Tag Archives: Memory

Marooned off Vesta: more of why I love sf/f

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125aMy dad’s idea of a vacation was to go camping and catch fish. Unfortunately, these trips not only never involved a camper, they also never included tents. We slept in sleeping bags under the stars gathered around the dying embers of the fire we’d cooked dinner on. If it was raining, the whole family would crowd inside the cab of Dad’s pickup and try to sleep sitting up all squeezed together.

I wasn’t terribly good at any “outdoorsman” sorts of skills, and Dad never missed an opportunity to tell me just what a clumsy, stupid, sissy I was whenever I did anything incorrectly. Though, for the record, he never called me anything as nice as “sissy.”

So I didn’t much enjoy those vacations.

The last one we took, before my parents’ marriage took its final turn for the worse, was when I was 13 or 14 years old. Shortly before we had left on the trip, I had acquired a paperback copy of The Early Asimov, Volume 1, and had packed it along. I’m not sure why that particular book had jumped out at me in the small bookstore that we had visited with my Great-grandma on a weekend trip to a nearby town that was large enough to have an actual bookstore. My best guess is that, since Asimov was at that time the author of a monthly science essay that appeared in each issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction that I had recognized his name.

I remember waking up early in the morning several times on that camping trip, my parents and sister still asleep, and going to the pickup to retrieve the paperback book from my bag. Then I sat and read until Dad woke up. Just looking at the cover of my worn old copy of the book brings back memories of the early morning light, the sounds of wind in the leaves overhead, and the nearby creek.

The Early Asimov was first released as a hardcover, single volume book a couple of years before I found the paperback. It is a collection of a bunch of Isaac Asimov’s short stories from the first nine or ten years of his career; specifically stories that had not already been included in any other anthologies. But the book isn’t merely an anthology—in between each story, Asimov wrote about how he came to write the story, along with describing other stories he wrote at the time that either had never been published, or had been and were in other collections. These interludes were much more than mere introductions to the story, they amounted to an autobiography. And the story this autobiography told was how a Russian-Jewish kid from Brooklyn discovered science fiction in the magazine rack of his family’s candy store, and became a published professional sci if writer before he exited his teens.

Isaac’s personal story gave me at least as much hope and wonder about the possibilities of the future as his science fiction did. The stories themselves were entertaining and thought-provoking. Asimov clearly loved science, and he was perpetually optimistic that great things could be accomplished with the proper application of knowledge.

And he wrote good stories.

Not just a few stories. He published over 300 books. He wrote science fiction novels, of course, and collected his short stories into anthologies, but he also wrote science fact books, history books, books on literature, and so much more. I mentioned his monthly science column—he wrote 399 of those from 1958 until his death in 1992. About every year and a half he collected the last 15 to 17 of them into a book, wrote additional introductory information, and published them (Janet Todd Rubin gives a great explanation of the importance of Isaac’s science columns here: (Almost) Everything I learned about science I learned from Isaac Asimov). And then there were the many limerick collections…

But back to the sci fi:

His Foundation series, besides being the first collection of novels to be awarded a Hugo as a collection, established the concept of psychohistory: a science of applying mathematical formulas to the actions of large populations to predict various outcomes. His Robot stories were the first to posit artificial intelligences that did not turn on their masters, and he was the first person to coin the word “robotics” which has become the name of the real engineering discipline he described in the books.

And then there were his mysteries. Science fiction mysteries at first (including the Wendell Urth science fictional science mysteries), but also a series of mystery short stories set in contemporary setting (Tales of the Black Widowers, and sequels), and two straight murder novels. Though my favorite of those, Murder at the ABA which was set at a booksellers convention, isn’t entirely serious. One of the supporting characters in that one is Asimov himself, and he portrayed himself very self-deprecatingly, making his character the comic relief of an otherwise serious murder investigation.

I didn’t really know all of that at the time, but reading that book over the course of several mornings on that vacation, Isaac Asimov gave me hope that I could write science fiction and get it published, too. Hope not only that I could write and get published, but that there were people out there interested in the things I was interested in. I didn’t have to remain trapped, like the protagonists of “Marooned off Vesta” stuck with no propulsion, no radio, a limited amount of air, and a year’s supply of water. I could rig up a propulsion system from the things I had, and get to a safer place.

His writing style was described as unadorned. Some people complained that he very seldom described his characters or the settings. I think that was a strength. His stories focused on the plot. His characters were defined by their words and deeds. He described only those things that needed to be described to understand the story, leaving the rest to the reader’s imagination. Allowing the reader to imagine characters who weren’t always white, for instance.

