The Best Banned in the Land

Actually, I was already primed to go off on a rant about "Political Correctness" when I encountered Mark Peters's article about the word "gay." Earlier that day I'd had a dispute with a coworker about the banning of books from public schools; I now think her concern had been inspired by an article on the subject in USA Today. Anyway, she was displeased by what she called "Political Correctness" which led to the "banning" of Huckleberry Finn, though what I think she meant was controversy over its use in the curriculum -- when I pressed her on that, she seemed unsure.

She jumped to the case of Little Black Sambo, which she also claimed was the victim of PC even though it was a very nice story and didn't mean any harm. She claimed that a few years ago she'd tried to get a copy of Little Black Sambo but you couldn't even get it in the US because of PC. I wasn't able to pursue that point with her, but a look at Amazon.com shows that LBS is still in print in numerous editions, and a search of the local public library shows that they have the original version and two retellings, including Julius Lester's. In those days, she said (apparently meaning her childhood and mine, we're very close in age), nobody objected to Little Black Sambo or Huckleberry Finn or Uncle Tom's Cabin. But now they're banned! (As someone said to me in another context, Oh, they are not!)

In those days, I countered sternly, racism was normal in the United States. She didn't have an answer to that, and in fact she was wrong. African Americans have been complaining about Little Black Sambo almost since it was first published in 1899. It was excluded from some American libraries immediately after World War II, before my coworker and I were born. Of course, we're both from Indiana, a state not famous for its racial sensitivity. What she meant, of course, was that nobody who mattered was complaining.

This weekend I've been browsing through the history of Huck Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin as school texts. They've both been controversial for a long time, and one thing I wasn't able to find out (though I'm sure the information is out there somewhere, probably in printed matter) was how long those books have actually been taught in schools. When they were still new, they wouldn't have been taught because they weren't Classics; it wasn't until after the 1930s or so, partly due to the efforts of Matthiessen's American Renaissance, that American literature was taught even at the university level in the US. (Barbarians at the gates!)

Y'see, when I was in school (roughly 1957 to 1969), our reading texts were textbooks -- first of the Dick and Jane variety, then anthologies assembled by textbook publishers, with few if any novel-length texts included. We were never given copies of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Moby-Dick, or Tropic of Cancer (just kidding! -- though I did read Henry Miller on my own during my junior and senior years) and told to read them -- not even in high school. My high school French teacher lent me what must have been her college copy of an anthology of French short stories so I could read Camus. Even in senior English our assignments came from the twelfth-grade Scott, Foresman textbook; I seem to remember reading the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in a modernized version.

Anything outside of the textbooks wasn't assigned reading, and I was virtually the only kid in my elementary school, as far as I know, who dug into the "library" shelves at the back of the classrooms and read books I didn't have to read. (A weirdo even then, you see!) I don't remember anyone but me reading the books (the Autobiography of Malcolm X!? how did that get on the shelves?) in the high-school library either, though surely someone else must have... But I'm wandering afield here.

The point is that while some large cities must have had advanced classes for elite students in their public schools, and perhaps elite private schools might have used real books instead of textbooks, in the ordinary public schools the textbooks ruled. If, despite the publishers' vigilance, something controversial got into the textbooks, the teachers probably would not have assigned it, and there was little danger that most students would read anything in the texts that hadn't been assigned. So the whole question of "PC" in this connection is a red herring, because the textbook and school systems were set up to avoid controversial material -- and the books I'm talking about have always been controversial. Uncle Tom's Cabin stirred up a major shitstorm in its day, prompting a counterpropaganda campaign from the slave states. Its enduring popularity after the Confederate Rebellion was the product of stage productions, including minstrel shows, which reduced it to sensationalism: "In fact," Darryl Lorenzo Wellington wrote in The Nation in 2006, "there were 'Tom shows' in the late 1800s and early 1900s that completely excised the story's antislavery message. Throughout the early 1900s, the familiar characters were cheapened by overuse in product advertisements." (You say you want a revolution ... )

Huckleberry Finn similarly had its critics long before "political correctness" was a gleam in Nat Hentoff's eye. As this contemporary white high-school teacher says,

It is quite surprising to students that the concerns that people had in the 1800s when the book was published had little to do with race, little to do with language, but much more to do with deportment, much more to do with how a young person was supposed to behave. That opens their eyes to how the book stays the same but the attitudes toward it change.

