Show notes
Here’s a transcript of the video: When I was a teenager, my best friend was a guy named Eddie Russell.My parents didn’t approve of him, and I always assumed that was because he was a Yankee. He’d come from elsewhere and had lived in Miami, so he was very suspect.But I didn’t fully understand until my mother pulled me aside one day and said,“I think you should hang out less with your friend Eddie… because he’s a little bit sissy, so people might get the wrong idea.”This is a theme in the South. People are always worried that somebody’s going to get the wrong idea about something. In Eddie’s case, I didn’t see the sissy part. I saw him as simply another boy who liked movies the way I did and loved to talk about them.Because of this Southern mentality, my mother never stopped worrying about how I appeared to the world. I had bad skin at the time, so she was always on a hunt for blackheads. She would creep up on me sometimes and say, “Let me get this one right here,” which was hideously embarrassing to me.And she knew that I walked funny—like a duck with my feet turned out. It’s the way I still walk, by the way. So she would constantly say, “Straight—turn your feet straight.” I remember going up to the mountains of Virginia once with her, and she had a chance to be with me all the time then. She would practically follow me as I walked and give me that instruction:“Straight. Go straight.”I read a Dear Abby article when I was sixteen where Abby said that a parent should be concerned if their sixteen-year-old child has not kissed a member of the opposite sex. So I made that my project. One evening I took a girl I knew just slightly—a sixteen-year-old girl—out to Roy’s Drive-In, and we kissed a bit.When I’d done it, I felt that I had completed a merit badge. It was an assignment that had been given to me by Abby, and I had come through with flying colors, because I could no longer be suspected of being gay.I was certain at the time that I was mentally ill, because I had read somewhere that homosexuality was a mental illness. I knew I needed to tell my parents if I was to be cured of this terrible thing. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.Then I decided that the way to save myself from shame would be to become paralyzed from the waist down, so I couldn’t act on those desires. It’s hard to say this, really. I can’t believe that I ever thought that, but I did. I don’t know whether I even considered ways that I could become paralyzed that weren’t too bad—in a minor car accident, for instance. Also, if I became paralyzed, there wouldn’t be any expectations from my future wife that I was bound to have. I would have an excuse for not performing.The afternoon I realized that I was beyond saving, I took my grandmother—Mimi—to her beauty parlor to get her hair done. It was in the Old Carolina Hotel, which had a newsstand in the lobby.When I walked in there, I saw this magazine that leapt out at me. It had a man on the cover who was clearly there for me and me alone. I felt like he wanted me. It wasn’t like your standard bodybuilding magazine or anything else. This was a man who was—well, I thought—very desirable. He was sitting behind satin sheets in bed and giving me a look.Well, I didn’t have the nerve to pick up the magazine, which is ironic since the guy who ran the newsstand was a blind man. But I even worried that his other senses might be heightened because of his blindness. He might be able to hear where I had walked. I was completely paranoid about the whole thing, so I left it alone.The magazine was called Demigods, and that name was emblazoned in my head so much that it lasted for years. I would remember the name of that magazine.When I went back out to my car in the hot summer afternoon—a little red Volkswagen, my first car—a song came on the radio called “Walk on the Wild Side.” It wasn’t the Lou Reed version. It was another one used in connection with the movie of that name. It starred Jane Fonda, and she played a hooker.It was a very smoky, sultry song.“You know the odds are against going to heaven six to one.”And I felt that I had finally reached my complete downfall, that I had been condemned to this life of sordid whatever.At the time in North Carolina, homosexuality was referred to officially as “the unspeakable crime against nature.” I had this illustrated for me when I was a high school student at Broughton High School in Raleigh. I had this really vile trigonometry teacher, a guy who was quite sadistic in his need to torture his students. I remember he told us very early on that many of us weren’t going to get this thing, and if we didn’t, watch out—because we were going to be out of there.Then one day we got word from the front office that the teacher was not going to show up for work that day. We were all delighted, because we figured he’d been fired for being cruel or something. But it turned out that he had been arrested for “crimes against nature” in the woods at William B. Umstead State Park.He was the first person who made it clear to me how terrible it would be to follow my desires. That was the lesson I brought out of that. I was glad to see him go because I didn’t have to take that class anymore, but he had been caught for unspeakable crimes against nature.And that was it for me. That was the only example I needed to shut down my life. I did not want to become a ho-mo-sex-ual… that war chant that so thrummed in my head at the time. So I didn’t. I made up my mind not to.Of course, I did come out. San Francisco helped, as I’ve said before, in a big way. It gave me a place to feel safe and to be myself.But it wasn’t until years later that my friend Nick Hongola heard this story from me. I told him the magazine was called Demi-Gods.And he said, “Oh my God, I think I’ve got one of those.”He had known some old gay man who had left him, in a sense, all his early porn. And the porn was very mild stuff, but one of them was called Demi-Gods.He showed up at my house the next day and said, “Is this the magazine?”And I said, “Nick, that’s not just one—that is the one.”So I had this chance many years later—thirty years later, maybe forty—to look at the magazine that I didn’t have the nerve to pick up on the stands.The guy on the cover that I was so in love with was named Larry Kunz. I hope that’s not the way it’s pronounced, but it looks like that: K-U-N-Z. He was wrapped in a shower curtain—a rather cheesy-looking shower curtain—and he was sitting on the edge of a bathtub, not in bed at all.But I paged through the magazine, and it was this time capsule of ’60s gay life. Everybody was in posing straps. It was really kind of wondrous, after all those years, to sit there and look at it and feel no guilt, no shame, no embarrassment—just to observe it for what it was.What struck me most about this fading artifact was how profoundly innocent it seemed. The guilt that it had once provoked in me wasn’t there at all. It was kind of silly in many ways. I flipped through it and found people whose names were Troy Saxon—which is about the most ’50s made-up name you can think of—and another one called Mr. Mike Nificent.There were ads in the back like the ones I remembered from my childhood—the ones where you’d buy sea monkeys and other such things. But these were for gay-themed things that the reader might enjoy. A pith helmet… what else? Anyway, you get the point. It was very silly. And I felt very silly for having ever feared this thing.I wish that I could go back and tell that terrified sixteen-year-old that this thing I had feared the most would be the source of great inspiration to me, and would inspire my life’s work—which is exactly what happened. Being a gay man has been my greatest joy. Letting go of that shame was the most important thing I ever did.And I hope that nobody out there—well, I know some of you are still living with that kind of shame—but don’t. Just don’t. You don’t have to. You can let it go. You can be yourself and not be punished for it.So thank you for coming along, and I’ll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit armisteadmaupin.substack.com/subscribe