A personal creative history, pt. 1: Something about spats (Patreon)

I was always telling stories. At the age of 2, my mom was writing them down in a blue notebook, the unsurprising childhood fare of stories about myself, my family, and bears. 

By age 5 I was keeping a sporadic diary and wrote my first "fan fic", at least as far as I can recall. It was about Jiminy Cricket from Disney's Pinocchio getting trapped in a pickle factory and having to elude scary machines lest he be accidentally pickled. I don't know what long-forgotten episode of "Mr. Rogers visits a factory" or brief Sesame Street montage inspired this horrific scenario, but it definitely was on brand from the beginning: well-dressed men in traumatic situations? LOL

Shortly after that with the airing of Duck Tales on the Disney Afternoon I began a deep childhood love of Scrooge McDuck. This lasted for some years. I saved up money to buy a very expensive collection of Carl Barks comics and did a report on Scotland in gifted class just to learn more about the heritage of my favorite duck. I was a very Capricorn child and I don't think characters get more iconically Capricorn than the money-hoarding businessman archetype of Scrooge McDuck.

If all children are weird I was definitely a little...extra weird.

From Scrooge McDuck I shifted my affections to Bravo Fox from the PBS kids show Zoobilee Zoo. Looking back this show feels like it was just a lot of very queer theater energy, and Bravo Fox was sort of a Henry Higgins figure, even down to a "My Fair Lady" episode where he tries to teach manners to Whazzat Kangaroo. Looking back on this show as an adult I thought the character would be much more "kiddie" than I remembered it as a kid, but...no, Bravo was still decidedly playing "irritable gay theater uncle who has lived in the same New York apartment for two decades plus" except in the context of a brightly colored kids' show world instead, complete with the fact that he is a fox with a receding hairline. And spats! Everyone had spats, for some reason.

At this elementary school age, I was always very self-conscious that I identified with the "wrong" characters, not the Rainbow Brites or princesses of the world, but men. Not even boys like Peter Pan or kid-friendly characters from cartoons, but the most adult, authoritative men on children's television, who were along for the adventure but also taking a somewhat adult perspective on the events. Looking back, this is how a lot of childhood felt to me anyway. I had the curse of the precocious child, not really fitting anywhere. I frequently remember not even understanding what other kids were talking about, like it was half garble, the way I still feel talking to small children, only at that point we were the same damn age. 

So I escaped into the creative worlds where I felt comfortable, cycling through an assortment of interesting male characters: Disney's Robin Hood, Doc Brown, a few snarky Garfield-inspired cats. 

It was beyond my comprehension at the time that I might have only been interesting in male characters because they were just more interesting in the late 80s and early 90s. I'm sure I would have been all over Eclipsa, the powerful, charming sorceress from the cartoon Star vs. the Forces of Evil, had she existed when I was 6. But at the time I continued to feel like there was something really wrong with me. Why didn't I want to just be a normal girl character? Why was I so weird? 

Some people remember childhood fondly as an easy time. I don't. As a child I was in a constant state of anxiety and angst. And there was nothing going wrong in my life externally. I had amazing parents and extended family with a sense of safety and security, but the problem felt like it was clearly ME. I wasn't like other kids. I didn't understand them and they certainly couldn't understand me. I was, from as far back as my memories go, weighted down with a sense of my own mortality that kids are usually free from, and conscious of being a weird kid, and there was no internet to tell me otherwise.

It was in this atmosphere that I learned the coping secrets of That Kid in every town, everywhere, for decades: the wonders of fantasy worlds. 

To be continued!