According to Jonathan Arac, "It was only after the Second World War that Huckleberry Finn achieved massive canonicity in the schools ... ; yet these same years were the time that the assertion of African American civil rights, most strongly symbolized in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), brought new voices into play concerning the relations of whites and blacks" (21). My co-worker is unaware of the reactions black students have had to Huck Finn and to white students' response to it, and she seems not to care, or at least not to see this as a problem. What matters is that white students should have the right to be exposed to this great book, and in school -- they shouldn't have to read it on their own. As Arac writes, "It would seem that if you are an African-American child who does not like to go to school because some other students feel empowered to talk like the hero of the assigned book and call you 'nigger,' that is your sickness, not a matter of public concern" (ibid.). As I told my co-worker, I'm all in favor of teaching the conflicts and encouraging students to understand the complexities of the treatment of race in books like Huck Finn, but I wonder how many teachers are competent to do that, or have time to do so now that so much of their time has to be spent prepping their students for standardized tests.

Just a few days before I had this exchange with my co-worker, I had one on Facebook about the movie Heathers with an old friend there. She claimed that Heathers couldn't be made today because of "PC" , since the Columbine High School shootings were so similar to some of the events in the movie. I asked her what PC had to do with it. Movies like Heathers were not exactly a dime a dozen in the 1980s either, and it was made not by a mainstream Hollywood production company (which wouldn't have touched such a project) but by a small, financially troubled company that went belly up shortly after Heathers was released. One reason it could be made was that the filmmakers didn't have marketing people breathing down their necks, worried about how it would play in Peoria. When I first saw it in a theater in 1989, I kept asking myself how such a dark, disturbing film had ever been made and released.

My friend replied:

Duncan, I'm using "PC" in the broader sense of offending mainstream sensibilities. I agree that Heathers was clearly in the realm of fantasy, as was "Rock 'n' Roll High School," and a number of other cult movies that did feature blowing up... a school (even an empty one). Some of the violence is actually cartoonish, and it's obviously fantasy. But a lot of people would be protesting, instead of laughing, even ones who might have smirked at these earlier movies (but wouldn't admit that now). I don't buy the idea that media makes kids do things like blow up or blow away classmates. I do think that if you are a parent and your kid seems to gravitate toward entertainment that seems ... dark ... then you need to explore what the attraction is. Columbine could have been prevented, if only a couple of parents had poked their noses into a garage in suburban Colorado, after all.

It's at least as true that Columbine could have been prevented if only a couple of parents had poked their noses into the harassment, bullying and persecution of non-conformists that was going on Columbine High School, as it does in schools everywhere to this day. (Usually the people who are hurt or killed are not the bullies.) I don't buy the idea that media makes kids do things like blow up or blow away classmates either, but I think that if you are a parent and your kid seems to gravitate towards "entertainment" that consists of slamming their classmates against lockers, kicking them in the stomach, and urinating on them, then you need to explore what the attraction is. (If a fascination with "... dark ..." entertainment were a warning signal of outbreaks of violence, then we'd have seen one, two, many Columbines in the past twenty years and more.) The fact that my friend could write such things just as American media were romanticizing gay-youth suicide and wringing their hands about bullying is, I think, a revealing statement about mainstream Christian America in itself.

But the really revealing thing is her definition of political correctness as "offending mainstream sensibilities": she has it exactly backwards. Mainstream sensibilities aren't offended by fag jokes, misogynist jokes, or racist jokes; mainstream sensibilities are offended when someone objects to sexism, racism, and antigay bigotry -- it's those objections which are called "PC." Or, to put it another way, if it offends you, you're being PC; if it offends me, I'm just tired of being kicked in the face by feminazis, radical fairies, America-haters, and blacks constantly playing the race card. At most, what is called "political correctness" is the mainstream's guilty conscience: mainstream Americans are aware that there have been some less-than-nice, even downright embarrassing aspects to American culture in the past, and they're prepared to make a few cosmetic adjustments so they can pretend to themselves that things have changed. (Having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is a great boon to many of them, because they can believe that it cancels out everything that happened before 2008; others feel that equality is all very well, but having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is Going Too Far.) But at bottom they don't really get it, they don't really view The Other as fully human, and wish that all these uppity Others would shut up and go away. All they want is to have America to themselves, like they did in the 1950s, when everybody was happy and there wasn't all this PC -- is that so wrong?