He raised questions, and answered them with a mix of science and humor that made the future seem like a very inviting place. And his willingness in many anthologies and essays to share anecdotes of his encounters with other writers (not to mention the many stories of the times he was Toastmaster at a Hugo Award ceremony) made the world of science fiction writers and fandom seem an even more welcoming place.

He was quick to laugh, and quicker to make others laugh. Sometimes too quick. He had to have thyroid surgery at one point in his life, and when they gave him the tranquilizer before they move the patient into the operating room, he began singing and joking with everyone. When the surgeon came into the operating room, Isaac sat up, grabbed the doctor’s scrubs in both hands, and blurted out, “Doctor! Doctor! In green coat! Doctor, won’t you cut my throat? And when you’re finished, Doctor, then, Won’t you sew it up again?”

The nurses got him back down and the anesthesiologist put him under. The nurses later told Isaac’s wife that the doctor couldn’t stop laughing for nearly five minutes. When he included this story in one of his essays, he noted, “They say I’ll do anything for a laugh, but I think that making a surgeon about to take a scalpel to me laugh so hard he can’t hold an instrument may have been a step too far.”

I could easily ramble on and on about Asimov, the awards he won, the records he set, the serious science circles he moved in, and the many, many bookshelves in our house filled with his books. He loved knowledge and he loved explaining things (two traits that I know more than a little about), and he wrote in a way that encouraged you to think, to be curious, and to meet challenges with confidence and a smile.

I would lose my head if it wasn’t attached

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ClearThere are so many topics I want to write about now, but most of them are so outrageous that trying to figure out how to reasonably discuss them will take too much time from my other writing, so I’m instead going to write about how forgetful I am.

This story requires a little context. I’m not a morning person. At all. I consider myself exceedingly lucky to have worked most of my life in jobs that don’t demand that I be at my desk precisely at 8:00:00 am ready to go. While I have a lot of flexibility in my schedule, though, I still have to get to the office within a certain window each day.

My poor husband is not any more of a morning person than I am, but his work requires him to be there earlier than, frankly, I even want to be awake. And I have such a hard time getting up in the morning, that I have a three-level alarm system to get me moving. My husband is usually leaving for work about 15 minutes before the second alarm in my system goes off, so I’m usually still in bed at least half-asleep when he comes in to kiss me good-bye.

Monday morning I stayed in bed until the third alarm went off, so I had almost no time for anything to go wrong in my getting-ready-for-work routine. After I had eaten, packed my lunch, showered, gotten dressed, packed my backpack, I was getting all of my pocket stuff together: phone off charger and into one pocket, watch off charger and on my wrist, keys in another pocket, and wallet–

My wallet was not where it ought to have been. Now this is no cause for panic on its own, because I am one of the most absent-minded people on the planet, and despite decades of trying to teach myself to always put things in consistent places so I can find them, the reality is that I misplace either my keys, eyeglasses, phone, shoes, hat, et cetera nearly every day. So when my wallet wasn’t where it belonged, all that meant is that I needed to check the five other places where it sometimes gets left around the house. That only took a couple minutes, no big deal, usually.

Usually.

My wallet wasn’t in the usual places. So I started looking underneath things, pulling out drawers and packs, poking into the pockets of coats in the closet, pulling pairs of pants out of the hamper and checking their pockets, and so on, and so on, and so on…

Throughout this process, I am getting increasingly angry and frantic. At first I was just muttering under my breath, “Where did I leave it?” Which soon became “Where the f– did I leave it!?” Soon I was no longer just muttering. How could I do this to my self again?

About forty-five minutes later I had turned over every corner of the house, when it finally occurred to me to check the car. As soon as I think of the car, I know exactly where it is. On Sunday, after we’d finished grocery shopping, we took the car to the automatic car wash. Because we had been planning to do that, as I was getting in the car in the grocery store parking lot, I pulled my wallet out of my pocket and set it on the inner console, because wrestling with my pocket to extract the wallet so I can put cash in the little machine at the car wash after I’m belted in is not fun.

I ran out to the car, my mind boiling over with the recollections of the times our car has been broken into, along with all the recent reports (both in the news and from neighbors) of overnight car prowls in our neighborhood.

