Arthur

Arthur, age 4

Auburn, Washington (1972)

Not long after this pic was snapped, I remember looking at an article in Mad Magazine about possible future nudity in cartoons. It had completely non-graphic nudity featuring characters from Pogo and Beetle Bailey, but I remember when looking at it, for the first time I got a funny feeling "down there." Only later did I realize that all the characters depicted were male.

"Hippity-hopity, Easter's on it's way"

In 1st grade, I would chase down and kiss Kevin on the playground. He didn't really like it, and the other kids would tease him when he got kissed, but I didn't see anything wrong with it. These days this would be called "not respecting boundaries."

It must have been on the long bus ride home from kindergarten when one day the kids on the school bus started chanting, 'Arthur wears panty hose! Arthur wears panty hose!' The driver got on the PA and said, 'Hey, Arthur does NOT wear panty hose!' Gee, thanks a lot.

Later in grade school, the kids started to develop more accurate vocabularies, and started to call me "fag."  'Hey, I'm not a fag, whatever that is.' Other contributors to this blog wish they had a name for what they were when they were growing up. I had a name, and I didn't like it. The name seemed so arbitrary that when I was teased, I started calling back, 'Oh yeah, well you're a fag too.'  Then everyone started started ignoring me completely. So at least I never got physically beat up much through my junior high and high school years.

When I was about 10, my father and his brothers gave my grandmother a Playgirl magazine as a gag gift for her 60th birthday.

"What's 'Playgirl?'"
"It's Playboy, but with pictures of naked men."
*GASP* "I wanna see!"
"NO!"

In 6th grade I had a crush on another boy when we went on a field trip with 6th graders from another school. He had dark tousled hair, and I couldn't stop being around him. I didn't know what was going on, but I knew I had to stop behaving that way, and I kept it hidden for 30 more years.

Then the depression got so bad I figured being honest with myself was better than keeping my parents happy by keeping them uninformed. Looking back, I wonder how I could not have known sooner.

Arthur's first, famous-person same sex crush:
"Dirty Dan" from Sha-Na-Na

Must be the tousled hair
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Click here - "Born This Way: Real Stories of Growing Up Gay" book
Click here - "My First Gay Crush Blog"

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