So, back to Mark Peters and his foolish article about "gay." Peters is presumably heterosexual, or at least adopting a heterosexual male stance. If a mainstream American major motion picture has a character declare that electric cars are gay, and if mainstream Americans go berserk because the line is cut from the trailer -- not the film itself, mind you, but from the trailer -- then that shows that any objections to the joke (which wasn't really a joke at all, according to Peters) are oversensitive. Again, as I said earlier, this would make no sense if "political correctness" referred to what offends mainstream America, because it's fairly obvious that mainstream America wasn't offended by the joke at all. Saying that electric cars are gay is not, contrary to Peters, the same as saying that they're "lame." It means they're unmanly, and cars are for American heterosexual males a vital phallic symbol: they go vrooom, they are powerful, they are fast, they spurt out stinky smoke (or did, until PC environmentalists made them stop). If you're going to make a normal heterosexual male drive a faggy electric car, why not go the whole nine yards and cut off his balls? It's as gay as your parents chaperoning the dance, as Vince Vaughan went on to say by way of "clarification." Because only a fag wouldn't mind his parents being at the dance, keeping him from any chance of getting any pussy.... Maybe I'm overinterpreting, but I don't think so, because I can't see a contemporary Hollywood film giving Vaughan's line to, say, Cameron Diaz or Judi Dench addressing a group of women.

Do I think that the line should be taken out of the movie altogether? Hell, I don't think it should have been taken out of the trailer. Since it was in the trailer, I can suppose it to be representative of the movie's general tone, and I'd rather know that in advance so that I can avoid the film altogether. (I wouldn't have wanted the trailer for I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry sanitized either; it would have been false advertising.) Movies about overaged boys who confuse their cars with their dicks are very rarely worth my money or my time. And that brings me to the next point about "PC": it isn't just organized campaigns against bigoted attitudes that offend mainstream America, but any individual dissent at all. In my experience, I am not even supposed to say that a movie is sexist, or that a joke is racist, or that a song lyric is misogynist, because it shows that I'm a PC tyrant who doesn't want mainstream America to have any harmless fun. And where is the harm in saying that electric cars are gay, huh? Nobody's killed by that. If I refuse to spend my money to support infantile Hollywood comedies in order to show how open-minded I am, that's my right (though just barely), but at least I can shut up about my objections. In that sense my friend is right: nobody is as Politically Correct, in the sense of not being able to tolerate disagreement with their political stance, as mainstream Americans.

The Best Banned in the Land

Actually, I was already primed to go off on a rant about "Political Correctness" when I encountered Mark Peters's article about the word "gay." Earlier that day I'd had a dispute with a coworker about the banning of books from public schools; I now think her concern had been inspired by an article on the subject in USA Today. Anyway, she was displeased by what she called "Political Correctness" which led to the "banning" of Huckleberry Finn, though what I think she meant was controversy over its use in the curriculum -- when I pressed her on that, she seemed unsure.

She jumped to the case of Little Black Sambo, which she also claimed was the victim of PC even though it was a very nice story and didn't mean any harm. She claimed that a few years ago she'd tried to get a copy of Little Black Sambo but you couldn't even get it in the US because of PC. I wasn't able to pursue that point with her, but a look at Amazon.com shows that LBS is still in print in numerous editions, and a search of the local public library shows that they have the original version and two retellings, including Julius Lester's. In those days, she said (apparently meaning her childhood and mine, we're very close in age), nobody objected to Little Black Sambo or Huckleberry Finn or Uncle Tom's Cabin. But now they're banned! (As someone said to me in another context, Oh, they are not!)

