Roddick: Or any month?
Marshall: Really. Just because he’s seven doesn’t mean he doesn’t notice what he’s wearing.
Roddick: Right. So I said, ‘Someone should just grab him and take him to the Gap.’
Marshall: Re-do him top to bottom.
Roddick: Buy him an ice cream cone or a Mrs Field’s.
Marshall: Give him a nice time, in other words.
Sally Jessy: And that’s when you -
Roddick: That’s when we picked him up, yes.
Sally Jessy: You ‘grabbed’ him.
Marshall: Hence the name.
Three and a half hours later, Marshall and Roddick dropped Booher back on the same sidewalk, dressed in a new tan, short-sleeve, sueded crewneck sweater; khaki walking shorts; and a pair of Timberland Kids sandals. He also carried bags filled with Gap Kids polo shirts, a Guess Kids belt, a stuffed Godzilla, and a Richard Scarry book on multiples of five5. Booher’s parents, Mr and Mrs Donald Booher, were unaware anything had happened until Aaron returned home. The police report includes the fact that Aaron repeatedly asked his mother, his father, the police officer, anyone he could find: ‘Can I go again tomorrow?’
All arguments and counter-arguments to the practice of the ‘groomgrab’ begin here with little Aaron Booher’s question. ‘You see,’ say the grabbers, ‘Booher was never in danger and had a little fun injected into his life for the first time in ages.’ Anti-grabbers, with some merit, point out that seven year olds also often find activities like vomiting and bee-stomping fun, i.e.a seven year old is not exactly the best judge of what good, healthy entertainment is. However, the point of this paper is not to judge the action6, merely to map its movement across the country and see just how the country got swept away in this most peculiar of fads.
Witness Marcy ‘Pebbles’ Morrison, youngest granddaughter of (then) 9th Circuit Court Judge Bosco Morrison7. The younger Morrison, in her seminal Take Your Hands Back On Me!8, the first real study of groomgrabbing as a cultural phenomenon, reports that ‘my own, personal groomgrabbing was the most exciting couple hours of my life to date. Nothing else has come close. I would trade the best sex I ever had for that time in my childhood. In a heartbeat. It was the first time any adult had treated me like a special little human, and for no reason, just because I was there.’
Morrison goes overboard somewhat by calling her groomgrabbing an experience of feeling unconditional love9, but you can see her point. A research survey by the University of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Including Parts of Barbados and St Lucia conducted in 2003, roughly a year after the trend had died down, reported that the groomgrabbed children ‘overwhelmingly’ reported the grabbing as an unequivocally positive experience. Looking at the survey’s raw data, ‘overwhelming’ is actually an understatement for once. Fully 99.58 per cent answered ‘emphatically yes’ when asked if they considered their groomgrabbing to have been a good experience10. A smaller, more recent study of groomgrabbed children conducted by sociologist Zorah Blandershot-Fields at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, reported not only the same almost-impossibly-high satisfaction rate as the UMNHVIPBSL study11, but also showed scholastic achievement including SAT and AP scores miles and miles above the national average12. Naturally, in addition to the scientific studies, the anecdotal evidence is voluminous13.
Some excerpts:
Ronald Laramie, Butte, Montana: ‘I didn’t even think there were any gay people in Butte, so getting groomgrabbed never really entered my mind. As far as I know, I was the only one in the whole state to be grabbed14. My grabbers were this older couple who’d apparently driven all the way down 1–90 from Deer Lodge, which, my God, has like seven people so you can just imagine the kind of risk they were taking. I was ten, and they took me to one of those pizza-arcade places, Charlie Cheese or something15. They also bought me a boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia and this great little black suit with an antique Golden Girls tie. It was a ton of fun, and I pretty much became a celebrity. They even asked me to be Grand Marshal of the Elk Parade, which is a big deal in Butte.’
Jessica Mankiewicz, Encino, California: ‘It happened when I was seven, and I remember it was near Halloween. My two guys were Harry and Reed. Reed was Asian, and Harry had wavy red hair. It’s funny how clear it all still is. Anyway, they asked what I wanted to be for Halloween, so of course I say Spidergirl because that movie had just come out16. So what do these guys do? They take me to the studio to get outfitted! My guess is that one of them had to work at the studio, because otherwise how would we have gotten back there? But I got this kickass little Spidergirl suit made of the same rubber they used in the movie. It weighed like 35 pounds. I dragged and sweated my way through trick-or-treating, but how cool was I that year?’
Savon Carmichael, Carson City, Nevada: ‘I remember that I’d been kicked out yet again from my group of so-called friends. See, I was a fat little kid, and unfortunately I wasn’t even that funny which is pretty much the only thing that saves you if you’re a kid and you’re fat. Actually, my grabbers, who weren’t even black, said it’s pretty much the same thing with being gay. If you’re a sissy, you better fucking be funny, or you’re going to get your ass kicked. My grab was just the simplest thing, you know? They bought me a sweater and a watch which I still have, and I remember, of all things, this belt. This really nice entwined leather belt that didn’t have holes in it, you could just hook the little prong anywhere in the entwined leather. Do you get my meaning? It didn’t have holes in it. So I didn’t have to worry about making a new hole or being too fat for a hole. I could just wear it however. I can’t tell you how much something like that meant to me. I really believe that that little belt was a catalyst for everything I’ve achieved so far. Med school17, my beautiful wife, everything. I owe those two guys a lot.’
Maggie Nakagama, Cadley, Georgia: “From what I’ve been told, I guess I was the first recognized fabgrab18. My couple didn’t buy me any clothes, which is what I guess happened on the groomgrabs. I remember I was playing by myself in my babysitter’s front yard, and these guys drove up and grabbed me. They left a Fendi19, and we drove to Six Flags Over Augusta. I just had the best time in the world. We spent hours there, hours, going on all these rides that my parents would never let me do, eating cotton candy, playing those parkway games. I mean, I threw up twice, but it was all in good fun. And you know, when I got back, the Fendi was still in the yard. No one had even noticed. My grabbers let me keep the flag so I could prove that it happened.’
Hunter Poulsbo, Redding, California: ‘I guess I had kind of a weird grab. Mine took me to a mall and bought me a new outfit, but what I really wanted to do was figure out fractions. I was only nine, and I was having the damnedest time figuring them out. So when
