In this photo, you’ll notice I had all of four teeth. For some reason, my adult teeth took forever to grow in, leaving me with the thickest lisp possible; thus, I thounded like the gayeth little boy in the whole thcool. It also didn’t help that I wore that same mock turtleneck every day, like it was a full-time job. Things got so bad that my school sent me to speech class for three years—a class they created just for me.
I remember an obsession with swords at this time in my life. Why? So I could pretend to be She-Ra, of course. Never He-Man. But nobody could make out the fact that I was saying, “By the power of Grayskull!” To this day, my family still teases me about shouting, “Baw-dee-aw-nees of Graythkull!” In retrospect, it all worked out really well. I grew up from a little lisping gay boy into a big gay man.