The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

Growing Sideways, or Why Children Appear to Get Queerer in the Twentieth Century If you scratch a child, you will find a queer, in the sense of someone “gay” or just plain strange.1 One boy says that he called himself a “filly”-the word, he thought, for a “homosexual seagull.”2A girl of nine thought herself a vampire, a shadowy figure with shadowy secrets surrounding women.Someone else tells how, “idiotic as it may seem, watching The Bible on a lousy tV during an acid trip [in college] with my best friend” brought up childhood sexual memories surrounding this film and thus enabled him to “half-acknowledge” himself “sexually” for the first time.3Certain queer comedians, who grew up in the sixties before there were any gays on tV, wryly explain that they “found themselves” as children in tV personas (some of these almost forgotten today): Ernie, the odd boy on My Three Sons; Robin of Batman; The Beverly Hillbillies’ Miss Jane Hathaway; or Josephine the Plumber (in ads for bathroom cleaners).4Aside from these confessions, there are dark and beautiful renderings, emerging, extending, from novels and films, such as I privilege throughout this book, beyond the puzzles they tease us with here: children who hang, suicide-like, in spectral forms from flowering trees; lying children spying in a Hitchcock fashion (an isolated eye peering out from a stairwell, making a diagonal visual plane), spying on their teachers who Dreaming is nurseD in Darkness.