Pride Month: The Secret Nobody Told Me to Keep When I Was a Kid
Here I look back on my many private TV crushes when I was growing up as well as why Pride Month is just as important as ever in 2025.
If you read my previous piece on how reading at a young age started my journey as a writer, then you also know I left readers with a promise to continue that story into my coming out journey so…where to begin?
I started my own inner dialogue about liking boys when I was still in the single digits. At the time, labeling myself anything didn’t make sense since I was only 5 or 6 years old so my biggest challenge was probably learning how to tie my shoes by myself. I know I thought there were some cute boys in my class and (dating myself) my first official TV crush was David Cassidy as Keith Partridge on the early 70s sitcom, The Partridge Family. Keith was the lead singer of the family pop band, was usually unlucky in love and he wore his hair on the long side, which was of the era. But I think it was the final season of the show when Keith also started wearing this white choker around his neck on the show and it sent my pre-pubescent feelings into a tailspin even if I didn’t understand what I was feeling yet.
While Keith Partridge was my first TV crush with The Brady Bunch’s Greg Brady (Barry Williams) a close runner-up, what I didn’t realize at the time but definitely do now is that I already knew without anyone ever saying a word to me that I should not talk about me liking boys to anyone. This was the secret nobody told me to keep but keep I did…for a long time.
This was the early 1970s in South Bend, Indiana, mind you, so there were no gay people that I was aware of and, given my age, I was only exposed to so much TV since there were only 3 broadcast networks on TV and most homes had one TV. That’s it. Shocking, isn’t it? Besides the main three networks, there was PBS, which didn’t interest me much once I grew out of Sesame Street and The Electric Company, and then WGN out of Chicago and local stations that showed reruns of Gilligan’s Island, Green Acres, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. Simpler times so I wasn’t even aware I was missing anything.
What wasn’t missing is an understanding that I felt alone for that early part of my life, which is strange given I had five siblings and a neighborhood full of kids who I spent time playing with after school and weekends. It’s akin to being an adult in a room full of people but feeling incredibly alone. Honestly, that solitude feeling was just a part of me and I didn’t question or talk about it with anyone.
I remember as early as the first grade having little crushes on the other boys in class but I never would dream of acting on them or even letting on that I felt anything towards them. This was normal for me. As for girls, I always had a lot of girl friends (definitely a space between ‘girl’ and ‘friends’) and if any of them ever expressed interest in wanting to ‘go together,’ I would usually tell them I only felt friendship (which was true!) or I’d just ignore they ever put it out there and hoped it would never come up again, which was usually the case. I kissed a few girls here and there but probably because that’s what I was supposed to do.
And, sure, as I got older and moved into middle school and high school, things got a little more complicated as puberty took hold. By now I already had a dual side to myself that just expanded. Publicly, I mimicked what my classmates were doing like keeping a list of the cutest girls at school or talking about Farrah Fawcett and the other Charlie’s Angels. But privately at home, I had a slew of Teen Beat and Tiger Beat magazines that featured both the hottest male and female celebrities and a lot of movie and TV content. Nobody would ever make the leap to think I was buying them just to see if there any shirtless pictures of CHiPs’ Erik Estrada in the latest issue. There almost always was. Case in point…
One funny memory that came back to me while writing this post is a time when I was 10 years old and Mom and one of my sisters (Cathy, I think) took me with them to the theater to see the movie, The Deep. It was a sexy thriller based on a book by Peter Benchley (who had also written the novel, Jaws) and most of the buzz was because Jacqueline Bisset comes out of the water at one point in a white t-shirt so you could see easily see her breasts. I think there’s another scene where she has to change clothes in front of a bunch of men but her back is to the camera so you don’t see much but her bare back. But I do remember one point when Bisset was on screen in one of her more revealing moments and my eyes were suddenly covered up by Mom and Cathy. At the time, I remember thinking they were so silly because I was thinking, ‘I don’t care about seeing her breasts. Where’s Nick Nolte?”
