joe.

Why can’t I just write about the cat, or the boyfriend, or how I am getting my head waxed and going to the beach, or anything just bland and safe and mundane…  Why does it have to be these topics?

“Well, you write because you care,” responds my father, “and you care because it matters.”. 

There you go.  Because it matters.  Hmm.  So simple; I should’ve known that.  I guess sometimes wisdom does come with age.  Sometimes.  There are, however, grown men who have less wisdom than most boys I’ve known.  But underage gay boys share a scary love that terrifies some men, especially when that love is celebrated and not hidden like a dirty English school boy secret.  Some men are positively beside themselves with rage that such a love might dare to speak its name in a widely published glossy mag that claims — quite correctly — to tell the truth. 

Boys are attractive in their own right, regardless of the beholder’s orientation or age.  That notion alone is difficult for the sex-phobic American culture to accept.  Much less acceptable are any efforts made by anyone to validate and normalize the sexual attraction felt between some teenage boys. 

To the boys:.  Whatever you are feeling is right and good.  I don’t care what it is.  There are a lot of bad men out there who are terrified of boys who love other boys.  If you dare to love another boy, those men will hate you for no reason other than that.  Many are very respected, and powerful.  One of the bad men, unfortunately, might be your father.  Or he might be your minister, your rabbi, your teacher, your bus driver, or your scoutmaster.  He might be all of the above.  But if you hear it nowhere else, then hear it now; your so-called ‘bad feelings’ are not bad, in fact they are good.  Supress nothing.  Deny nothing.  Accept everything about yourself as precious (yeah, that’s right — precious) and good, and wholesome, and true.  These things will lead you to integrity, deep happiness, and freedom. 

I had a lover when I was in the fourth grade.  His name was David.  We had terrific, fabulous, wonderful, intense, red-hot sex, even though neither of us was yet able to ejaculate.  But sex is not all we did.  Mostly we were just boys who did boy-stuff together; camping, Boy Scouts, drawing (he had talent), watching TV or just hanging-out.  In fact, David was so flamboyantly femme — and I, so homophobic — that I would have avoided being seen with him, except that we were lovers, and we each had few other friends.  And because he was nice to me. 

I wanted to be like David — or, more accurately, I wanted to be like me without all the pretenses and self-consciousness.  David was certainly not ignorant of the straight boys’ contempt, but he never once let them dictate his behavior or cramp his femme ways; he met every intimidator toe to toe and he never once backed down.  David, the queen, was more man than me.  From the perspective of the closet I was in then I could not have recognized how much I looked up to David.  But despite the swish, the lisp, the limp wrist and all, David was what I wanted to be — free. 

In the mid-sixties there was no way for me — or for David and me — to be gay and okay.  There was a lesbian (I think) teacher who was our champion and our patron, who did make it okay to be gay, at least in our immediate vicinity.  For a school trip to a museum, she had, perhaps on her own initiative, made arrangements to support the friendship of these two lonely boys, neither of whom had ever been able to make friends with others before.  So with half the elementary school assembled to receive the rules for the class trip, Miss Williams announced that she had gotten special permission — from the Principal and the other teachers — to have me come over to David’s bus to ride with him. 

With her help, it would have been okay to be gay, except I was just too afraid to acknowledge my own affection for my loverboy.  I learned that cowardice from men.  I stayed on my own bus. 

If you ever see a tall forty-something blonde named David Ackley, originally from Northboro Massachusetts, please say hello to him for me.