Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [19]
Other than these sledding memories I have no recall of ever seeing any of the neighborhood girls anywhere, and if you were to press me I could make the case that there were, in fact, no girls at all in the neighborhood. Years later, it would turn out, we learned they had spent a lot of time reading, and playing instruments, and making things, and telling stories to each other and to Barbie. This would serve them well once they left childhood behind, but for now they were invisible to our existence, and I guess we thought we were all the better without them. Boys will not only be boys, but boys like to be with boys. And some boys like to be with certain boys a lot.
Sammy Good was different. In 1965, you could be different—to a point—and that was considered OK. For instance, you could have blue eyes while the other kids had brown eyes. Your hair could be a rusty color while others’ may be sandy or dark. There were tall kids, short kids, kids who rode on bikes, fat kids, skinny kids, even kids with chicken pox (and, yes, they all loved hot dogs).
What there weren’t were boys who fell in love with other boys.
Of course, there were those boys, but we didn’t know that in fifth grade. It’s not that anyone was opposed to homosexuality; it’s just that there was no need to oppose it because it just didn’t exist! It would be like opposing unicorns or Atlantis or men without nipples—I mean, you couldn’t hate what isn’t real.
This made it all the more critical that if you were a boy who liked boys (or a girl who liked girls), you had better guard that secret like it was your own personal Fort Knox, sealed airtight and impenetrable. You had to behave knowing you were an alien who landed from another planet, but in human form. No one knew you were an alien, and if they ever found out who you really were, they would annihilate you. The knowledge that you were not “like others” was so scary to possess that if you came across another boy-loving alien, you could not let on to that homosexual who you really were.
But, of course, the other alien would know. Yet you dare not risk making contact with each other, for if you were caught by the Normal People, they could ruin you. Sometimes you had to turn in one of your own just to prove you weren’t one of “them.” It was an often devastating existence to be gay in the fifties and sixties (and seventies and eighties, and… ), and it made you sometimes do very cruel and unnecessary things to yourself and to others.
Such was the case with the boy three doors down from us on Lapeer Street. The Good family seemed like educated people, which immediately made them stick out. There were many fathers in the neighborhood with no college education and some had even barely gone to high school. But in those days, being educated or smart was not considered a drawback. It was something that was admired, respected, even aspired to.
Also in that time, the educated and professional class was not separated from the lowly wage earner and the factory serf. As their income differential was negligible, they lived among each other and shared their knowledge. The college professor down the block tutored the neighborhood kids in math, and in turn the garage mechanic father would be “over in a jiff” to fix the professor’s carburetor. The dentist was available to pull an emergency tooth for the plumber’s kid, and the plumber was on call to fix the leak in the dentist’s house on a Sunday night. That’s just how it was.
And so on our two democratic, egalitarian dirt streets, this was who lived there, going from west to east: Presbyterian minister, manager of the five-and-dime, spark-plug assembly-line worker (our dad), steelworker, postmaster, shirt salesman, the osteopath and his mother. On the other block: truck driver, retired couple, department store manager, high school teacher, janitor, disabled elderly person, grocery store checkout-line bagger, retiree, city councilman, single mother with son, banker. It was the American middle class. No one’s house cost more than two or three years’ salary, and I doubt the spread