Gorgeous Ralph

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Winston

The nuance of queer

I read somewhere that we formulate our personal tastes regarding music around the age of thirteen.  It's a very specific period in our lives.  For women it's a bit earlier, but of course they mature faster than we do.  We are, for the most part, just entering puberty, so this makes perfect sense regarding the formation of self.

My mother's favourite piece of music was Debussy's Claire de Lune.  It was an old wax record that she told me I stepped on and shattered when I was learning to walk.  I grew up with classical music therefore, and embraced it for all the richness of its emotion.  I was jealous of my brother who played the guitar and drums, and whose tastes leaned more toward Billion Dollar Babies than Mozart's partitas.  The cool older brother, yes I had one, not to make my life a template or anything.  If you've read any of my earlier essays, you will know that I threw away children's literature at thirteen after being handed a copy of Animal Farm, and had my first orgasm at the same age in the family bathroom.  I also recall a schoolboy crush on Bruce Jenner in that same Montreal Olympic year of 76.

Come on, he was hot

I do some of my best thinking in the bathtub.  It's a meditative spot, much like a cocoon.  Especially here in Canada, sometimes a bath in winter is the only thing that will really get the warmth in your bones.  Mine is clear and hot.  No suds allowed.  Too messy.  This of course brings me, in my round about fashion, to the point of this essay.  Years ago, I worked with an inner city kid.  His family was rich, albeit his parents were divorced.  His mother had many gay friends and he would tell me stories about the men in her life.  Once on a long shift he related how one fellow's martinis-before-dinner expression was "That's SO FAG .." if something struck him as especially gay in context, or subtext.  The amazing thing was Sebastian, this straight boy, could pull a queer character out his hat with ease.  The voice, the hands, the face.  Before my eyes he instantly transformed into a stereotype, his mother's friend and dinner guest.  And it was that stereotype.  The James Millhollin in all of us.  It's a feat I can barely pull off.  And not to say that I am especially masculine.  I think it has more to do with where and when I was raised.

We've had three storms so far this winter, and I have enjoyed an inordinate number of baths.  My phone is my music box in that space.  I don't know why I picked Johann Strauss's Ägyptischer Marsch last week, but I did.  Willi Boskovsky & the Wiener Philharmoniker.  As a kid I saw in my head a legion with Napoleon leading, filing past The Great Sphinx, half-buried at Giza.  The hooves and the soldier's boots kick up the sand.  They march and sing to a gypsy tambourine, just like in Strauss's piece, under the hot sun of the Middle East.  Then I remembered something.

In that baker's dozen year I was in the basement of the farmhouse with someone I considered pretty much a brute.  I can't remember his name, I wish I could, but I can still see his face.  He may have been a grade or two ahead of me in school.  He had tagged along with a few of my brother's friends.  He had curly sandy hair and freckles, and he already possessed wrinkles on his forehead and lines where his dimples formed on his cheeks.  He was one of those boys who took up weightlifting before they had matured, so as we rolled into puberty his body was wiry and tight and leanly muscled.  I may have been half-attracted to his physique, but I was not attracted to him.  He was coarse.  I remember I saw he and his father at the lake once and they were bathing.  He was soaping his father's back like a supplicant as the sun set.  Dad was a compressed spring, a coiled hyena, his son, subservient.  I could see it, even at that distance from the shore.  That kid was stamped imprimatur.  So the son did his best to emulate his father - and made a point of it in the basement that day.

For Christmas the year before my mother had gifted me with a double album of Johann Strauss's best pieces, The World of Strauss, care of K-Tel, that colossus of the 70s.  It was playing in the basement when he came down the stairs.  "What is this shit?" he said.    "Johann Strauss .. Junior", I said.  "You listen to this?" was his response.  Caught red-handed in my enjoyment, I had no choice but to defend it.

In the poor fellow's brain classical music equalled fag.  Most probably for him also, pink shirt equalled fag, or tea equalled fag.  It's an endlessly limiting exercise.  So now you realise what I am trying to elaborate.  He crowed, "I'm gonna tell everybody!"  That is, I'm going to tell everyone you're a fag and I don't even have to say it!  "Go ahead," I said.  This threw him, for I think he expected me to plead with him, but I didn't.  "I'm gonna tell EVERYBODY," he reiterated, and ran out.  He was nothing if not on-the-spot dramatic.

I was smart enough to know then that it was an empty threat, as itching as he was to humiliate me.  For this is the fail safe of the queer nuance, it can be a false flag.  I have tried to spot it myself in order to better understand some men who I may be meeting for the first time.  Don't we all?  Maybe there will be a future, as yet unseen, where, in the words of Eric Bentley, "Everyone will know, but no one will be able to tell .."

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"

Sigmund Freud