Now, I should say, while all this was going on, I still wasn’t having any big revelation to myself about why I was feeling any of this. I guess when we’re kids, we’re just living our lives and we don’t really start thinking about things until we get older. I know everything I was feeling was my normal. Besides, it was the early 1980s so I was way too busy being distracted not only by all the prime time soaps popping up on the air (Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing, Falcon Crest) but also even bigger distractions in Mr. Estrada and other TV hunks like BJ and the Bear’s Greg Evigan, The Dukes of Hazzard’s Tom Wopat and John Schneider, Magnum PI’s Tom Selleck, Dallas’s Patrick Duffy and, of course, Gregory Harrison from Trapper John. M.D. with opening credits I would never miss for good reason. (And when Harrison made a TV movie called For Ladies Only in 1981 about an unemployed actor who finds fame as a male exotic dancer, my 14-year old self just about lost his mind. I’m sure I wasn’t the only young boy feeling this way!)
Of course, while I knew I was a great secret keeper, I still had a very real paranoia about being found out so as I moved through my teen years I had some excellent camouflage on my bedroom walls for everyone to see just how straight I was. Posters of The Dukes of Hazzard’s Catherine Bach in her Daisy Dukes and Lisa Hartman from Knots Landing were prominently displayed as well as fabulous scrap book with a lot of pages ripped out of TV Guide and other magazines of my favorite female and male TV stars.
Of course, the women (Farrah, Lynda Carter, Victoria Principal, Cheryl Ladd) were at the front of the scrap book and I had a few pages devoted to some of my favorite guys in the back. Besides, who would possibly suspect that I also had a poster of Harrison from For Ladies Only rolled into a tube far under my bed? Nobody, of course!
Junior high and high school pretty much went along like this. And, yes, I had a few dates in high school but was it a shock that I chose to go see All the Right Moves with John Adams High School cheerleader Becki Kissell because I really just wanted to see a Tom Cruise movie? (Becki did give me a little kiss at the end of the night and, another shocker, we never went out again!). Outside of these few instances, I really wasn’t a part of the social circle in high school. I worked on the school paper and literary magazine but I wasn’t going to football or basketball games, I didn’t go to the school dances and I wasn’t spending my weekends at whatever parties might have been happening. Most of the time I didn’t even know these things were going on and I didn’t care either since I was either spending time watching TV, reading or playing Yahtzee with my siblings.
I was writing for the John Adams Tower and the Footprints literary magazine but I wasn’t keeping a journal at this point. That changed once I got to college at Indiana University - Bloomington. Again, I was still keeping my big secret and living away from home didn’t change that much at all. I had my straight guy friends in the dorm (and then straight guy and girl friends once we moved off campus) and we’d eat meals together, study together, play cards and, once we were all 21 or older, we’d hit the bars. But I think given this was now the mid-to-late 80s, there were more gay characters popping up on TV and film that I was paying close attention to but there was also the AIDS epidemic, which scared the hell out of me and everyone else. I overheard too many people say that maybe AIDS would kill all the gays (I won’t use the more colorful language I usually heard but you can imagine) and we’d all be better off. None of this was the most encouraging scenario to suddenly start waving a pride flag.
Once I began keeping a journal, I wrote in it a lot and wrote about everything going on but over time I realized that the journal was for me and me alone and I could write whatever I wanted. I kept it in a secure place so roommates in college or, when I was home, family wouldn’t find the need to snoop through it or even know it existed. But it came in really handy once I had the guts to start writing about a same sex crush I had in my junior year.
After flirting with the idea of a journalism major, I ended up a telecommunications major (now called The Media School) and I had a professor who was newly out of grad school named Chris Anderson. He was young, nice looking and, even better, he was passionate about television as I was. I couldn’t ask for more in a crush, right? I took several of his classes including one called MTM Productions that was all about the history of a television production company. We started with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and went through the 70s and 80s not just studying the high quality programming that came out of MTM (St. Elsewhere being among them) but we had a screening time every week where we’d watch a key episode or two of whatever show we were talking about in class that week. I was in heaven with that major and all of Chris’s classes. Watching TV, talking about TV and then writing papers about it? In so many ways, I was really just preparing for the career I currently have where I do pretty much the same thing!