I got to the car. Relieved to see no broken windows. There, sitting on the console, is not only my wallet, but a very visible wad of the bills the car wash payment machine had given me as change. I unlocked the car, retrieved the wallet and money, locked the car again, and rushed back inside.

I was running quite late by then. Fortunately, I had no morning meetings on Monday, and no one anxiously waiting for me to handle any emergencies when I got in.

Tuesday morning, I tried to get up and moving sooner. I had one meeting before noon, and I was feeling a little worried about something else going wrong.

My worries were not misplaced. I couldn’t find my keys. I tore the house up, again, checking all the usual places. The wallet has only four or five usually misplaced locations; the keys, unfortunately, have about thirty such places. Once I had checked those locations with no luck, I pulled everything out of my backpack and felt around in the bottom of its compartments before I gave up and called my husband to see if he remembered seeing my keys at an unusual spot. He had not.

We haven’t gotten any extra house keys made since the new doors were put in (I just keep forgetting), so I didn’t have any way to lock the deadbolt behind me. My husband told me to just lock the lower lock and get to work.

I hadn’t spent as much time looking, but I had to catch the next bus if I were going to make my meeting. I didn’t run the almost half-mile to the bus stop, but I walked really fast. Which wasn’t entirely easy, because my hasty re-packing of the backpack had left things cattywumpus in there, and I had an uncomfortable lump in the middle of the pack pressing into my back the whole way.

By the time I got to the bus stop, One Bus Away indicated I had about seven minutes until the bus arrived, so I sat on one of the benches and contemplated the pros and cons of trying to straighten out the contents of the backpack. I felt the lump in the center of the back of the pack… and it felt an awful lot like keys.

This backpack has a weird little elastic pocket on the back panel of the main compartment. It is odd shaped and in a spot that’s difficult to get into, so I never use it. Monday afternoon the weather had been very warm, so before leaving the office I had shoved my jacket and my keys on top of everything else in the main compartment before walking home. When I reached home, my husband was already there (as usual), and the door was unlocked, so I hadn’t needed my keys to get into the house. The keys had apparently worked their way into the pocket, not sliding down all the way into it until after I took the pack off when I got home.

I felt like such an idiot.

Wednesday morning, for whatever reason, I woke up, fully awake and ready to get out of bed, about a half hour before the second alarm went up. So I was puttering around the living room and kitchen when Michael needed to leave.

He came downstairs and asked, “Where are your keys?”

I walked over to the coffee table, pointed to my keys, wallet, and hat. “That’s the wrong question,” I explained. “If my luck keeps running badly, today it will be something else entirely. My glasses, or my phone, or—”

“So, where are they?”

As I was gathering my glasses and phone, he started listing other things. “Where’s your jacket? Your iPad? Your headphones? Lunchbag?”

I asked him why he puts up with me. He just laughed and kissed me good bye.

One name, two name, real name, true name

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Me sitting on the hood of a car.
Grandma took this picture of me when I was three or four.
I’ve written more than once about names: the names I’ve been known by, or the names people I’ve known have used. Each time I’ve at least circled around the question of what, precisely, do we mean when we talk about someone’s real name?

You will find a number of people who insist that only one’s legal name can be considered the real name. But being a person who has legally changed his name (and having known a few other people who have done so), I can assure you that there are also a significant number of people who insist that a legally changed name, while certainly legal, is not real. They insist that only the name given by one’s parents at birth is real, and all the rest are counterfeits… Or nicknames, or something. I confess I have trouble understanding their reasoning, because anytime I tried to discuss it with one of these people, they always reverted to insulting or dismissive language. “You’re just changing it to rebel against your parents,” or “So you didn’t like your name? grow a little backbone and embrace it.”

… Continue reading One name, two name, real name, true name →

Four Childhood Crushes

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Clockwise from upper left: Race Bannon, James West, Mowgli, Major Don West.
Clockwise from upper left: Race Bannon, James West, Major Don West, Mowgli.
Last week lots of people were sharing lists and sets of pictures of their childhood crushes with the hashtag #4childhoodcrushes. I was thinking this might be too late for me to come to the party, except that when I did a google search on it, I found a big cluster around the tag dated in 2010. One thing that was a bit disconcerting was how many of the people I follow on social media were posting pictures of TV and movie characters that didn’t come into existence until I was in my 20s or later. Clearly I’m the old, old man of several online social circles. Continue reading Four Childhood Crushes →

Oh, what was it?

