My friend Mark and his partner Eric are coming to San Francisco in September for the Folsom Street Fair. I can’t wait. Mark and I have been close friends for about 27 years — since we went to elementary, junior high, and high school in Central Maine. We have a tendency to laugh hysterically during our high school musicals and talent shows — productions with which we were constantly affiliated. (No wonder that we eventually came out?). This photo is not of Mark by the way. Donnan and I saw “Hairspray” tonight and Zac Efron is our new crush.
In 1984, I was 18 and ready to go to college. We had discovered drinking beer in my father’s corn fields a year earlier. Perhaps it was there when I talked the high school jocks into performing in my version of “The Newlywed Game” during our upcoming senior talent show.
The premise was simple: I would be the host, Bob You-bang (a play on the original host’s name, Bob Eubanks). Half the jocks would dress in drag and the other half would be their husbands. And, oh yea, two of them would be a gay couple. We would play the Herb Alpert theme and decorate some banquet tables in white tissue paper. It seemed funny at the time.
While I always liked guys, I was not in any mindset in 1984 to write drag and gay comedy. I probably would have been run right out of my town had I been out of the closet and producing such a skit. But, we got away with it right through the performance. I was “straight” after all, and it was okay to be homophobic and poke fun at the homosexuals. The sketch was indeed a memorable one. Hence, my writing about it today.
I don’t remember when I wrote the script. I do remember that my friends Pete and Jamie would play the gay married couple. After I was introduced, I initiated questioning. “How did you two meet?” I asked when I finally got to the “gay” couple whom I had deliciously dressed in flowered shirts and white pants.
“I’m a pipe fitter in Pittsburgh” said Pete. “I was at the beach and bent over to pick up a seashell, and there my husband was!”
The audience roared with laughter. When I think back, I am still surprised that hundreds of our families and friends in my conservative home town got an anal sex joke. And, laughed.
The questions continued as I went through the half-drag, half-jock “hetero” couples. I had dressed Rob (a football linebacker) in a tight dress that exposed his meaty legs. He was also adorned with big balloons for tits. Ones that I and the other guys could not resist feeling up during the performance. No one had much hair on their bodies yet, so they could pass as hotty drag queens. I remember at the end of the sketch that many of us on stage dove on Rob and popped his tits.
I am at a loss for what funny questions and answers we wrote for the sketch. I’m sure Mark was a part of the creativity. What I do remember is getting away with something quite out of the ordinary for my hometown — a depiction of a married gay couple oh-so-many years ago. I still wonder how we pulled it off. I think it was a matter of who we were — go-getters who had futures and could get away with humiliating ourselves and a whole group within society with whom we had no experience. The gays. Foreshadowing always fascinates me. While details have left me, the premise of this act years later remains. I don’t know what to think. I would like to think that I was opening up a part of myself that I was not yet ready to explore but had thought about. I would like to think that that night helped me evolve into who I am today. But, I believe it was a more isolated incident that I produced to feel “part of the cool kids.” Who knew that I would turn into the flaming homo that I am today? Maybe it did help me move forward.
At any rate, Mark and I will laugh about it in about six weeks. Until then…