In those days, I countered sternly, racism was normal in the United States. She didn't have an answer to that, and in fact she was wrong. African Americans have been complaining about Little Black Sambo almost since it was first published in 1899. It was excluded from some American libraries immediately after World War II, before my coworker and I were born. Of course, we're both from Indiana, a state not famous for its racial sensitivity. What she meant, of course, was that nobody who mattered was complaining.

This weekend I've been browsing through the history of Huck Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin as school texts. They've both been controversial for a long time, and one thing I wasn't able to find out (though I'm sure the information is out there somewhere, probably in printed matter) was how long those books have actually been taught in schools. When they were still new, they wouldn't have been taught because they weren't Classics; it wasn't until after the 1930s or so, partly due to the efforts of Matthiessen's American Renaissance, that American literature was taught even at the university level in the US. (Barbarians at the gates!)

Y'see, when I was in school (roughly 1957 to 1969), our reading texts were textbooks -- first of the Dick and Jane variety, then anthologies assembled by textbook publishers, with few if any novel-length texts included. We were never given copies of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Moby-Dick, or Tropic of Cancer (just kidding! -- though I did read Henry Miller on my own during my junior and senior years) and told to read them -- not even in high school. My high school French teacher lent me what must have been her college copy of an anthology of French short stories so I could read Camus. Even in senior English our assignments came from the twelfth-grade Scott, Foresman textbook; I seem to remember reading the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in a modernized version.

Anything outside of the textbooks wasn't assigned reading, and I was virtually the only kid in my elementary school, as far as I know, who dug into the "library" shelves at the back of the classrooms and read books I didn't have to read. (A weirdo even then, you see!) I don't remember anyone but me reading the books (the Autobiography of Malcolm X!? how did that get on the shelves?) in the high-school library either, though surely someone else must have... But I'm wandering afield here.

The point is that while some large cities must have had advanced classes for elite students in their public schools, and perhaps elite private schools might have used real books instead of textbooks, in the ordinary public schools the textbooks ruled. If, despite the publishers' vigilance, something controversial got into the textbooks, the teachers probably would not have assigned it, and there was little danger that most students would read anything in the texts that hadn't been assigned. So the whole question of "PC" in this connection is a red herring, because the textbook and school systems were set up to avoid controversial material -- and the books I'm talking about have always been controversial. Uncle Tom's Cabin stirred up a major shitstorm in its day, prompting a counterpropaganda campaign from the slave states. Its enduring popularity after the Confederate Rebellion was the product of stage productions, including minstrel shows, which reduced it to sensationalism: "In fact," Darryl Lorenzo Wellington wrote in The Nation in 2006, "there were 'Tom shows' in the late 1800s and early 1900s that completely excised the story's antislavery message. Throughout the early 1900s, the familiar characters were cheapened by overuse in product advertisements." (You say you want a revolution ... )

Huckleberry Finn similarly had its critics long before "political correctness" was a gleam in Nat Hentoff's eye. As this contemporary white high-school teacher says,

It is quite surprising to students that the concerns that people had in the 1800s when the book was published had little to do with race, little to do with language, but much more to do with deportment, much more to do with how a young person was supposed to behave. That opens their eyes to how the book stays the same but the attitudes toward it change.

According to Jonathan Arac, "It was only after the Second World War that Huckleberry Finn achieved massive canonicity in the schools ... ; yet these same years were the time that the assertion of African American civil rights, most strongly symbolized in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), brought new voices into play concerning the relations of whites and blacks" (21). My co-worker is unaware of the reactions black students have had to Huck Finn and to white students' response to it, and she seems not to care, or at least not to see this as a problem. What matters is that white students should have the right to be exposed to this great book, and in school -- they shouldn't have to read it on their own. As Arac writes, "It would seem that if you are an African-American child who does not like to go to school because some other students feel empowered to talk like the hero of the assigned book and call you 'nigger,' that is your sickness, not a matter of public concern" (ibid.). As I told my co-worker, I'm all in favor of teaching the conflicts and encouraging students to understand the complexities of the treatment of race in books like Huck Finn, but I wonder how many teachers are competent to do that, or have time to do so now that so much of their time has to be spent prepping their students for standardized tests.

