This weekend, for the first time in a few years, I traveled from San Francisco to St. Louis to see my immediate family. My parents, reaching un certain âge, are in the midst of a move from a nostalgic old brick house with narrow walk-ups to a cavernously modern condo with homeowner’s association fees that strike me, the San Franciscan renter, as either exorbitant or aspirational. Mom, deflecting her feelings and anxieties into logistics as usual, has been abuzz about the boxes of old documentation of our childhood development. Are you taking the pictures back with you? Do you want your old report cards? Have you taken a look yet? How much do you think you can get on the plane? Conflict avoidant as always, I took my dutiful look through the boxes of report cards, trophies, Polaroids, and forced childhood handiwork trinkets. All I can think these days—now the Queer Theorist pretender, the tattooed leatherboy, the Castro dweller—when confronted with these excreta of my lower middle-class Midwestern childhood is, “Gosh, what a little faggot.” I texted that to my boyfriend alongside these images. “How did no one ever say anything?” I think now, as I look at the little boy next to grinning proud kindergarten mother figures, the little boy holding his wrist a little limp and angled next to the jungle gym, the little boy with A+’s in all his academic subjects and B-‘s in PE every quarter they tried to make me move my graceless awkward little body into gymnastic shapes, the little boy beaming too brightly next to the butcher less smiley boys I crushed on, the little boy growing dour and pathologically shy of smiling in the too-early adolescence where I couldn’t stop noticing all the other boys around me.
On Little F*gg*ts and Origins Stories
On Little F*gg*ts and Origins Stories
On Little F*gg*ts and Origins Stories
This weekend, for the first time in a few years, I traveled from San Francisco to St. Louis to see my immediate family. My parents, reaching un certain âge, are in the midst of a move from a nostalgic old brick house with narrow walk-ups to a cavernously modern condo with homeowner’s association fees that strike me, the San Franciscan renter, as either exorbitant or aspirational. Mom, deflecting her feelings and anxieties into logistics as usual, has been abuzz about the boxes of old documentation of our childhood development. Are you taking the pictures back with you? Do you want your old report cards? Have you taken a look yet? How much do you think you can get on the plane? Conflict avoidant as always, I took my dutiful look through the boxes of report cards, trophies, Polaroids, and forced childhood handiwork trinkets. All I can think these days—now the Queer Theorist pretender, the tattooed leatherboy, the Castro dweller—when confronted with these excreta of my lower middle-class Midwestern childhood is, “Gosh, what a little faggot.” I texted that to my boyfriend alongside these images. “How did no one ever say anything?” I think now, as I look at the little boy next to grinning proud kindergarten mother figures, the little boy holding his wrist a little limp and angled next to the jungle gym, the little boy with A+’s in all his academic subjects and B-‘s in PE every quarter they tried to make me move my graceless awkward little body into gymnastic shapes, the little boy beaming too brightly next to the butcher less smiley boys I crushed on, the little boy growing dour and pathologically shy of smiling in the too-early adolescence where I couldn’t stop noticing all the other boys around me.