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The other night while I was walking home from work (which takes a bit over an hour) I had this brilliant idea. For a while last year I participated in Throwback Thursday (#tbt or #Throwback) by writing a blog post inspired by one of the large collection of scans of the contents of Grandma’s old photo albums. It was fun. It was an easy way to make me write about something other than politics or the news.

But it isn’t something I really wanted to do constantly. Particularly since I was trying to avoid posting pictures of living relatives without their permission—or at least to minimize it. So that limited which pictures could be used. There’s also only so many childhood memories that I can make at least potentially interesting to other people.

So I took a break, figuring I would do it occasionally, or maybe pick a month next time, or something. Anyway, there I was, walking home in the drizzle, listening to music on my headphones, cars zooming by in the dark, and I had an idea of something else that I could do on Thursdays; make it the usual Thursday thing. It was a topic that could include Throwback Thursday. So I would have the benefits I get from having a weekly scheduled task, that could sometimes be a Throwback Thursday post, but most of the time would be something else. And that something else would, I hoped, be of slightly more interest than just another walk down memory lane with Gene.

It was brilliant! I even thought of a cute name that had the same initials as the short hashtag (tbt). I resolved to start my first post as soon as as I got home.

When I walked in the door, my glasses fogged up. I heard my husband call to me from upstairs, but I couldn’t understand what he said because I still had my headphones on. I had to turn off my headphones, take off (get myself untangled from) my backpack, peel off my wet hat and coat, hang up the coat and the hat, get out of my shoes, get the rest of my damp work clothes peeled off and tossed into the hamper, then pull them back out to check the pockets which I always forget, figure out where I set my glasses down when I came in the door, put on some sweatpants and fuzzy socks—all the while as Michale and I babble at each other about dinner and/or our days or something else that one of us thinks is important—check the mail, collect my phone and iPad and watch and headphones to put on their chargers…

And finally I sat down and woke up my laptop. I jumped to WordPress right away to start the first post in the new Thursday idea…

…and I couldn’t remember what the nifty notion was. I don’t just mean that I didn’t remember what I meant to start writing for today’s post, I mean that I couldn’t remember the umbrella topic/personal meme that was going to be my new regular Thursday thing. The thing that had the initials T B T and could include Throwback Thursdays as a subset.

I remember having the thought. I remembered the entire internal conversation about how I’d do it. But the idea itself? Gone.

And it’s still gone, days later. I haven’t got the slightest idea what it was. None.

I hate when that happens!

Not out to sea

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The television version of the Doris Day Show was one of the most schizo programs ever.
The television version of the Doris Day Show was one of the most schizo programs ever.
One day in middle school, in one of the boys-only classes1 one of the guys was going on about some actress he really had the hots for. Several of the other guys agreed. And then a general discussion of other actresses that guys thought were hot got rolling. I don’t remember any of the actresses in question. I remember that at least a couple of them were on shows that my family never watched, so I had only the slightest idea who they were.

Eventually one of the guys turned to me and asked which actress I thought was hot. It was asked in a fairly challenging tone of voice which clearly communicated that the topic of the conversation was shifting to What-stupid-thing-can-we-get-him-to-say. It’s one of the more subtle forms of bullying, asking the kid no one likes a question that to the ears of an adult who might be listening sounds like an attempt to include you in the conversation, but all the kids know that this is really just another test. Can you come up with an answer that isn’t going to result in derision and teasing?3

I knew where this was going, and I knew no matter what I said my answer would be wrong in some way. But ignoring the question could go even worse, so I quickly scoured my brain and said, “Doris Day.”

Even I was a little surprised when that name came out of my mouth.

Continue reading Not out to sea →

Cousins, part 3

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Cousins David, me, Tom, Trudi, and Chip, plus Aunt Silly, Great-uncle Lyle, and Great-aunt Viv (I'm second guy from the left).
Cousins David, me, Tom, Trudi, and Chip, plus Aunt Silly, Great-uncle Lyle, and Great-aunt Viv (I’m second guy from the left).
When I was 14 years old I went on a road trip with my Aunt Silly and her family. They lived in Phoenix, so I was sent on a bus from the tiny town in northwest Colorado to Arizona. After spending about a week in Phoenix, we were all loaded into a big station wagon and drove to California where, among other things, we visited my favorite Great Uncle and his wife and youngest son, after having spent several days visiting with the same Great Uncle’s older daughter and her family, then up to Washington were we visited Grandma and Grandpa P, then back to Colorado where everyone visited my folks and our Great-grandparents and a few other relatives from my dad’s side of the family, before Aunt Silly and family got back on the road to return to Phoenix.