But Chris (he told us to call him by his first name since he was too close to our age to be ‘Professor Anderson’) also had office hours so I would usually pop by with whatever stupid question I could think of or sometimes we’d just talk TV. If he ever noticed that I occasionally would look a bit too long at the little tuft of chest hair that would stick out of the top of his buttoned shirts, he never let on. Plus, we had so much to chat about since it was 1988 and there was this new sitcom called Murphy Brown that was one of the best shows on TV alongside other great TV like The Wonder Years, Roseanne, China Beach and thirtysomething.
Side note: I still have the paper I wrote for Chris entitled "Historical Narratives of Characters in Prime Time Television” where I wrote about several dramas (China Beach and Magnum PI among them) that really dove into a character’s history outside of the present day in their respective shows. For example, we heard about Thomas Magnum’s (Selleck) past in Vietnam but then there were several flashback episodes that gave so many more layers to the character as well as how it impacted his present day. I remember that paper pretty much wrote itself and I had a feeling I’d done a good job but I was beyond elated when Chris gave me an A+. He liked me! He really liked me! (Ok, not the way I wanted but still…)
But I still remember writing that journal entry where I cautiously wrote (in ink!) about maybe being attracted to Chris. It felt liberating to write that down on paper even if I followed it with questioning if maybe that meant I was bisexual, which makes me laugh now. Honestly, I knew that I only liked guys but I wasn’t ready to admit it even to myself so this was at least a way of slowly coming around to the idea that maybe I was gay.
And even after writing about Chris in my journal, I wasn’t suddenly out and I still kept up the masquerade of having a few dates with some girls in college but they honestly were few and far between. Nothing physical ever happened and I would write about them in my journal but it was more about how nothing ever happened and I was okay with that for whatever reason. Trust me, I was really okay with that.
So when did I actually, truly come out? I was 24 years old and living in Indianapolis living the good life as a manager at a Blockbuster Video store. (Another true story I’ll have to write about another time.) There were several gay guys in the Blockbuster employ and I loved eavesdropping on their conversations about where they went on the weekends and maybe even some boyfriend drama. There was no internet so I had no clue where any gay bars might be in Indianapolis so I’d listen to every detail and I realized I was starting to care less if anyone thought I was also gay. In fact, I started feeling like I was missing out on some fun times and deep down, I’d by lying if I said I didn’t want join them on their weekend outings. I just didn’t know how to make that first step.
Eventually those first baby steps came when like all those melodramatic prime time soaps I loved watching, I looked in my bathroom mirror one day and said “I am gay.” It was liberating and I laughed at how easy this incredibly difficult thing ended up being. Then, I just waited for the right moment to let all my gay work friends (including my buddy Marty, who I am still in touch with today) that I was one of them. What a shock they would have since I was still so confident I was fooling everyone.
Soon thereafter, I made plans to go out to dinner with one of my very gay co-workers, Darrin. He came to pick me up at my apartment and I told myself I would tell him before we went out so I could truly enjoy the night. So I just told him that I was like him and Marty and the other gays and wanted to go to the places they went on the weekends. I can still see the lack of surprise when the words came out of my mouth and he gleefully - a little too gleeful - told me that everyone already knew and conversation about when I would finally come out was a hot topic amongst the Blockbuster gays. I was mortified for half a second and then just shook it off and jumped into this new world because for the first time in my life, I began to have friends who knew something about me that I had never shared with anyone.
It was the biggest weight off my shoulders and I realized that nobody had kept me in the closet except for me. If times had been different or I had grown up in a bigger, more progressive city, I might have come out sooner than 24 but who knows if that’s even true. We all have our coming out journey and I know mine wasn’t as terrible as some stories I’ve heard so I didn’t spend a lot of time beating myself up over not coming out sooner.
Suddenly, I had a group of friends to hit the Indianapolis gay bars with on the weekend, go dancing, drink, watch some drag shows and just spend time with. I didn’t date or hook up in those days but was just enjoying having what felt like my first true friends. It felt so good. Plus, despite my years as a Lothario with the ladies (ha!), I had no idea how to pick up a guy or let one of them pick up me. I also had a romantic idea that I’d like to get to know someone and date for awhile before anything physical happened. I really had the best intentions in that regard even if they all went out the window a few years later.