Just a few days before I had this exchange with my co-worker, I had one on Facebook about the movie Heathers with an old friend there. She claimed that Heathers couldn't be made today because of "PC" , since the Columbine High School shootings were so similar to some of the events in the movie. I asked her what PC had to do with it. Movies like Heathers were not exactly a dime a dozen in the 1980s either, and it was made not by a mainstream Hollywood production company (which wouldn't have touched such a project) but by a small, financially troubled company that went belly up shortly after Heathers was released. One reason it could be made was that the filmmakers didn't have marketing people breathing down their necks, worried about how it would play in Peoria. When I first saw it in a theater in 1989, I kept asking myself how such a dark, disturbing film had ever been made and released.

My friend replied:

Duncan, I'm using "PC" in the broader sense of offending mainstream sensibilities. I agree that Heathers was clearly in the realm of fantasy, as was "Rock 'n' Roll High School," and a number of other cult movies that did feature blowing up... a school (even an empty one). Some of the violence is actually cartoonish, and it's obviously fantasy. But a lot of people would be protesting, instead of laughing, even ones who might have smirked at these earlier movies (but wouldn't admit that now). I don't buy the idea that media makes kids do things like blow up or blow away classmates. I do think that if you are a parent and your kid seems to gravitate toward entertainment that seems ... dark ... then you need to explore what the attraction is. Columbine could have been prevented, if only a couple of parents had poked their noses into a garage in suburban Colorado, after all.

It's at least as true that Columbine could have been prevented if only a couple of parents had poked their noses into the harassment, bullying and persecution of non-conformists that was going on Columbine High School, as it does in schools everywhere to this day. (Usually the people who are hurt or killed are not the bullies.) I don't buy the idea that media makes kids do things like blow up or blow away classmates either, but I think that if you are a parent and your kid seems to gravitate towards "entertainment" that consists of slamming their classmates against lockers, kicking them in the stomach, and urinating on them, then you need to explore what the attraction is. (If a fascination with "... dark ..." entertainment were a warning signal of outbreaks of violence, then we'd have seen one, two, many Columbines in the past twenty years and more.) The fact that my friend could write such things just as American media were romanticizing gay-youth suicide and wringing their hands about bullying is, I think, a revealing statement about mainstream Christian America in itself.

But the really revealing thing is her definition of political correctness as "offending mainstream sensibilities": she has it exactly backwards. Mainstream sensibilities aren't offended by fag jokes, misogynist jokes, or racist jokes; mainstream sensibilities are offended when someone objects to sexism, racism, and antigay bigotry -- it's those objections which are called "PC." Or, to put it another way, if it offends you, you're being PC; if it offends me, I'm just tired of being kicked in the face by feminazis, radical fairies, America-haters, and blacks constantly playing the race card. At most, what is called "political correctness" is the mainstream's guilty conscience: mainstream Americans are aware that there have been some less-than-nice, even downright embarrassing aspects to American culture in the past, and they're prepared to make a few cosmetic adjustments so they can pretend to themselves that things have changed. (Having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is a great boon to many of them, because they can believe that it cancels out everything that happened before 2008; others feel that equality is all very well, but having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is Going Too Far.) But at bottom they don't really get it, they don't really view The Other as fully human, and wish that all these uppity Others would shut up and go away. All they want is to have America to themselves, like they did in the 1950s, when everybody was happy and there wasn't all this PC -- is that so wrong?

