I’ve always liked playing with girls, if not quite in the way Dad was hoping. I feel safer with them, freed from the male constraints of bluster and machismo—especially in the gay world. I belong with the lipstick-for-lunch bunch, and miraculously, I’ve been able to stretch our platonic little gender-blending mix-’em-ups into a lifetime of nonthreatening fun and games.
It’s always been as natural a fit as the gown I got to wear in elementary school for an exciting Greek line dance that bordered on a drag show. When I was a kid, men seemed too busy, too pressured, and too distant to deserve—or want—my company. The ladyfolk got not only to wear clothes with more zing and possibility (appliqués! shoulder pads!), they could have the real fun, like sitting around over Entenmann’s apple crumble cake and dishing everyone on the block and the TV set, in between bowing their heads and murmuring their rosaries. Thanks to forward women like my mother and my aunt who lived upstairs, I learned the cathartic virtues of down and dirty gossip, something I not only turned into a life-affirming pastime, I’ve made a living out of it, complete with free meals and health benefits!
At age ten, I spent a lot of time at that gossip table, the only man for miles, while seizing every other free moment to go to the neighbors’ backyard and play with two preteen sisters, Teresa and Dawn, who took me in like a stray dog. On balmy summer afternoons, we staged fake tea parties and pseudo-TV tapings, and after braiding our dolls’ hair and slathering their heads with glitter, we’d put on even more shows, making the dolls talk and gossip almost as intoxicatingly as we did. I had a feeling this wasn’t accepted behavior for a boy growing up in testosterone-laden Bensonhurst, Brooklyn—in fact, it was screaming out for an intervention-via-straitjacket—but I didn’t have a choice. I could pass for a guy, but not for a straight one, so I knew to avoid the schoolyard across the street, where wry humor got you nowhere unless you also had a mean right hook or a killer kick in the ass. Any extravagant use of my limbs was generally applied to impersonating Diana Ross, not to scoring hoops and tackling people, so I demurred and stayed in the dollhouse where I could get by without anyone looking in and making fun. The girls accepted me, no questions asked, and welcomed my friendly ear and stylish advice. I knew I’d found my place.
Aiming for a little normalcy, I did eventually try to cultivate a straight male friend—Jimmie Boy, a pesky neighborhood squirt who seemed only occasionally scary. We’d lightly bonded a few times on my stoop, so I suggested we go see a movie together (that sounded better to me than stickball), but it turned out we had even less chemistry than my parents. Jimmie Boy was pushing to see the John Wayne Vietnam butchfest, The Green Berets, a bloated flag-waver you couldn’t have dragged me to with a rifle. Instead, I was begging for the foofy Julie Andrews toe tapper Thoroughly Modern Millie, knowing that would be just my cup of period froth—who doesn’t love Carol Channing and Beatrice Lillie? Jimmie Boy looked as horrified as if I’d asked him to dine in the back of a sanitation truck. When I offered to pay, he said fine. We sat there in tense silence as the movie unspooled with all of its spangly costumes and campy humor. Jimmie Boy bolted midway, practically vomiting. I stayed till the end, enthralled, then went right back to the girls.
They might not have liked Millie either, but at least they would have been nice enough to stick it out. Females were my salvation—once my hormonal years hit, me and the ladies, any ladies, clung to one another with an even fiercer desperation. Without the hint of sex—which can make things so messy and complicated, after all—we were able to explore our friendships with a minimum of game playing and an absence of hidden motives. With another guy, the subtext would always be either, “Why doesn’t he want me?” or “I wish he didn’t want me,” but with the girl-gay combo, that’s out of the way and you can just sit down and compare your fingernails. There’s no threat of rejection—we simply don’t like each other that way—so we’re liberated to move on to a more healthy interpersonal ballet without strings attached. Of course, sometimes the girl will develop a friendship-paralyzing crush on the gay, but that’s when you simply move on to another, less complicated fag hag. There are plenty out there.
In the 1970s, I went to the then all-male Columbia College, maybe to punish myself, though I did find ways to make the experience more than bearable. I majored in ultragirly English literature and lived in Plimpton Hall, the Barnard dorm filled primarily with girls, girls, girls. On paper, this was a straight guy’s dream, but in reality it was even more tailor-made for a gay because I was shacked up with my gal pals, my peers, my kindred playmates. I was back in my dollhouse, far from creatures that liked football and John Wayne (except maybe for a few lesbians). I even wrote for the Barnard Bulletin—and would have gladly gone all the way and enrolled in Barnard if the school authorities had allowed it. After all, I still had that lovely Greek gown.
My Ivy League friendships were the archetypal straight woman–gay man ones that are now the stuff of popular culture. I listened, they talked. I lent support and accessories, they returned them. I lived vicariously through their dating stories, they told me to get some of my own. Most importantly, we’d both been hurt or let down by guys and needed one another to fix the damage.
Flash forward to today, when I’m still reliving those same familiar patterns from my childhood. I can’t help it: I’ll always be quite the ladies’ man. Happy, Dad?