“Prosperity depends more on wanting what you have than having what you want.” – anonymous
1961: Divas ‘R’ Us – Eyes Right… Eyes Left… Four sets of drawings done as a junior/senior in high school to amuse myself between bouts with homework and occasional depression about being an oddball seemingly intent only on developing my math skills.
Now I’d be called a ‘dork’. Then the word used was ‘square’. An athlete I was not. Truthfully I was pretty uncomfortable in my skin, but I wasn’t exactly sure why. Making these pictures was part of my early but misunderstood art therapy.
They express what I really desired to be in my heart of hearts, but knew was impossible, unless I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Christine Jorgensen. Intriguing as the idea sounded, it was out of the question; I wasn’t ready for that kind of derision.
Truth to tell, I was a cowardly lion just wanting some respect, despite the fact that I’m a curious Gemini. In reality I was probably just one more sweet sixteen-year old boy growing up in America in the early 60s who really thought I’d be a lot happier if I were a girl on my way to being a woman, than being the strange boy I was, on my way to being… What? I wasn’t sure. But manhood looked and sounded pretty scary to me. Too much responsibility that I certainly didn’t feel ready for. What to do? Grin and bear it! as they say? To cover, I became a Great Pretender as a teenager, ‘laughing and gay like a clown’ hoping I’d figure something out eventually if these perverse desires for a boyfriend, instead of a girlfriend, didn’t somehow go away, allowing me to become ‘normal’.
Nevertheless, I kept working at appearing ‘normal’ to myself, as well as my peers in high school. My first year at Thornton, I had jumped from a grammar school class size of eight to over two hundred freshman. At first a bit overwhelmed by such radically enhanced social interaction, I eventually adjusted to being a small fish in a much bigger pond than the one I had grown up in. By senior year I was involved in several extra-curricular activities: Glee Club and its double-quartet spinoff The Maroon Crooners, both Latin and French Clubs, the Tripod yearbook staff, the One-Act Play. I was also lucky enough to be selected for inclusion in a group named Junto, the brain-child of favorite teachers Harriet Patrick and Robert Stanton. Derived from the word junta, it was a small group composed of juniors and seniors, who met monthly – at first in the library after school, eventually in the evenings at the home of Harriet Patrick – to discuss issues and topics not covered in normal high school classroom settings: the fine arts of architecture, painting and sculpture and the lively arts of music, dance, theater; philosophy and psychology; the phenomena of culture, western civilization, even a brief history of food: all heady stuff for a kid still physically living in the country and journeying into the city each day to get a dose of education, and still not sure where it was all leading…
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