So, back to Mark Peters and his foolish article about "gay." Peters is presumably heterosexual, or at least adopting a heterosexual male stance. If a mainstream American major motion picture has a character declare that electric cars are gay, and if mainstream Americans go berserk because the line is cut from the trailer -- not the film itself, mind you, but from the trailer -- then that shows that any objections to the joke (which wasn't really a joke at all, according to Peters) are oversensitive. Again, as I said earlier, this would make no sense if "political correctness" referred to what offends mainstream America, because it's fairly obvious that mainstream America wasn't offended by the joke at all. Saying that electric cars are gay is not, contrary to Peters, the same as saying that they're "lame." It means they're unmanly, and cars are for American heterosexual males a vital phallic symbol: they go vrooom, they are powerful, they are fast, they spurt out stinky smoke (or did, until PC environmentalists made them stop). If you're going to make a normal heterosexual male drive a faggy electric car, why not go the whole nine yards and cut off his balls? It's as gay as your parents chaperoning the dance, as Vince Vaughan went on to say by way of "clarification." Because only a fag wouldn't mind his parents being at the dance, keeping him from any chance of getting any pussy.... Maybe I'm overinterpreting, but I don't think so, because I can't see a contemporary Hollywood film giving Vaughan's line to, say, Cameron Diaz or Judi Dench addressing a group of women.

Do I think that the line should be taken out of the movie altogether? Hell, I don't think it should have been taken out of the trailer. Since it was in the trailer, I can suppose it to be representative of the movie's general tone, and I'd rather know that in advance so that I can avoid the film altogether. (I wouldn't have wanted the trailer for I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry sanitized either; it would have been false advertising.) Movies about overaged boys who confuse their cars with their dicks are very rarely worth my money or my time. And that brings me to the next point about "PC": it isn't just organized campaigns against bigoted attitudes that offend mainstream America, but any individual dissent at all. In my experience, I am not even supposed to say that a movie is sexist, or that a joke is racist, or that a song lyric is misogynist, because it shows that I'm a PC tyrant who doesn't want mainstream America to have any harmless fun. And where is the harm in saying that electric cars are gay, huh? Nobody's killed by that. If I refuse to spend my money to support infantile Hollywood comedies in order to show how open-minded I am, that's my right (though just barely), but at least I can shut up about my objections. In that sense my friend is right: nobody is as Politically Correct, in the sense of not being able to tolerate disagreement with their political stance, as mainstream Americans.

I Don't Patronize Bunny Rabbits!

Whenever I start thinking that I might be better off after all if I were normal, something comes along to reassure me. In this case it was Ramon Esquivel's new play Nocturnal, which had its premiere at Bloomington Playwrights Project last week. I saw it last night, and while it's not my favorite kind of play, it was well-written, well-acted, and well-staged.

Three of the four characters are boys, high-school freshmen out to have some fun by defacing the seniors' official prank, a sign with "SENIORS" painted on it. (Yes, "official prank" is deliberately oxymoronic.) Their outing is interrupted by a girl a year or two older than they are, who had briefly dated one of the boys the previous summer. The ringleader wants revenge, not only because the girl stole his thunder but because his sidekick betrayed his plan to her. Besides, revenge is the code of the macho-wannabe geek. Things escalate as the leader tries to act out his movie fantasies; dares are issued and accepted. Insecurities are exploited, expressed, and confronted. But these are good kids, "smart kids who went to a good school, who were brought up in two-parent families, and who lived in a safe neighborhood" as the playwright insists, and everything turns out all right in the end. (I hope that's not a spoiler.)

I'm not complaining about the play, mind you. As I said before, it's thoroughly well done, and it's the sort of thing that most people seem to like watching. But replays of the anxieties of adolescence are like nails on a blackboard to me, and I'm not entirely sure why, especially since they have no point of contact with my own high-school years. Okay, I was a smart kid who went to a good school, brought up in a two-parent family, lived in a safe neighborhood. I was something of an isolate, but I did have people I could hang out with from junior high school onward. Some of the kids I knew smoked, drank, fooled around (heterosexually), and drove their cars too fast, but I never felt pressured to do any of these things, or anything else I didn't want to do. The trouble was that I didn't respect myself, not that other people didn't respect me; they did, in fact, respect me, for which I'm forever grateful. But I never tried to cope with my personal fears about being a queer, being a sissy, being a bookworm, about being fundamentally unlovable, by trying to prove anything. If anyone had dared me to do something risky that I didn't want to do, I am pretty sure I'd have given them a chilly glare and refused without any qualms at all.

