The Ultimate Unavailable Man

I was talking to someone the other day, and we got on the topic of when/how we first knew we were gay.

I hadn't thought about it in a very long time.

Fact is, I don't know if there was ever a moment when I said to myself, "Whoa, I'm gay." I wish I could point to a moment in my childhood when a cartoon piano had fallen out of the cartoon sky and landed on my cartoon head. Alas, no go.

But upon reflection, I did remember the moment when I knew that nothing was ever going to be the same again. I was probably thirteen or fourteen years old, and my family had been broken up among various relatives after the sale of the house I grew up in, but before our new house was ready for moving into. My mom and dad and I were staying with my Aunt Barb and her family -- among them, my slightly older cousin, Tom.

I was an impressionable young child...

Okay, I was a hopeless, friendless nerd.

And I sort of glommed onto Tom, who, being older, was, in my eyes, automatically cooler. So I appropriated all of his tastes. I stole his taste in music (he was, unaccountably, going through a phase of obsessive admiration for The Beach Boys and Frankie Vali and the Four Seasons). And, most importantly, I absconded with his love of comic books.

Late one night, I was reading one of his Conan the Barbarian comics, trying to get to sleep. I don't know if you've actually read comic books, but they tend to idealize the male body, and very often these superheroes are kinda scantily clad. In this particular comic, Conan and some equally barbaric guy who was his nemesis (only blond... I remember that), were battling it out, and in one particular frame, the baddie got Conan into a bearhug and was trying to squeeze the life out of him. I remember the lurid descriptive text: "breast to breast, belly to belly."

Needless to say this all had a suprising effect on me. One that caught me completely by surprise and -- how to put this delicately? -- had to be cleaned up afterward. It was the first time that had ever happened (when I was awake), and was a clear embarkation on my career as an homosexual.

Among the boyfriends of my youth were Aquaman, Spiderman, and Namor, the Submariner. This might in some way explain my ability to crush from afar on completely unavailable men.

My love affair with comics eventually petered out (forgive the pun) after we moved, but not my fascination with how the comics tended to portray the male body. Today's superheroes remind me of body-building gym queens; too muscly for my tastes. But clearly, the way comics are drawn didn't affect just me. I suspect the had a profound affect on a whole generation of gay boys. Witness the work of Joe Phillips.

Tell me he didn't read some Conan as a child.