1982 (31 page)

And, being done, thus Wall away doth go.

Some people in the crowd would cheer a bit and laugh when I left the gazebo stage after delivering the final words of my big moment. I took little delight in the reaction. I was very self-conscious about my lines. And I was madly self-conscious about my minidress.

Still, given that no one was saying anything explicit to me about the costume, I held out hope that the laughter I was generating had to do with my comedic timing.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
has comic moments, after all. It’s meant to be a farce. I was simply part of that, right? Surely my outfit just fit the bill. But I was getting hints that my attire was not going unnoticed. During the first show, one of the Theatre Troupe leads, Donna Davis, bumped into me backstage and said, “Is that your costume?” She asked me this with a note of concern in her voice. She said it as if to suggest there had been some kind of mistake. I nodded. This was my costume.

Toke came to our second night and barely spoke to me afterwards. This was odd for my best friend. He mumbled something about it being very much “like theatre and all dat,” and I chose not to pursue any further explication of his critical thoughts.

But things really took a difficult turn when my father and mother came to see the show on our third night. After the play ended, I emerged from the backstage area (which was actually an indoor gymnasium near the outdoor gazebo) to find my parents waiting to say hello. My father was wearing a very proper suit and looking quite sheepish.

“Yes, hello, Jian.” My father always spoke to me quite formally in public, even if no one was listening. “Eet was nice play,” he said. He seemed to want to leave it at that.

“Good job, honey!” my mother chimed in exuberantly. “You were great!”

My mother punched the air when she said “good job,” the way you do when you hit a home run or find out your teacher is sick and your class is cancelled. But I wasn’t sure about her enthusiasm. My mother was always polite, just like the way she would say “This is great!” when the Polish people next door gave us Christmas baskets we didn’t need. I knew she was likely embellishing for my sake.

“Oh … well, thanks, Mom. Anyway, thanks for coming, you guys.”

I didn’t want to spend too much time talking to my parents. I had spotted Mike Farnell and Tom Howard both looking at me with my family. I wondered if these older actors would think I was less cool if I were speaking with my parents. I prepared to make my escape to the backstage area. Just when I thought I was home free, my father felt the need to speak up.

“Tell me,” he said, audibly enough so that anyone in the vicinity could hear him, “why you were wearing thees dress in the play?”

My father could be very blunt sometimes. I don’t think he
wanted to hurt me. It was, after all, a pretty good question. I was playing Tom Snout. A man. So why was I wearing a dress? Or rather, a shirt that looked like a dress. But it wasn’t what I needed to hear. Not right after the show. Not with other people around. I lashed out with my reply.

“It’s not a dress, Dad!” I shouted in my father’s direction. “It’s a costume! You don’t understand Shakespeare. I’m sorry … if … you don’t have Shakespeare in Iran!”

I turned away from my parents and darted across the gazebo to get my Adidas bag so I could take the bus home with some of the other cast members. I was feeling humiliated. Was being in the theatre scene really worth all this? I had tried to defend myself. But my father was right. It was more of a dress—and not a very pretty dress or an intentional one. Even worse, I had heard Wendy was coming to one of the performances of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
with her brother, Paul. I prayed she wouldn’t make it. I never found out if she did. I surveyed the audience each night and never saw her. But either way, she didn’t mention it now at the Police Picnic. Maybe Wendy had come to the play and decided not to mention the Jesus minidress. Maybe she was being sensitive to my feelings. Again.

With my higher-pitched voice and the impromptu mauve dress, I had inadvertently assumed a genderless look in our Theatre Troupe production. I had just turned fifteen in early June, and being seen as anything less than an adequate male was not entirely comfortable for me. I was already self-conscious about being skinny and one of the lousier players on my hockey team. Then again, gender ambiguity was all strangely apropos if you were New Wave. It made some sense to appear
in drag. Albeit unwittingly in this case. New Wave culture was very much intertwined with androgyny and gender reversal. And this had become my forte. After one of our performances, Mike Farnell’s friend saw me in the communal changing area and bluntly asked me if I was gay. I wasn’t sure if it would be a good thing or not to tell this guy I was gay. Maybe he was gay. Maybe he would like it if I were gay too. I said no. But I wasn’t entirely sure. And nor would I have thought it a bad thing to be gay. Maybe the makeup and the mauve dress I had to wear as Tom Snout were a message sent from above. I certainly liked Bowie. He was a man who sometimes dressed like a woman. And I was smitten with Wendy partly because she was like Bowie. I was obsessing over a girl who reminded me of a man who dressed like a girl. These were confusing times.

At the Police Picnic I saw that my newest role model, David Byrne, was also genderless in many ways. As Wendy and I watched him on stage, it dawned on me that he was a man who was comfortable in his skinny body and with not being particularly muscular or macho. What you need to know is that the early ’80s was a period when many artists were challenging traditional ideas about masculinity. This was especially true in New Wave culture. If men were expressing themselves as tougher guys in rock bands like Van Halen, New Wave music was about the exploration and celebration of androgyny. Guys were wearing skirts and makeup and streaked hair. At the epicentre of all this was the lead singer of a band called Culture Club. He was an enigma in 1982. We would later find out his name was Boy George.

You know all about Boy George. First of all, you know that’s his name. George. Boy George. You know he was a guy
who wore makeup and played with themes of gender stereotypes in the early ’80s. You know him as a gay man now. But we didn’t know who he was in 1982. More importantly, we didn’t know
what
he was.

The debut Culture Club album,
Kissing to Be Clever
, was released in 1982. It featured the hit song “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” which was the third single released by the band in England but the first to come out in North America. Culture Club had an appealing pop sound that was a mixture of New Romantic synthesizers and old-school R&B and soul. They were a very good group that would be unfairly judged more for their image than their sound—although that image was very much cultivated by the band. And as you also likely know, they would go on to have several international hits in the 1980s, and Boy George would become a widely recognized star before fading away. But we didn’t know him in the beginning.

For many in my circle of kids, our first exposure to Boy George was the video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” The singer was unlike anything we’d seen before. This person was in a white, genderless outfit, with long hair, heavy, feminine makeup, and a cute hat. The singer had luscious lips and a girlish pout and danced around through the video in a slow and seductive way. The whole subtext of this music video was that the singer was on trial for looking and being different.

I have made a list of characters’ reactions to the androgynous lead singer of Culture Club in the video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me”:

judge shakes his head

old man loses his monocle

horrified young couple stops kissing

shocked woman removes sunglasses

arm wrestlers lose incentive to win

woman falls off diving board into pool

These were all reactions to the gender-ambiguous lead singer of Culture Club in the video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” It was a powerful and effective statement. The video was sending up our own reactions to this curious person. Especially given that we didn’t know who it really was. I had a few debates with Toke about the lead singer of Culture Club in late summer of ’82.

“Dat is totally a chick. It’s an ugly chick.”

Toke could be quite direct sometimes. Just like my father. He was convinced the lead singer of Culture Club was a woman.