When I wasn't in school, I spent my teen years reading, writing, listening to music, and learning to play guitar. These were all things I wanted to do, and I enjoyed them. Learning to play guitar gave me some common ground with the kids around me, which was important because I didn't have any other. There were smart kids, but as far as I know they weren't interested in the books and ideas that interested me. Mine was a small school (my graduating class was 95, after consolidating three townships), so there just wasn't a large pool of people to guarantee any like-minded spirits to keep me company. That didn't bother me too much; I knew that when I graduated I'd go to college and enter a world that suited me better -- which is pretty much what happened, if not quite in the ways I foresaw.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like there had been some other serious intellectuals around. There was one girl I met in junior high school, really brilliant, but my social skills were too undeveloped to deal with a girl; I behaved churlishly and lost touch with her for a few years, until we met again at college. But she was much smarter than I, and her interests were in other areas; we never really became friends. The first real friendships I made, after high school, were with other pop-folk musicians. I now see that I was keeping my distance from all sorts of possible contacts. It didn't hurt (or help, depending on how you look at it) that my family lived in the country, which limited the possibilities of just dropping in next door to listen to the newest Bob Dylan album. Then I came out, and found that I could be as alienated in a crowd of gay people as I'd ever been in a crowd of straight people. Would it have helped if I'd met another gay kid in high school? What kind of friends was I looking for? I still don't know. But I'm raising this question because the next one is: if I'd found a circle of people to hang around with, what would have happened when the groupthink began, when someone decided it would be cool to take a risk for the sake of taking a risk -- jumping off a railroad bridge into a lake thirty feet below, for instance, on a dare -- or spray-painting the wall of the school, the sort of harmless pranks that normal kids do? I wouldn't have hesitated, not for long: I'd have said, "No, thanks, count me out," and walked away without looking back. I've never had any tolerance for practical jokes, which is another thing that makes me weird.

And I don't feel that I missed anything because of these gaps in my experience. On the contrary: if there were a God, I'd thank Her for sparing me such adventures. But so many people do seem to think that pranks and contests of pride, shaming and humiliating other kids (or being shamed and humiliated by them), the games of hierarchy and social-climbing, are essential parts of growing up, that I understand at last why I've always been an outsider, and always will be. And rightly or wrongly, I don't consider it a deficiency on my part. This, I think, is why Nocturnal felt to me like a skillful portrait of life on another planet, except that it's the planet where I live too.

Nocturnal was written with a teen audience in mind, though it clearly appeals to people of all ages. That's another issue. The playwright says, “Adults can influence, encourage, inspire and teach young people, but what happens when adults are not around? Nocturnal is a world without adults.” This immediately reminded me of my personal favorite exploration of teen angst, Daniel Waters and Michael Lehmann's great 1989 film Heathers. In one crucial scene, the heroine's mother asks her, "How do you think adults act around other adults -- do you think it's all one big game of doubles tennis?" The world of adults is too often a world without adults: of people who think that video games and romance movies are real life, who want to be in with the cool crowd, who'll do anything in order to be popular, and who'll happily sacrifice anyone handy in order to protect their pride. Who will teach the teachers?

I Don't Patronize Bunny Rabbits!

Whenever I start thinking that I might be better off after all if I were normal, something comes along to reassure me. In this case it was Ramon Esquivel's new play Nocturnal, which had its premiere at Bloomington Playwrights Project last week. I saw it last night, and while it's not my favorite kind of play, it was well-written, well-acted, and well-staged.

Three of the four characters are boys, high-school freshmen out to have some fun by defacing the seniors' official prank, a sign with "SENIORS" painted on it. (Yes, "official prank" is deliberately oxymoronic.) Their outing is interrupted by a girl a year or two older than they are, who had briefly dated one of the boys the previous summer. The ringleader wants revenge, not only because the girl stole his thunder but because his sidekick betrayed his plan to her. Besides, revenge is the code of the macho-wannabe geek. Things escalate as the leader tries to act out his movie fantasies; dares are issued and accepted. Insecurities are exploited, expressed, and confronted. But these are good kids, "smart kids who went to a good school, who were brought up in two-parent families, and who lived in a safe neighborhood" as the playwright insists, and everything turns out all right in the end. (I hope that's not a spoiler.)

