I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. You walk like a girl.”
“Well, I’m a boy, and this is how I walk. So I don’t walk like a girl, I walk like a boy.”
I had this conversation with a little girl when I was nine years old, in the fourth grade. I remember the spot where it happened. It was in the doorway at Pangborn Boulevard Elementary School as we were exiting onto the playground. She didn’t say it to be rude. It was just an observation. For me, it was more complex. I was simultaneously flattered and confused. I hadn’t been aware that I walked like a girl. I don’t even know that I aspired to walk like a girl. But I’m sure I never tried to walk like a boy. I didn’t like boys. I’d never really liked boys.
FOR THE FIRST PART OF MY LIFE, I THINK MY role was very clearly defined: I was my mother’s most glamorous accessory. I was cute, fairly at ease socially, and I began talking at a very young age. My parents were delighted that their first child was a boy and it was several more years until my sister came along, so I was the focus of quite a lot of attention.
I was mostly surrounded by women and girls. My mother’s best friend, who I called Aunt Judy, had a daughter who was one year older than me. I had a girl cousin who was three months younger than me and a slew of female teenage cousins who were always dropping by, especially when they needed to use our bathroom as they were headed from their house in the country to go shopping downtown.
I was raised by girls and I liked it. I was like a pet monkey that they would tease and dress up and play with. This seemed perfectly normal to me and I remember enjoying it. Once I entered school in the autumn of 1969, I was thrown into social situations with boys for the first time. I was appalled. They were always racing around, screaming loudly, playing with trucks, throwing balls, wrestling, and sweating. I found it disgusting and unnerving. I wasn’t used to so much aggression and commotion. I preferred skipping rope and playing house to running around. I enjoyed climbing the jungle gym with the girls. My teachers’ reports were always the same: “He is very alert, a good student, but needs to learn how to play with the other boys.”
By the time fourth grade rolled around, I had become fairly comfortable with most of the boys in my class simply because I was familiar with them, as it was a small school. Nonetheless, I didn’t play or socialize with them. I’d had several girlfriends, and as a matter of fact I had “married” Patty Chase in second grade. Her sister performed the ceremony in her parents’ house, and I was devastated when I was told we weren’t going to be allowed to live together. Obviously, when no one took our marriage seriously, I became disillusioned. Well, they had their chance . . . Anyway, I had several girlfriends in the fourth grade, including Kim Bell who wore white go-go boots to school. I was very happy because I got to sit next to her and stroke her go-go boots, which to me had the texture of marshmallow fluff, one of my favorite treats. Kim didn’t seem to mind me stroking her go-go boots one bit, and my teacher didn’t stop me because I think she was relieved that I was showing interest in a girl instead of trying to be one.
IN 1964, MY PARENTS BOUGHT A THREE-BEDROOM ranch house in a development at the edge of town. Our street was paved, but the rest of the freshly plowed area consisted of red clay. The Kendalls, our neighbors to the rear, had a son named Greg who was a bit younger than me, and I quickly became friends with him. In their front yard they had a great big boulder that we used to play on, until someone fell and scraped their knee and the boulder had to be removed. That’s how it was then. They tried to keep us from climbing trees in case we fell out. They removed boulders so no one would skin their knees. I’m surprised they didn’t put cotton bunting on the sidewalk in case someone fell. It was all about the safety of the children.
Next to the Kendalls, a new house was being built. Eventually, a couple moved in with their daughter, Eva. They had an aboveground pool, which was very exotic, and they were almost, but not quite, hippies. The Brinings were young and cool and much hipper than anyone else in the neighborhood. Eva became one of our best friends. Greg, Eva, and I played together every day. But one day when we knocked on her door, her father said that Eva wasn’t living there anymore. Our parents told us that she wouldn’t be coming back because her parents were getting a divorce. This was the first time anyone we knew had parents who got divorced, and it was sad for us because our friend just disappeared.
THE BRININGS’ HOUSE WAS SOLD TO AN AFRICAN American man named Mr. White. Mr. White was a bachelor and the first African American man to move into our neighborhood. We were very excited and wanted to welcome our new neighbor. We didn’t know how to make a pie and our mothers were busy so we decided that since we had just gotten a new set of crayons, and since he was a “colored” man, Greg and I would write him a poem using all of our new colors: Red is nice, we like red. Green is nice, we like green . . . making our way through all of the colors . . . we like purple, blue . . . we LOVE White! Then we got to black. Black is ugly, we hate black.
Very excited and proud of our poem, we knocked on Mr. White’s door, smiling from ear to ear, and handed it to him. We said, “Welcome to our neighborhood, Mr. White!” He looked at the card. We were sure he would be delighted by our neighborliness but instead he looked very shocked and asked, “Do your parents know you wrote this?”
“No. We did it on our own, Mr. White. We would have baked a pie but we don’t know how.”
He didn’t seem at all pleased with our gift, which was very confusing to us. We went home and told our parents Mr. White wasn’t very friendly. Soon, they received a phone call from Mr. White and we got into big trouble. We hadn’t realized Mr. White was black, we thought he was colored, which is why we wrote him a poem about all the colors we liked. Most kids prefer red or green to black, but we didn’t realize that saying we hated black would be an insult to Mr. White. Our parents brought us over to his house and, in tears, we apologized. “We’re so sorry Mr. White. We didn’t know you were black.”
He was very nice to us from then on, although he moved out a few years later. In all honesty we were glad he moved out because we wanted someone fun like Eva to move back in there. And Mr. White didn’t let us swim in his pool.
FINALLY, A NEW FAMILY MOVED IN. THE HUNTERS. They had two boys, one of whom was my age, named Michael, and his older brother, named Bobby. On Michael’s first day of school I discovered he was in my class at Pangborn and our teacher Mrs. Schmid, clearly with an agenda, decided I should show Michael around since he was my new neighbor. I was very interested in knowing what Michael was like but I was also suspicious of the motives of adults, and I quickly realized this was her attempt to find me a boy friend.
I thought, I’ll give this Michael boy a chance. He talked about how he had lived in a very nice neighborhood in New Jersey, much nicer than the one we lived in, and told me that his father’s company had provided all the glass for the new United Nations building. I thought to myself, “This boy’s full of crap, and I have to take him down a notch.” He was very full of himself and clearly was seeking to impress. I approached relations with most boys with an air of studied disdain, but Michael Hunter had my hackles up immediately. I was unaware that the UN building had been erected in 1952 but I knew well enough not to believe him. I didn’t come straight out and call him a liar, but he could tell that I knew he was full of it.
One thing I was pretty sure I knew how to do was to be condescending to men and boys. Having three teenage cousins during the era of women’s lib had taught me quite a bit about sarcasm and just how far a good roll of the eyes could take you. These were the times when you couldn’t turn on the TV without a news report making reference to the women’s movement, Roe v. Wade, and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. Gloria Steinem was on with her frosted hair and wire-frame glasses, and Bea Arthur was starring in a sitcom called Maude in which her famous line was “God’ll get you for that, Walter,” which not only put her husband
