What is a Man: Proving You're Not Gay in 1971

December 3, 1971, Christmastime in 6th grade.  I'm having a friend over: Brian, with a belligerent smirk but otherwise cute: a tanned face, sandy blond hair, pale blue eyes with eyelashes so blond they are almost white, and thin, pinkish lips.

Brian's parents are entertainers -- Beauty and the Beast, Dad playing the piano in a gorilla mask while Mom sings risque songs.  When their Friday or Saturday night gigs run late, they have arranged with my parents to mind him.

He brings his pajamas, and we read comic books and play army men and watch the new portable tv set I got for my birthday,  and at 10:00 he climbs into bed between me and my brother.  Then late in the night his Dad swoops into the room like a vampire and carries Brian off in his arms.





Tonight The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family have been pre-empted.  Next comes Room 222, a drama about a hip, caring teacher at Walt Whitman High (Pete Dixon, played by Lloyd Haynes, left).  I don't usually watch -- some of the boys are cute, but the plots are too melodramatic, about prejudice and cheating on tests and the generation gap.  But you can't spent a whole evening without watching something!









The episode is entitled "What is a Man?"  The English teacher points out that in Shakespeare's day, boys played the girls' parts, and has her class try it out.  The jocks can't play girls without giggling, but Howard (Frederick Herrick) is good at it.  Soon "fag" is scrawled on his locker, and he is getting beat up after school.

Pete consults the principal, who says "Maybe we have two problems.  What if Howard is a homosexual?"

"What's a homosexual?" Brian asks, his mouth full of chocolate chip cookie.

"Dunno."  It's not explained in the episode.  When I hear it again five years later, I don't remember ever hearing it before.

But I know what a fag is: a boy who pretends to be a girl.  Everyone at Denkmann Elementary School, teachers and students alike, thinks that fags are the worst kind of being in existence.  Being a girl is deplorable enough; why would anyone deliberately pretend to be one?

Howard proves that he is not a fag by asking a girl for a date.  See, if you think you are a girl, you won't be interested in dating girls, right?

I look at Brian.  Next year we will be grownups, in junior high, and we will discover girls, like the adults have been crowing about.  And if we don't, we will become fags, the most deplorable of human beings, not really human beings at all.

But that's eight months away, an eternity. We have all of our lives yet to live.

Suddenly I throw Brian down in a judo pin and yell "Kata-gatame!"  He flips me over and lays atop me, a heavy weight of hands and thighs, his chest heaving and sweaty, his breath hot and smelling of chocolate. We're both giggling.