Kevin, age 7
Basking Ridge, New Jersey (1990) |
"Thpeak and thpell"
|
The photo itself might not scream "little gay boy" -
but upon careful inspection, you'll notice I had all of four teeth at this time. For some reason, my adult teeth took forever to grow in, leaving me with the thickest lisp possible.
For years. It was so bad, that my school had to send me to speech class for 3 years - a class they created just for me.
Thus, I thounded like the gayeth little boy in the whole thcool.
It also didn't help that I wore that mock turtle neck every day, like it was a full time job.
I remember an obsession with swords at this time in my life. Why? So I could pretend to be She-Ra, of course. Never He-Man. Nobody could make out the fact that I was saying 'By the power of Grayskull', and aunts and uncles still tease me to this day my shouting 'Baw-dee-aw-nees of Graythkull!' ... Good times.
In retrospect, it all worked out really well. I grew up from a little, gay boy to a big, gay man. And I now run a company called Unicorn Booty that helps keeps the LGBTQ community aware of pop-culture and activism.
Kevin's first, famous-person same sex crush:
Joey Lawrence (from "Blossom")Kevin is also featured in the
"Born This Way: Real Stories Of Growing Up Gay" book!
Click HERE to check it out.
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5 comments:
This is just precious, Kevin. Thanks so much for sharing with the world. I'm reminded of "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by one of my BELOVED gay authors (along with Augusten Burroughs). If you have not read that book yet, and I can't imagine that you don't own it, order it today. Ith juth hythterical!!!
Ditto what Maggie said...
Tell us all how to find: "Unicorn Booty"
Thanx for tharing!
Aww, so adorable!
I also spent three years in speech therapy. I learned to mimic real well and got rid of the lisp after year two.
I was going to reference the David Sedaris speech therapy story, but Maggy beat me to it...
I will let you be jealous, though, because Joey Lawrence came to a mall near my Toronto home in 1992 and I lined up for six hours, got an autograph and even got a wink! And yes, he was even cuter in person. :)
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