quote:
For Michael, the awareness began in the fourth grade while he was watching "The Blue Lagoon," a movie about a pair of love-struck teenagers shipwrecked on a beautiful island. Seeing the young male character, tan and smooth, Michael felt a wave of warmth move through him.Growing up, he did all the normal Oklahoma things. He talked with a rubber-band twang, he loved the smell of the Tulsa Speedway, and he ordered Dr Pepper at Sonic by hanging out the window of his truck. Still, the Blue Lagoon boy kept visiting him.
It was as though Michael was being culled from the herd. Inside him were contradictory feelings of terror and curiosity. The magnet pulled him.
Last year, when Michael was 16, he had his first sexual experience. Everything flowed and the pieces fit -- the boy's skin, his bony chest, even saying his name sounded right. They fooled around the way other teenagers fool around: when parents were at work. The romance ended abruptly. Michael was devastated. He started writing poetry in a notebook.
I think of you all day,
I think of you all nightI can't wait to hold you tight
I think of you all morning,
I think of you all afternoon
If I could, I would rope you the moon.
Other crushes and romances followed, each searing and short-lived but adding to the growing evidence that Michael might be gay.
Full of impulses:
Now a year later at 17, Michael has short, blond hair, a square jaw, the roseate remnants of acne and the sandpapery beginnings of a beard. He is uncharacteristically sincere for his age, telling customers at the pet store where he works after school, "You have a real nice day." Michael struggles with school -- he is a 17-year-old sophomore -- but he can take apart anything mechanical. As a little boy, he'd put foil on the bumpers of his toy cars and simulate stock-car crashes. A Dale Earnhardt Jr. poster hangs in the bedroom he shares with an eight-foot Burmese python. He leaves his dirty clothes on the floor but doesn't drink or smoke, two facts he reminds his mother of when she starts to pray or weep over him.
He would rather watch the Blue Collar Comedy Tour than visit Internet chat rooms to look for hookups. "That kind of dirty talking, I don't want sex," Michael says. "I want a decent relationship."
Still, he is 17, full of impulses. One day in PE class, a good-looking preppy guy on the bleachers strips off his T-shirt in the hot gymnasium. Before Michael can catch himself, his eyes drift. Stop looking at me, the other boy tells Michael in a voice loud enough to humiliate. This is the turning point at school. His secret is out.
"He was wanting to kick my ass," Michael later recalls. "I told my dad about it. He said, 'I'd kick your ass, too, if you were looking at me.' " Officially, ass-kicking is not allowed on school grounds since Oklahoma adopted anti-bullying laws. But Michael's life at Charles Page High turns miserable. He is called a faggot in the hallways. For his own safety, he starts avoiding places where he could be trapped.
While the rest of the country is laughing over "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," Michael stops using the restroom during the seven-hour school day.
Reminds me of everything I don't miss about growing up, and about the Prairies.
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posted 27 September 2004 08:22 AM
What?? So just looking at a shirtless guy (unless he's gay) is verboten, now?
BLUSH!! 