It was a big family trip. Our misadventures were nothing like anything one would get in a road trip movie, but there were a few. Continue reading Cousins, part 3 →

Haven’t you outgrown that?

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Me at age seven, being photographed by Mom's biological father.
Me at age seven, being photographed by Mom’s biological father.
I hang onto things. Being a packrat from a long line of packrats, this should come as no surprise. And it’s something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. Take the photo I’ve picked for today’s post. If you look closely, you’ll see that the striped shirt I’m wearing is actually several sizes too small. I kept wearing that shirt, not caring that it would no longer cover my belly, for several years. I vaguely recall the argument that arose one time when I wanted to wear in to school (I think it was early in first grade). I loved my blue-striped shirt, and since I could still pull it over my skinny shoulders, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t wear it!

Several times over that years I have found myself in a conversation with an acquaintance or friend about one of my collections. I collect (or have collected in the past) a lot of things: Continue reading Haven’t you outgrown that? →

Action Boy!

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This picture was taken when I was four.
This picture was taken when I was four.
I mentioned previously that one of my uncles declared, when I was a child, that the reason I was a sissy was because my parents let me play with G.I. Joe action figures. Except, of course that he didn’t call them action figures. He called them “dolls.” Again and again he repeated the word “doll” during his rant. And he said it in the same tone of voice that he said words like “sissy,” “pussy,” and “girlie.”

When I came out at the age of 31 (yep, it took a while), more than one relative on that side of the family repeated the theory that the reason I was a homo was because of those G.I. Joe dolls I had as a kid.

People who understand the medical science know that a person’s sexual orientation is determined sometime before the age of two (it is almost certainly earlier, but it’s much more difficult to measure before then), so toys I received as presents at the age of seven didn’t have anything to do with it. But the claim is wrong in another way.

I never owned a G.I. Joe action figure as a child.

caparaboxWhat I had, was Captain Action.

The original G.I. Joe was created by toy designer Stan Weston. He licensed the idea of his articulated action figure that could have a infinite number of costumes and accessories to Hasbro. The deal wasn’t an exclusive license, so Weston took Hasbro’s money and formed his own company.

Once he saw that Hasbro was going with only soldier accessories, he secured licensing deals with D.C. Comics, Marvel Comics, and King Feature Syndicate to produce a similar action figure, but one that was a something of a shape-shifter.

Captain Action’s exact shape differed from G.I. Joe in several ways, the most noticeable being that his head seemed a bit small for the body and the facial features are a little weird. The reason was that, thanks to all of those licensing deals, among the accessories you could buy for Captain Action were kits to transform him into characters such as Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Aquaman, Steve Canyon, Buck Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Flash Gordon, and so on. Each of those kits included a “mask” that completely covered Captain Action’s face, giving him the face of the character in question.

5The Christmas that I received Captain Action, I also received the Superman kit. Note that there is no action figure in the box. That is a full-head face to go over the Captain Action figure’s head, a costume, and other accessories, but no action figure.

The thing I remember most about the Superman kit is that when I put the Captain Action clothes back on the figure, I often put the red Superman boots on him. I even remember explaining to someone why I thought the red boots looked better with the Captain Action costume. I also remember that another kid swiped my Krypto the Superdog toy. And I never got it back.

CA_Ba3The following Christmas, several relatives got me G.I. Joe accessories, because they were easier to find (and probably most of them didn’t realize that Captain Action wasn’t a G.I. Joe). They only kind of worked. Captain Action’s chest was just enough bigger than G.I. Joe’s that I couldn’t fasten the shirts and jackets that came in the G.I. Joe kits. So when my Captain Action was dressed up as a marine or a sailor, he also had his shirt open, showing off his hyper-muscled chest. It made him look like a member of the Village People—except that the band didn’t exist until ten years later.

Now that I think about it, maybe that was part of the reason that one uncle was convinced the action figures were making me gay: my Captain Action was always baring his chest!

There was even a Captain Action comic book. I owned a copy of this, and it was still part of my collection years after my action figure had fallen apart.
There was even a Captain Action comic book. I owned a copy of this exact issue, and it was still part of my comic collection years after my action figure had fallen apart.
My uncle wasn’t the only person who had misgivings about boys playing with dolls. When Hasbro introduced the first G.I. Joe, they invented the term “action figure” to label and advertise it precisely because their marketing research indicated that a lot of parents were reluctant to buy a doll for a boy.

