Jack Tripper, Charlie Brown, The Paper Rose and Me, part 1

by Eric Franklin Crow

Preface: One of the most momentous years of the 20th century was 1969. Major events from that year include Woodstock, the Moon landing, the last public performance of the Beatles, the creation of ARPA Computer Network, the first temporary heart transplant, Judy Garland's death and the Stonewall riots (though her death was not the cause.) I was born on March 3rd that year, and if I had it to do over again, I wouldn't choose any other time to be born. So in the spirit of Stonewall and Gay Pride Month, I'd like to tell you my coming out story.

I love to regale others of my coming out story. We usually have that day in October to tell our story, but in the age of social media, it has to be super-condensed and just long enough to grab our attention. Truth be told, that's the reason the New Horizons For Fifty blog exists--it's a place for me to share all my long thoughts that I haven't already written about. And so I take this moment to share a longer version of my coming out story. Because coming out isn't just about the moments that lead right up to the moment of realization. No, there are many incidents that lead up to it, and those incidents often involve fear of being found out, bullying, isolation and the like. (Religion and the church always has and always will play a major role in a person's coming out process, it is that ingrained into our souls as children.)

The only part of coming out that happens in an instant or "overnight" is the moment when the words are first spoken. The rest is a process that can take years or even decades, and because of intersectionality, it is for many the first of many times they will come out. Underneath every person's moment of coming out, there lies a sub-oceanic mountain of drama, guilt, fear, shame, lust, love, happiness, awareness, stigma, AIDS, self-loathing, self-actualization and ultimately self-love. It is from this locus that my experience arises, and I am now going to share that with you. There are no pictures to accompany this article, because I don't want to distract from the imagery of the story. And now, I present to you:

"Jack Tripper, Charlie Brown, The Paper Rose and Me," Part One.

My first experience of seeing a "gay" person on TV was Jack Tripper on Three’s Company. Although he wasn’t really gay, and both Mr. Roper and Mr. Furley were homophobic, the show normalized the subject for me in my kid mind. The lines were blurred between stereotype and camp, and I think I understood this on an implicit level --remember the episode where Jack did drag? Or when he and Larry would play like they were together to get out of a tense situation with a girl or with one of the landlords? Or season 1, episode 3, when Mr. Roper asks Jack to take his niece out on the town, figuring him to be “safe” for his niece. At the end of the show, he apologizes to Jack for said niece throwing herself at Jack. When Chrissy asks, “So does that mean he can stay?”, Mr. Roper responds with the first endorsement for equal protections ever uttered on a prime-time sitcom (six months before the premiere of the landmark sitcom Soap): “of course he can stay. Jack has his rights, just like any other minority.” This would NEVER fly today, I don't think anyone could argue that, but the show's producers knew what they were doing. They were using homosexuality to legitimize all other forms of sexual behavior—a slippery slope, to be sure, but it is what is, and this was how things were done back then. The point in bringing this up was that to me, Jack was cool, and in my eleven year old mind, I wanted to be like Jack.

I started to have feelings for other boys as early as five, and the first crush I had was on a male cousin. I remember wanting a closeness with him that was beyond the familial. I even had a distinct picture of what that closeness looked like in my mind, though I don't think that closeness was sexual in mind, per sé. Outside the family, I remember this closeness with two other boys in Warren, Michigan. One boy, Dave, was pretty much the only boy who befriended me in school. I remember him bringing a copy of Queen's “A Night at the Opera” to class one morning and getting permission from the teacher to play the first two songs from the album (“We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions”). We spent time together doing things boys do, and I spent many an afternoon in his room, and he played one of his other favorite albums—Black Sabbath's “Master of Reality.” That album has “Children of the Grave” on it, which has that infamous “spooky” ending to him. I thought Dave was cool and I was glad to be his friend. Yet, I made the mistake of calling him my “boyfriend” in front of other boys. I naively thought of him as a boy who was also my friend, therefore...“boyfriend.” I knew of no romantic connotation to the word, so I didn't it was wrong to share it. (I'd never thought of it until now, but this incident almost directly coincides with when I first started getting picked on in school.)

