I changed the name of this blog to "Beekman Place," in reference to the location of
Auntie Mame's Manhatten apartment when little ten-year-old Patrick was delivered to her.
Auntie Mame was one of my favorite books as a pre- then full-blown-adolescent. Many other queers of my acquaintance also hold Mame in a special place in their heart. The whole idea of living with an eccentric-but-loving adult, I think, appeals to the outcast kid, especially those of us who grew up with psychotic-but-distant parents, which describes about 90% of the homos I knows.
I found this book probably right around the time that I was starting to figure out that I liked boys more than I liked girls as objects of romantic...
fancy, ahem, and probably my only disappointment with it was that Patrick didn't grow up to be a big ol' queen (However, the real-life
Patrick Dennis was a mostly-gay switch-hitter, a fact barely mentioned in his
Wikipedia entry). But, for me, at the time,
Auntie Mame not only gave me clues towards my future love life, it also made me feel like I wasn't the only weirdo in the world, and that somewhere, sometime, that weirdos could find other weirdos and live happy, weird lives together.
And I think that's what I want to concentrate my intellectual energy on at this point in my life. Yeah, sure, I'm a bitter, cynical, Bush-hating liberal and just reading the paper on a bad day is enough to make me want to end it all (in a tasteful-yet-dramatic fashion, of course), but maybe if I make myself push the same vibe that saved me as a young strangeling, I can work some positive something-or-another back into my life. And who knows, maybe some little gay weirdo of the 21st century will read some of this and find a clue that he won't always be alone.
Yep, it's worth a shot.
