ESL a/s/l?

a WIP multimedia project

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JUSTIFY MY LOVE

A MEMOIR EXCERPT

My summer breaks, probably leading up to 14 years old, were filled with daytime television that was a part of the “tabloid talk show boom.” With my newfound downtime from school and as a child of strict parents, I stayed home most days and quietly watched Ricki Lake and The Maury Povich Show while seated on our very 70s-style living room carpet. Both Ricki and Maury’s programming featured episodes that explored relationship and family issues, as well as spicier topics like:

People who now regret earlier extracurricular sexual conquests.
Pregnant women whose husbands hired hit men.
Strippers take lie-detector tests.

I remember a Ricki episode featuring a panel of gay teens coming out to their parents. The parents reacted with shock and horror, threatening to disown their children if they dared date someone of the same sex. My mom was in a leather, remote-controlled recliner behind me making commentaries like “You will also be disowned if we ever find out you’re gay.”

I was probably around 12 years old and remember thinking I don’t like you — and — What harm are these kids doing by being attracted to the same sex? It took me back to the empty parking lot of Kmart as my younger self. I might have been 7 or 8 years old and remembered seeing an androgynous girl(?) leaning back on the wall waiting for her ride. That was the second time that I could recall feeling sexual arousal for another female. The first was when I was maybe 5 on my grandmother’s balcony in Toronto with my cousin who revealed excess cleavage in her red skin-tight scoop neck 80s-style dress. But I was so young back then and it might have been intrigue that I was feeling rather than sexual arousal.

The time I was undoubtedly sexually aroused was after watching Madonna’s banned-from-MTV music video “Justify My Love” in 1990 “due to extremely strong displays of sexuality.” Shot in a black-and-white French New Wave cinematic style, it featured S&M scenes of a gender-fluid cast set in a hotel where they take turns luxuriating in erotic and voyeuristic pleasures. I was too young to understand what was happening but I felt something. I kept the closeted feelings to myself, because, again, who would I tell?

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MEMOIR EXCERPTS
preface
LEANING TOWERS
justify my L0v3 <3 (currently viewing)