The other boy I experienced this with is little more than an ephemeral impulse in my mind now, but one of the most potent childhood memories nonetheless. I was six or seven years old and I think I met him at school. I don't remember his name and I don't remember what he looked like, but I remember liking him a lot and playing with him a lot. Before I knew it, he moved away with his family, and the last time I saw him him was at a playground, on a merry-go-round. I remember him most for his warm spirit. I think this energy reincarnated itself in a Justus, a flaxen-haired boy I had a crush on when I moved out to San Diego in the 80s. This was the first time I ever yearned for another boy, and I would find ways to be close to him, whether playing cards or games or talking. Like the other boys, I like him because he was cool, and because I felt an affinity to him—the affinity of being boys growing up together. 

Outside the family, I remember a dream involving a male school mate in sixth grade with. In the dream, he knocked on the door to my house, and I opened it without wearing any clothing. The dream happened after I ran into him during fifth grade summer vacation, where he offering me a drink of his soda. The other boys at Harding Elementary could have their moments of really going in on me, mostly to establish dominance but also because of some very troubled behaviors I exhibited as a reaction to their behavior towards me, but not Dave. He was tough but gentle, and that was what I admired him for. 

I had three fifth grade teachers. I don't remember my first teacher's name, but if I look back on his build, his beard and his mannerisms, he had “Daddy Bear” written all over him. About a third of the way into the year, he announced that he was leaving (looking back now, I suspect this was because of a corporal punishment incident gone wrong), and on his last day there, I was heartbroken. I didn't want him to go. I really didn't want him to go. So much so that I couldn't hold back my tears, and I broke down in front of the class. I liked him and I admired him, merely because of his strong presence...strong and warm, and I was sad that he had to go, but such is life. 

We had a substitute teacher for a few months until Mrs. Kauritz. She was the teacher who taught me how to sing from my diaphragm, but she also challenged me to let go of being afraid to sing. I'll never forget singing a note and having her press on my diaphragm to squeeze the note out of me. It was because of her that I began to sing the songs of one of my favorite comic strips: Peanuts. Yes, I played Charlie Brown in a play. (I'll bet I make a whole lot more sense to you now, eh?) What does Charlie Brown have to do with an exploration of sexuality? Mostly on the personality end—a character who is a mixture of insecurity and awkwardness mixed with eternal optimism and dreams of being so much more than just the ordinary person others around him want him to be because it would threaten them. If only there was a way to make Charlie Brown into a drag queen. At any rate, I played him in the all-grade talent show and then was featured in the sixth grade performance of “You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown.” The role fit me to a T.

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Warren, Michigan is Detroit's largest suburb, and up until the time my family moved away in 1981, very, very white. 98.2% white as of 1980, to be exact. We had one Asian girl that went to Harding and one First American, and the rest was pale, European stew. My mother always sought to bring as much balance as she could to her children, in terms of race. We grew up watching American Bandstand and Soul Train on Saturday mornings. My mother, like every other person her age, was also into Motown and soul music, and Rick James, James Brown and Jackie Wilson (especially) were her favorite. She made sure we listened to many styles of music, and I also think she wanted her children to be exposed to other black children through religion. I have no recollection of how it came to be, but for five years, my sister and I went to a (Southern) Baptist church in the heart of Detroit. Every Sunday, we would wait outside for the church bus to pick us up, and when we got on, we were the minority. There were a large number of black youths from 5-18, male and female, and we got along because the Sunday school staff forced us to get along. 

We did the usual things you do in Sunday School—Bible lessons, games about the Bible, field trips and so on. I was also into roller skating at the time, and when my church had an outing at a skating rink, I was first in line, though there was no secular music played at this rink—only organ music. I got along with most everybody there, save the Sunday school teacher's son. We got into an argument that almost came into blows, and as a punishment, we were forced to kiss and make up. Full on the lips. So what was meant as punishment was actually my first kiss. 

