Claude

This is just a snippet of an idea inspired by Claude, a dear friend since we were both teens at GHS. Claude has sent me deep into the weeds thinking about sexual identity. Much work needed. Much more to come.

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As children, Claude and I could have been best friends. I'm fascinated how that might have altered our lives. My masculine ideal was my dark, street-tough, movie-star-handsome father, a Welsh coalminer's son and Pittsburgh Yankee.

Daddy

To be my boyfriend, the boy must seem slightly dangerous and have dark hair. But more important, he must have aroused the notice of an A-list girl...Sue, Rilly, or Connie. I would declare this boy or that my boyfriend. The word would circulate and filter back whether I was said boy's designated girlfriend. If I was, it was a triumph over a girl rival. If I wasn't, I didn't care. My boyfriends weren't friends. We seldom spoke and never touched. Gender apartheid was nearly total and only started to shift around me in eighth grade. It took years to acclimate to the social order.

I had a boy cousin my age. Larry, with his perpetually sun-blistered face and pale yellow hair, had proved himself an uninteresting pest by the time we were toddlers. Before Larry and I started first grade, we went to the outhouse together, and when our pants were down, Larry convinced me to let him press his soft little tee-tee to mine. This was fucking, he explained. Even though my sins were due to wash away in Bayou Conway at eight, once I learned the definition of this new word, I believed my real value as a girl was gone forever.

In elementary school, I had a couple of friends who were boys. One was the flamboyantly effeminate Dickie; the other was Cliff who wore braces and could only walk with crutches. Though Claude was neither effeminate nor handicapped, I can visualize us bonding over our mutual love for Miss Rosa and her books.

I didn't develop any deep friendships until Jane moved to Gonzales in fifth grade. The first book I read was Anne of Green Gables. Jane and I had a chaste Anne-and-Diana girl romance. We held hands and kissed hello and good-bye. We told each other secrets, my most shameful, of course, was that I was chewed gum. We pricked our fingers and pressed our wounds together.

Jane and I had both seen an Ed Sullivan segment that opened with a wide shot of a serpent slowly wrapping around a tree trunk. While sensual music played, the camera zoomed in to reveal a beautiful woman in a snakeskin bodysuit. This seized our imaginations, and we spent countless recesses ecstatically snake dancing while teachers watched in silence and kids called us queers.