I'm not complaining about the play, mind you. As I said before, it's thoroughly well done, and it's the sort of thing that most people seem to like watching. But replays of the anxieties of adolescence are like nails on a blackboard to me, and I'm not entirely sure why, especially since they have no point of contact with my own high-school years. Okay, I was a smart kid who went to a good school, brought up in a two-parent family, lived in a safe neighborhood. I was something of an isolate, but I did have people I could hang out with from junior high school onward. Some of the kids I knew smoked, drank, fooled around (heterosexually), and drove their cars too fast, but I never felt pressured to do any of these things, or anything else I didn't want to do. The trouble was that I didn't respect myself, not that other people didn't respect me; they did, in fact, respect me, for which I'm forever grateful. But I never tried to cope with my personal fears about being a queer, being a sissy, being a bookworm, about being fundamentally unlovable, by trying to prove anything. If anyone had dared me to do something risky that I didn't want to do, I am pretty sure I'd have given them a chilly glare and refused without any qualms at all.

When I wasn't in school, I spent my teen years reading, writing, listening to music, and learning to play guitar. These were all things I wanted to do, and I enjoyed them. Learning to play guitar gave me some common ground with the kids around me, which was important because I didn't have any other. There were smart kids, but as far as I know they weren't interested in the books and ideas that interested me. Mine was a small school (my graduating class was 95, after consolidating three townships), so there just wasn't a large pool of people to guarantee any like-minded spirits to keep me company. That didn't bother me too much; I knew that when I graduated I'd go to college and enter a world that suited me better -- which is pretty much what happened, if not quite in the ways I foresaw.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like there had been some other serious intellectuals around. There was one girl I met in junior high school, really brilliant, but my social skills were too undeveloped to deal with a girl; I behaved churlishly and lost touch with her for a few years, until we met again at college. But she was much smarter than I, and her interests were in other areas; we never really became friends. The first real friendships I made, after high school, were with other pop-folk musicians. I now see that I was keeping my distance from all sorts of possible contacts. It didn't hurt (or help, depending on how you look at it) that my family lived in the country, which limited the possibilities of just dropping in next door to listen to the newest Bob Dylan album. Then I came out, and found that I could be as alienated in a crowd of gay people as I'd ever been in a crowd of straight people. Would it have helped if I'd met another gay kid in high school? What kind of friends was I looking for? I still don't know. But I'm raising this question because the next one is: if I'd found a circle of people to hang around with, what would have happened when the groupthink began, when someone decided it would be cool to take a risk for the sake of taking a risk -- jumping off a railroad bridge into a lake thirty feet below, for instance, on a dare -- or spray-painting the wall of the school, the sort of harmless pranks that normal kids do? I wouldn't have hesitated, not for long: I'd have said, "No, thanks, count me out," and walked away without looking back. I've never had any tolerance for practical jokes, which is another thing that makes me weird.

And I don't feel that I missed anything because of these gaps in my experience. On the contrary: if there were a God, I'd thank Her for sparing me such adventures. But so many people do seem to think that pranks and contests of pride, shaming and humiliating other kids (or being shamed and humiliated by them), the games of hierarchy and social-climbing, are essential parts of growing up, that I understand at last why I've always been an outsider, and always will be. And rightly or wrongly, I don't consider it a deficiency on my part. This, I think, is why Nocturnal felt to me like a skillful portrait of life on another planet, except that it's the planet where I live too.

Nocturnal was written with a teen audience in mind, though it clearly appeals to people of all ages. That's another issue. The playwright says, “Adults can influence, encourage, inspire and teach young people, but what happens when adults are not around? Nocturnal is a world without adults.” This immediately reminded me of my personal favorite exploration of teen angst, Daniel Waters and Michael Lehmann's great 1989 film Heathers. In one crucial scene, the heroine's mother asks her, "How do you think adults act around other adults -- do you think it's all one big game of doubles tennis?" The world of adults is too often a world without adults: of people who think that video games and romance movies are real life, who want to be in with the cool crowd, who'll do anything in order to be popular, and who'll happily sacrifice anyone handy in order to protect their pride. Who will teach the teachers?