Five Boyhoods, published in 1962, is five short memoirs written by men who grew up in sequential decades starting in the 1880s and ending in the 1940s with John Updike.
The short memoirs give fascinating insights to what it was like to grow up a boy in America a century ago. The first one reveals how his father, as a medium, tricked his audiences. The author worked selling his uncle’s papers at six years old. I didn’t let my kids anywhere without me at that age.
One author mentioned he never heard “homosexual” or “rape” growing up, though they definitely happened then as often as now. Another author said nothing about sex or the body was talked about, and his parents didn’t even hold hands in front of anyone.
My uncle and aunt on one side and an uncle on the other side were/are gay. My brother is gay. I’m bisexual. My oldest niece is gay. We’ve been fortunate enough to grow up in a world where we can find and support each other, where people will help us fight for our rights.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I was born in ’81 to a 19 year old mother and her husband, who had an 18 year old daughter that year. Mom joined the air force, and when she was 23, her husband shot her. The Air Force flew her to California to heal.
Mom grew up in a small Appalachian church and was whipped until blood ran down her legs for wearing pants as a teen. She almost always wore pants when I was a kid. She limped and her face was half paralyzed from the shooting. She’d been beautiful, and she still was, on the right side. The left side was frozen in a wide-eye grimace.
Her first husband died from a heart attack when I was five, living in California with Mom. She married the man who nursed her back to health, and he adopted me. He gave me a sister and a brother, and I was a bossy older sister, I hear. In California I attended kindergarten, and my main memory from that year is standing on stage with dozens of other students singing, “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land.”
We left California the Spring I turned 6, and moved to Little Rock, Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor. I had one friend in Little Rock, but all I remember is walking around the housing area on the base with her. I think she was older than me. But I was 6, playing outside without my mom, so that’s something I have in common with the boys in Five Boyhoods.
I turned 7 in Orlando, Florida, where Dad was honorably discharged. He worked hard to make a good life for us. He was well loved by everyone he worked with, all his life. I remember him running beside me, holding on to my bike while I pedaled, letting go and cheering me on. I remember riding on his back at a school field day and he raced other similarly encumbered Dads. I don’t think he won. I was a chunker.
Mom was 19 when I was born, and the man who became my Dad was 17 that year. My parents were young, but well liked in the neighborhood and community. Mom hosted Buddhist meetings in our home; she converted in California when she was healing. We would spend major holidays with family in Virginia with our Christian farmer family on mom’s side, and in Dad’s parents trailer in South Carolina. Orlando, South Carolina, and Virginia might as well have been three different countries.
I was the oldest of the cousins, as mom was the oldest of her siblings, and Dad was only 17 when I was born. His sister had a son a couple years younger than me, and they lived in Florida, right behind our elementary school. We would sneak onto school grounds to play on the playground, climbing the giant tires, tire mountain. Making potions in the sand.
In Virginia, we had huge family meals, and family reunions. Mom’s seven brothers and sisters and their families all gathered at Grandma’s house. The younger kids would go play while I helped prepare the meal, or hid from the noise and read a book. I wasn’t much help, and I got a lot of reading done. The men would sit in the den, watching wrestling under the glass-eyed stare of four buck heads mounted on the wall, Grandpa’s cigar smoke wafting among the antlers.
Mom was infected with HIV and Hepatitus C when she was shot. Dad knew, but us kids didn’t know Mom was dying. Ronald Reagan hated gay people so much, just about everyone hated gay people so much, the drugs to prevent HIV from turning into AIDS weren’t made legal in America until after Mom died.
Adventures of an Earthborn Alien 