Gayish.

I’ve been a Céline fan since hearing her since in French on a radio station out of Kingston, Ontario back in the mid-late 1980s. Here’s one of her latest interviews. She is a couple months older than me. I find her attitude to be very inspiring.

Random photo from an Internet search

I think it was 1984, just shortly before my 16th birthday. My family was camping at a popular campground and marina; we were situated near relatives and friends in our Steury pop up camper. The camper could sleep eight, but it was just the four of us for this trip. Nearby were campers with a permanent site; they were friends of my parents. Their youngest daughter was staying with them and we had fun being teenagers. Her older brother visited for the evening; he would have to head back into town in the morning.

It was late Friday night and we were enjoying a campfire on the shore of the “north pond”. Lake Ontario was a mile or so away, separated from this inlet of water by a thin sandbar. It was easy to get to the beach by boat; from there Lake Ontario looked like an ocean. In the still of the summer night you could hear the waves crashing on the sand in the distance. The small ripples on the pond barely lapped the shore. Once in a while you’d hear a boat rock a bit as it bumped up against its tie down.

The fire burned brightly; it’s familiar warmth was comforting. Slowly everyone retired for the evening; as time closed in on midnight, it was me and the older brother sitting around the fire. We just chatted. I didn’t know him very well; our paths had not crossed a lot, but he seemed down to earth. He had a stocky build, traces of a mustache and typical 80s hair that wasn’t too feathered but still had some wind blown look to it. He liked fishing and the water and doing things along the lakeshore.

I don’t remember what we talked about. I do remember that I felt that I didn’t have to be so guarded around him. The guys in the neighborhood back home were good friends but I didn’t have any ‘feelings’ toward them other than hanging out with the guys. This guy, we’ll call him Charlie, well, he was cute and my biology was telling me that I found him attractive and I was being flooded with feelings that were confusing. I’d known for a long time that I was “different” but what that meant. My parents and sister were asleep in the camper. Outside of the canvas walls I was sitting with a guy I didn’t know that well. I felt like I was burning up. The fire was hot. He might have been drinking a beer. I was not. My not quite 16 year old hormones were raging and he wasn’t any the wiser. He was just sitting there, we were just talking, and no moves were made. I knew that he wasn’t different like me and I was confused as to why I was feeling the way I was feeling. When it was time to call it a night, we shook hands and I felt a tingling just with the handshake. What did this mean for me? I went to bed, opting to sleep on the couch.

My dad was up fairly early the next morning for work; after he left I heard splashing around in the pond and saw Charlie swimming. He was wearing only swimming trunks and was taking a bath in the pond. I thought that was good idea and I did the same. We horsed around as we washed our hair in the cold water and then he got out of the pond, dried off, got dressed, and went back to town, just as he had planned.

Still confused by what I was feeling I was, at the time, inexplicably sad. Other friends would visit throughout the day and my Mom was concerned about how mopey I was. It was confusion, it was horniness, it was a crush on someone that had absolutely no idea as to how I was feeling, and now he was gone. After lunch I went for a walk and found an isolated spot in the woods overlooking the other side of the pond. I sat for a while, under a tree and instantly found myself crying. It was a few minutes before I started to realize what “being different” really meant. My hormones were confirming what I had known deep down all along: I was attracted to other guys. Not just hanging out with the guys, I really liked guys and I wanted to be close to them. I wanted our skin to touch, I wanted to be close to another guy. I wanted to do things that I was afraid to even fantasize about.

It would be several years before I saw Charlie again. We shook hands, we chatted a bit. He’s probably married with a litter of grown kids and probably even a few grandkids by now.

And he never knew how he had inadvertently impacted my life that night we spent just shooting the breeze around a campfire.

The second episode of the TV sitcom “Alice” was called “Alice Gets A Pass”. It was broadcast on August 29, 1976. In this episode, a famous football player, Jack Newhouse (Denny Miller) that went to college with Mel is passing through Phoenix and wants to stop by and see his old college buddy. They plan a fishing trip together for the coming weekend. While at the diner, Flo and Mel get Jack to take Alice out on a date. They have a great time, go on a couple more dates and Alice hints that she would be interested in taking their relationship a little bit further. Jack comes out as gay, to which Alice responds, “Are you sure you’re not just jolly?”

Jack confirms that he is indeed gay and hopes that they can still be friends. Alice rethinks her decision to allow Tommy to go on the fishing trip with Mel and Jack, which prompts Jack to confront Alice at the diner on her reasoning. He makes a compelling argument: “if I was straight and Tommy was your daughter, would you allow her to be around me?”, which Alice says she would have no problem with that. This causes her to rethink her position and she allows Tommy to go on the fishing trip.

At the end of the episode, as Alice and Tommy are discussing the trip, she tells him that Jack is a homosexual. Tommy is a little surprised, because everyone at school talks about how you should be able to instantly tell if someone is gay but overall he doesn’t care. He likes Jack for who he is. Alice and Tommy hug and the credits roll.

Now, I remember watching this episode as a young kid (I was eight years old when this episode originally aired), probably in reruns on a weekday morning or something. For 1976 and especially for the second episode of a brand new sitcom, this seems like a very edgy subject to tackle but it is well handled from beginning to end. The episode feels honest and I find it to be a surprisingly positive episode of the gay community. The comedic bits are handled mostly well; there’s a few 1970s era digs in there but overall the episode flows well and the message is positive. Imagine, a positive gay episode in 1976, and again, it was the second episode ever of “Alice”.

Props to the writers, cast and crew for taking that change during the bicentennial.

The reason I remember this particular episode so well is because of Tommy’s reaction at the end. His fairly nonchalant attitude towards Jack’s sexuality struck a good chord with me. In the era of Anita Bryant and the pie in her face, hearing a kid around my age speak his truth about his attitude toward gay people actually made me realize that not everyone in school, despite the taunts I would endure from time to time, was evil. There were good people out there, people that didn’t really care who I fell in love with as long as I was a good person.

This is something we all need to remember from time to time.

Now, because you know you want to sing along with it, here’s my favorite version of Linda Lavin singing the theme song from “Alice”. I have gathered nine different vocal takes of the theme song from its nine seasons, and the “second season long version” theme is my favorite. I remember when this new version debuted, I had to explain my sister the different between “Early to rise” with the first season and “Early to rise” with this version. Having a VCR back then would have made the argument much easier.