Pride Story, 1992

Thanks Madonna!

It's 1992, I'm fourteen years old, maybe wearing my first undercut or side-shave, maybe my first undercut-and-bob look, even, and right on the edge of my first bleach-and-Manic Panic adventure, all to be followed by a freight train of firsts. I'm at Just A Nick, a hair salon in what's called "The Rivera" in Redondo Beach, where I've been getting my hair cut by Robert, a skinny, crook-toothed leatherman with one nipple piercing and an orange, receding hairline-turned-mohawk since I was in preschool. Robert had a great, loud cackle of a laugh.

Robert came into my life after my first barber, Michael Dino, died of AIDS in the early 1980s, and I don't know if Robert lived to see the end of 1993. One way of measuring gay history might be to divide it into pre-AZT and post-AZT. Robert passed out of my life before he died, or, rather, my life eclipsed childhood in a fury at the same time his own, final, eclipse began. Robert described me for over a decade with one word, "Ornery." <3

So, I'm at Just A Nick, and I'm hanging out, maybe waiting for Robert to finish dying my adoptive mother's hair its former Fairfax Red, itself a color not so far away from Manic Panic's Pillarbox Red, a staple of disgusting stains in teenager's bathrooms and scalps of the 1990s.

Robert loved Madonna. I mean LOVED MADONNA. At some point in the last years of his life, he spent an ungodly sum of money to slow dance with her at an AMFAR benefit in the dome of the Spruce Goose in Long Beach. Edged under the frame of his station's mirror were many photos, but the last two to join his altar of self were a photo of him with Madonna and a glamour shot of him in the leather tuxedo that he wore to dance with her. I remember how he was shot in the tuxedo, the mix of studs and rings in his ears - a look I would soon come to take for myself - sparkling with lens flare as a blue glow of gay power made a mandorla around his head and frame. He was unforgettable and proud.

Robert's love of Madonna extended to buying a first edition of her Sex book, which, for the uninitiated, had a polished aluminum cover decorated with only its title. And, there, in 1992, Robert shared it with me.

Memory is cruel and kind and a liar and trickster, and this is what memory tells me: That I literally sat on his lap or across his chair, while he pulled it out of its mylar sleeve and shared with me his most prized possession. He had already, long ago, clocked me for being what I am, and he knew the little boy with the long eyelashes and wavy hair that he loved to cut in David Cassidy waves needed. So...we thumbed through the book, together.

He was a little conservative. It's not a particularly saucy document, now, but at the time, it was "controversial." So I don't recall seeing all of it in great, intense detail. I have a strong memory of one photograph of Madonna, nude, hitchhiking, thumb-out. It was, very much, a peep show, a brief look into the world that I very much wanted to inhabit, or a world I could inhabit. Madonna in a black leather mask and harness set, sucking on her finger…. Hard masculine bodies in black and white, fascinations of jawline…. I think it was more of a quick pass than a deep tour, and I was left alone with it for a bit and felt like I had in my hands something like a work of art to be held, and never dropped.

I recall I think about my Queer friends who grew up in tiny towns with violent, conservative families, and I realize that for every door I wished were open to me when I needed it and wasn't, a thousand more doors were open to me than many, or even most.

By the time Robert put Sex in my hands, I was already doing things that were more than a little gay, but I didn't know what I was doing, I was scared, and I was so hungry and touch starved - joy starved. I wish I could remember more, and I wish I had the courage to have asked Robert every question that burned in my heart, especially the questions about that might help me to find other people like me and feel their breath close to my face and to find my reflection in their soft eyes.

So, yeah, Madonna's Sex made me a little gayer, and I'm glad for it. And, yeah, I miss Robert, always. I have largely cut my adoptive family out of any knowledge of my personal life, but I wish I could share every hot minute with a Robert, and I wish he had been there, later, when I needed an Elder and none were to be found.

Happy Pride to everyone who makes the invisible visible, in every way, and by any means necessary.