussion Baume could have fleshed out.) I'm wondering if Baume or his publisher nixed the "Roseanne" chapter since Roseanne Barr has fallen so epically...and not on account of her anthem singing.

 

One thing I tired of in Hi Honey was all the repetition. The negative depiction of homosexuality on “Marcus Welby, M.D.” appears in four separate parts of the book. An account of people protesting outside the offices of “Soap” is mentioned verbatim in the book’s opening vignette and then a hundred pages later. It seems incidents of repetition are an editorial choice based on an assumption that some readers will skip chapters about shows they didn’t know or like, but this dummies things down (and offers annoying moments) for people like me who opt to read from cover to cover. Rather than harping on “Marcus Welby,” I’d have loved some elaboration on an almost random reference on page 101 about the fact ABC employed an on-staff psychic named Beverly Dean. Yes, things were kooky in the ’70s! 

 

Sigh. Baume’s book is still interesting for this TV aficionado. When the gay content is more apparent, giving him more to work with, the chapters are much more interesting. The chapter on “Ellen” is furtive ground, even if I wanted more in-depth analysis of the clunky yet earnest season that followed Ellen Morgan outing herself to Laura Dern’s Susan and, via microphone, to other airport passengers. I would have loved a tub of popcorn as I gobbled down Baume’s accounts of “Will & Grace” and “Modern Family.” 

    

Television has come a long way in its portrayals of queer characters. Perhaps today’s awkward, nascent gay boys have more opportunities to understand their identities by catching content so accessible on phone and laptop screens.