Buddy Ebsen

It’s the queers who made me. Who sat with me in the automobile in the dead of night and measured the content of my character without even looking at my face. Who—in the same car—asked me to apply a little strawberry lip balm to my lips before the anxious kiss that was fraught because would it be for an eternity, benday dots making up the hearts and flowers? Who sat on the toilet seat, panties around her ankles, talking and talking, girl talk burrowing through the partially closed bathroom door, and, boy, was it something. Who listened to opera. Who imitated Jessye Norman’s locutions on and off the stage. Who made love in a Queens apartment and who wanted me to watch them making love while at least one of those so joined watched me, dressed, per that person’s instructions, in my now-dead aunt’s little-girl nightie. Who wore shoes with no socks in the dead of winter, intrepid, and then, before you knew it, was incapable of wiping his own ass—“gay cancer.” Who died in a fire in an apartment in Paris. Who gave me a Raymond Radiguet novel when I was barely older than Radiguet was when he died, at twenty, of typhoid. Who sat with me in his automobile and talked to me about faith—he sat in the front seat, I in the back—and I was looking at the folds in his scalp when cops surrounded the car with flashlights and guns: they said we looked suspicious; we were aware that we looked and felt like no one else.

It’s the queers who made me. Who didn’t get married and who said to one woman, “I don’t hang with that many other women,” even though or perhaps because she herself was a woman. Who walked with me along the West Side piers in nineteen-eighties Manhattan, one summer afternoon, and said, apropos of the black kids vogueing, talking, getting dressed up around us, “I got it; it’s a whole style.” Who bought me a pair of ­saddle shoes and polished them while sitting at my desk, not looking up as I watched his hands work the leather. Who knew that the actor who played the Ghost of Christmas Past in the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol was an erotic draw for me as a child—or maybe it was the character’s big beneficence. Who watched me watching Buddy Ebsen dancing with little Shirley Temple in a thirties movie called Captain January while singing “The Codfish Ball,” Buddy Ebsen in a black jumper, moving his hands like...