Someone from my high school class posted a video of 50s rock and roll, kids like ourselves dancing to Danny and the Juniors “At The Hop”, and the first thing that struck me was that, just as I remembered, a number of the couples dancing in the video, just as we did at the time (knowing nothing about Lindbergh or the “Lindy Hop”), were girls. None of the couples ever were boys. That was unthought and unthinkable, never occurred to any of us that I was aware of. But it was perfectly common and acceptable, and not even to be noticed or remarked, that two girls would form a dance couple if a boy was not available to dance. For me this experience was from around 1958, when I turned 12 years old.

I recall the term “queer” from perhaps as early as the 6^th grade but I don’t recall ever having a clear understanding of what it meant. If you wore yellow on Thursdays you were “queer” and that is all I knew. I understand that my experience is just a tiny fragment of it all, but that is what I remember.   I also do not remember ever being aware until well into adulthood that my best friend, Bobby B___, was African American. The term “African American” was some 20 years from coming into use. We were both “Bobby” and we lived just down the street from each other and for a few summers we played together and were friends. Although I had bunked with and been friends with Negros (I use the respectful term that I was taught and that was used at that time) at summer camp when I was 9, 10 and 11, I never made the connection to Bobby B___. His father was Italian, a shoemaker who had a tiny shop in downtown Holliston. His mother was African American, but I never thought of her in any racial way. She was Bobby’s mother, that was really all. I recall her making us peanut butter sandwiches on occasion. I can picture her in the kitchen of their house but I don’t remember what she looked like. Bobby is dead now and I never really knew his siblings, and his house is gone too, across from the grade school we attended, razed and replaced with someone else’s home, I can’t really picture it, though I have driven by it numerous times in the last thirty years.

I am struck and torn by the ways in which politics and advertising have, over my lifetime, forced their way into my consciousness and warped the way that I see the world. I once saw my friend, Bobby B___, as simply my friend. I once saw my bunkmates at summer camp as just who they were, not as Negros, or African Americans, or Blacks, though I was not unaware of their skin color, but just as the kids they were. Perhaps this change, this racialization and gender orientation awareness has been inevitable.  Perhaps it is moving somehow toward, or back to, the child’s world I remember, one not divided by race and gender orientation, just as we were not then. As more and more people proudly claim and express their heritage and their selves, the multiracial and multicultural diversity of our all of our backgrounds becomes better known and understood. The narrowness of making judgement on the basis of a shade of skin color or gender orientation is seen more and more absurd and senseless.

But these are just a few late night thoughts.  I can’t pretend to understand or resolve any of this.  I am going to bed.  See you in the morning….