While I remember seeing figures for Dr. Evil, Captain Action’s nemesis, I don’t think I ever saw the Action Boy figure in stores. I know, from reading collectors’ web sites, that there were Action Boy figures and there were accessory kits to turn him into Robin (to go with Captain Action in the Batman kit) or Superboy.

It’s probably just as well. As I recall, my Captain Action was laying in my toy box completely naked most of the time. Whenever I wanted to play with him, I had to spend a while tracking down enough clothes and accessories to dress him up as someone. If there had been a naked Captain Action and a naked Action Boy lounging about in my toy box, that uncle would have probably had a stroke!

Speaking of childhood memories…

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Blurry picture of me sitting in front of a christmas tree.
I’m 3 years old in this picture, taken at my maternal grandparents’ house.
I mentioned earlier about one set of Christmas pictures showing me with cowboy toys, even though that was apparently the first year I started begging for an Easy Bake Oven. Several of the toys in the pictures are related to the television show, Have Gun, Will Travel, which I was told years later by my grandmother was my favorite show at the time. I don’t remember the program, at all. I only found one picture from that Christmas, which I’ve posted here. This is taken at my maternal grandparents’ house, so I suspect the only presents visible are from those grandparents.

My mom has a picture of me in the same “Have Gun Will Travel” shirt, along with a cap gun and a couple of other cowboy-related toys, taken in front of our Christmas tree in our own living room. But I don’t seem to have a copy of it.

Publicity photo for The Rifleman
Chuck Connors as the Rifleman and Johnny Crawford as his son in a publicity photo. Chuck was shirtless in a lot of episodes.
While I have no recollection of Have Gun Will Travel, the show I do remember, which was on the air those same years (both of them aired their final episode in April of ’63) was The Rifleman. I have a lot of very vivid memories of that show, even though I was only three when it went off the air. I don’t remember the plots of any episodes, but I have a lot of memories of the star, Chuck Connors, and the many times he appeared shirtless on the show.

While there is still some debate about how much genetics play in sexual orientation, the overwhelming evidence has shown for a long time that what arouses us emotionally and sexually is pretty much set in stone by the age of two.

Let me repeat that: by the age of two.

This seems weird and a little creepy, but it makes sense when you remember that we are fundamentally social creatures. We are definitely hard-wired to form various kinds of bonds with the people around us. When a little boy exhibits the signs of having a crush on a girl or woman in his life, we think it’s cute and adorable and a nature precursor to other feelings that will come along later in life. That’s all we’re talking about here, except the fact is that for some of us we developed crushes on males.

Congressman Shock has a great anti-gay voting record, but posts pictures of himself to Instagram like this, has never married, and has lived with a string of similar male "roommates" for over a decade.
Congressman Shock has a great anti-gay voting record, but posts pictures of himself to Instagram like this, has never married, and has lived with a string of similar male “roommates” for over a decade.
And if the adults around us noticed, they freaked out and tried in various ways to redirect those impulses. That redirection is doomed to failure. The closest anyone gets to success at that is that some non-heterosexual kids become fairly good at faking it later in life (though most seem to be pretty bad at it, cf Aaron Schock or Marcus Bachmann).

I have wondered why I don’t recall this show that my parents and grandparents all say was my favorite, while I do have memories of the other show. It’s possible that the adults around me noticed that my enthusiasm for Chuck Connors wasn’t the same as the way I talked about the other show, and so they were discouraging my interest. I suspect that it is more likely that Have Gun… was also the favorite show of one of my grandparents or parents, so the shared enthusiasm made it a stand out. I have some vague recollections of Dad commenting disparagingly about Chuck Connors when one of his movies came up on TV a few years later, so maybe I only got to watch the Rifleman occasionally, and it was safer not to talk about it around Dad.

I don’t know when my parents first began worrying that I was queer. The Easy Bake Oven wasn’t the only toy that I got told I couldn’t have because it was a girl’s toy… But I should point out that when I finally did get the oven, I quickly converted it to a device for amateur chemistry experiments. And the toys I most remember loving to play with in those early years were my Tonka trucks—especially my bright yellow steam shovel. So I wasn’t that gender non-conforming.

Publicity photo from the television show, the Rifleman.
Publicity photo from the television show, the Rifleman.
I have previously said that I think my first celebrity crush was Race Banon, a character from the cartoon series Jonny Quest. But I suspect that it was more likely Chuck Connors’ character in The Rifleman.