Out of the blue one Sunday, I was pulled aside and told by this same teacher that I couldn't come back to Sunday school until I got a haircut, because “only sissies wear their hair this long.” I remember answering him obediently, promising I would, but when I got home and told Mom, she didn't like this at all. I was confused, because I'd been going to this church for five years, and no one had ever said a word to me. When Mom found out, she was immediately on guard. She had a history with religion as it was, having been excommunicated from the Presbyterian church she went to for not keeping her tithe. In her eyes, my sister and I faced enough bullying in school and from the neighborhood kids--
why should we have to deal with it at God's house. She and my father had been making plans to move out to California, unbeknownst to me or my sister, and so this was an opportune time for her to pull us out. Years later, she told me about a time she sat in the pews, watching me perform a number for regular church with my school mates, and seeing this same teacher glare at me from the pews, and it struck her funny and made her want to pull us from church that Sunday. In retrospect, I probably could have been a little more on the ball; after all, this was the church where on one Sunday, we all had an explicit picture painted for us of the way that Jimi Hendrix died (he choked on his own vomit, don'cha know?) This was a church where the King James version of the Bible was the only acceptable translation. Sex was strictly for procreation, and no display of affection was ever shown by the clergy. I learned from one of the teachers that when he married his wife, they sealed the deal with a handshake. Hindsight...

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I moved with my family to California in December 1981, and met two more cousins I would get big crushes on, only this time both a boy and girl. My cousin, Jessica, was the fabled flaxen-haired, blue-eyed California teenage girl. She would babysit the lot of us when Gwen and I went over to Aunt Donna's house on weekends. The other was my cousin Tony, this cool, brown-haired boy (see how I was attracted to someone because they were cool to me?) Depending on the day or our moods, we could be best friends one day, butting heads all day the next. I remember an incident when Tony was pissed at me and trying to come after me, but I was bigger than him and had longer limbs; I pinned him to the wall with ease. To see the daggers in his eyes and wonder what he might do if he got loose was something of a thrill for me. A turn-on, actually, at least emotionally. 

I might have been taking on the traits of the people I went to school with. I got an even stronger dose of bullying at the first two schools I went to in San Diego. I would often be the brunt of rude jokes and unwarranted gang-ups; for example, the boys in my sewing class once asked to borrow my pink comb, only to come back from the bathroom five minutes later and tell me, "Here's your comb. We all peed on it." (I don't need it back, thank you). Or like one of the tomboys, who showed me she was boss by holding my head against the desk and telling me so. Or one of the boys trying to fight me in the halls, and then when the teacher asked the class if they saw anything, the boy was behind the teacher shaking his head no for the class. Or one boy just coming up to me and kneeing me where it counts as hard as he could during P.E. I stood eye to eye with him, stone-faced on the outside, in horrible pain on the inside. This all culminates with one of those fabled after-school fights every kid remembers. I got into it with a boy during a class and he said, “I'll see you after school.” Word got around as to place and time, and I didn't really debate it. I went there and went into the fight swinging. He went into it swinging. I was just starting to get the upper hand (or should I say upper fist) when we were pulled apart and then force to spend the day together in detention. We called a truce at the end of the day and became friends, but I didn't return in the fall.

Mix all of this in with my first experience of phys ed with a locker room and public showers. I would catch myself staring at some boy when he was undressing, and I knew I liked what I saw it, but I would never let out my secret, partially because I wasn't ready to share these feelings with others (I was years away, in fact), but this was the early 80s and just not something you could talk about freely. Other than the eye candy in the gym, the things that most attracted me to other boys were all mostly from the neck up, and if the boy had good hair, that was really all I needed. Especially curly, black hair, as in the case of a senior named Salvatore, an stocky, Italian boy that I couldn't help but crush on in front of him. I think he knew. He had to have known there was a reason I would always focus my attention on him and try to be around him whenever possible.

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Thank you for reading. Part Two is coming on Wednesday. 

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