Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
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Want to know a true, humiliating fact about Charles Cassady? When I was growing up, I had a warped idea of what "gay" meant. Connecting it in my logical, innocent young mind (since then, largely destroyed) with the traditional use of the word "gay" and its derivations ("gaily"), I simply assumed that, when I watched some TV drama and there was a scandalous revelation that a male character was "gay," all it meant, very simply, was that he was too shamefully happy and disgustingly flippant to ever fit into functional society.Really, that's what I believed - that "gay" men had a crippling abundance of enthusiasm and just couldn't ever be serious, employable or productive. All that was on their minds were putting on shows and going to the disco. I mean, that's what it always seemed like in the media. Gay guys could never have a hope for normal relationships and careers, consumed as they were with the things that made them unnaturally jubilant. Like Broadway and movie musicals, their Judy Garland collection, WIZARD OF OZ knick-knacks, gourmet cooking, children's beauty pageants, acting, designing women's fashion and interior decorating. Nothing useful to humanity. No wonder gay guys' families always disowned them. No wonder girls liked hanging around them (far more than they tended to hang around me).
I don't know what finally made me abandon my childhood theory of what gayness entailed. Possibly, when I caught an inkling of something called "lesbianism" and it just didn't fit the thesis.