One of the other best things to come out of this time is I made a conscious effort to stop the negative talk I regularly had going in my mind. There was an endless stream of negative thoughts that played on a loop that something was wrong with me, nobody would ever really love me and a life of loneliness was the only life I would know if I was truly a gay man.
It brings tears to my eyes now how hard I was on myself when I didn’t need to be but besides always feeling different, I also had terrible acne as a teen so that didn’t help my self esteem one bit. That said, it was around this time that I began to move away from that kind of hate-filled self-talk and replaced it with positive thoughts and affirmations. Plus, I suddenly had people who not only didn’t reject me for being gay but they embraced it.
This, my reader, is what you call a community.
However, it’s not like life just fell into place since I naively believed I’d keep my new gay world separate from the rest of my life. I was living a few hours away from my family and I had this new family (I guess now they call it a ‘chosen family’) and I didn’t see the point in merging the two worlds. Yes, I was naive and this was only an extension of some of that shame I still carried as I worried my family and former friends would reject me.
However, as the worlds came together and I began telling family and close friends, nobody rejected me. Not one person. Sure, there may have been some who didn’t understand or approve necessarily but nobody shut me out. That was empowering in itself and also taught me over time that it wasn’t my responsibility to worry about how other people might react or receive this new me. The younger me didn’t even know that was a possiblity!
And who knows what would’ve happened had I stayed in the midwest but after returning to IU-Bloomington to finish my degree (a whole different college experience since I was out by this point and had so much fun — more on those years in another post down the line) and then living a year back in South Bend to save money, in 1995 I headed west to Los Angeles. If there are tentpoles with the big events that shape your life, this was one of them. I was coming into my own personally and suddenly was living in a place where there was a huge LGBT community and I was ready to live an authentic life. I was out to family, friends, at work and there was no going back in.
To be honest, I never had the kind of close relationship with my Dad where we’d have deep talks about anything so I never actually told him I was gay but he wasn’t blind and I know he’d say things to my sisters like “Jimmy just hasn’t found the right girl yet.” They would just say “Dad! He’s gay!” Bless them. And, years later, Dad has welcomed Boyd into our family in such a kind and loving way, that’s all I ever wanted or needed from him. [If you’ve read my “Memories of Mom” post from last year, you know that she passed away before I could come out to her.]
And, yes, I still kept journal writing about all my dating experiences both serious and, well, just fun as well as getting my foot in the entertainment business as an executive assistant at what was then known as Columbia TriStar TV (aka Sony Pictures Television). It’s been awhile since I journaled but a lot of the entries here on Substack feel like I’m writing in a journal again though this time, I welcome everyone to read it.
The last thing I’ll say about my coming out for this post is that it was the best thing to ever happen to me. I was fortunate to eventually feel safe enough to share who I was with a few people at first and then, decades later, write about it proudly here. And while it may seem easier in the 21st Century given there’s LGBTQ+ content everywhere (see my recent post on 10 LGBTQ+ shows to make sure to watch), unfortunately there’s still a lot of hate, ignorance, misunderstanding and an administration trying to reverse any right that has to do with freedom to be who you are. I can see why there’d still be fear depending on where you are in the world.
All that is why Pride Month is still important and always will be. It’s that reminder that there’s a community filled with people like you and allies who support you and will help you go through anything. You may feel as alone as I did growing up in Indiana but there is a life ahead where you’ll find your place and your people.
Somewhere out there, someone may be watching all the parades and decorations and positive images on social media and take that step in their respective journey to full accept who they are. It’s why I don’t shy away from posting on my own social media accounts when Boyd and I have an anniversary or I see a quote or saying that needs to be shared. If you’re someone who is biding their time for whatever reason, come on out when you’re ready and you’ll realize that it might not always be easy but it’s a hell of a lot better than being in.
Happy Pride, everyone!
Thanks for sharing, loved the TV references woven in!