I Catch Cousin Joe in the Act

Rock Island, December 1976

When I was in junior high, I caught my friend Brian trying to erase graffiti from the wall of Washington Junior High, "Brian gives free LBJs."  He wouldn't say what it meant, and I had no idea.  It endured season after season, year after year, ghostly pale but still legible, stubbornly resistant to the generations of custodians who attempted to erase it.  It was the biggest riddle of my childhood.

During the summer after 9th grade, I learned that the term "BJ" referred to oral sex, but I didn't make the connection to gay people until a cold Friday at Christmastime in 1976, my junior year at Rocky High, shortly after I discovered what "gay" meant.

Aunt Nora was visiting for the holidays, with two whole carloads of relatives.  Cousin Joe, a 22-year old college senior, was staying in the attic room with Ken and me, and his girlfriend Sandy was staying downstairs with my sister.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, everyone was out shopping or ice skating, but I didn't feel well and stayed in to read.  Joe and Sandy came in, said hello, then vanished somewhere into the house -- I assumed they went down to the basement rec room to play pingpong.

They weren't playing pingpong.

Soon I got a throbbing headache, so I took an aspirin and decided to go upstairs to bed.

The door at the bottom of the attic stairs didn’t lock, but the clatter of shoes on the bare wood was usually an adequate early-warning signal, giving you plenty of time to stop watching late-night tv, reading comics, or whatever else you didn’t care to have witnessed -- but today I was wearing only socks, and the throb in my head made me go slowly, one step at a time. So they didn’t hear me.

When I reached the top of the stairs, I saw Joe lying on the floor on his side of the room, and Sandy kneeling over him.  My first thought was that he had fainted. Then I saw a thick, heavy shaft the color of putty.  Joe's penis!

I had seen it several times before -- while changing clothes to go swimming, once while skinny-dipping.  I walked in on him in the bathroom when I was five.  It was always breathtaking.

Suddenly Joe saw me, pushed Sandy away, and quickly zipped up. “Um...we were....we were just..."   He was blushing red.

"I don't care, I'm sick."  I walked the five steps to the bed I was sharing with Ken, fell down face-first, and covered my head with a pillow.  "It's no big deal. You’re not the first person in this room to give a bj.”

They were both silent. I peered out from under the pillow to see them staring open-mouthed.

“What’s your problem?”


“You. . .give bjs?” Sandy asked.

“Of course I  give them!” I said angrily. “You think I’m a virgin? I’ve given them lots of times.”

Joe laughed. “Gee, you're dumb! Boys don’t give bjs, they get them.”

“No, I give them. . .boys give them.” My head was still throbbing, making it hard to concentrate.   "Why do you think it's called giving a bj?  Because you give your penis..."

"The girl gives the b.j. to the boy, Boomer."

“Well. . .to be fair, it doesn’t have to be a girl,” Sandy said. “Sometimes guys do give bjs.  At least they're sort of like guys."  She flashed a loose wrist.

My face burned as I realized what she was implying.

"Be nice!" Joe commanded.  He patting my shoulder.  "Boomer just got mixed up.  Don't tell Mom about seeing us...you know...ok?"

"Don't worry, your secret is safe with me."

"And your secret is safe with us!" Sandy managed to say before Joe grabbed her and dragged her down the stairs.

I lay in bed, mortified.  But now I understood -- LBJ, BJ with an "L" added.  Long ago some bullies had accused Brian of being gay. No wonder he worked so furiously to scrub the graffiti off!

It turns out that I was wrong.  Five years later, in the spring of 1981, I would discover that the phrase LBJ had nothing to do with sex.  But it did have quite a lot to do with being gay.

Kissing A Boy Under the Mistletoe

Rock Island, December 1977

In junior high, Brian was on the outer edges of my social circle, really one of my brother's friends..  We never hung out.  And when I was in high school, he moved with his parents to Bettendorf, across the river, so I rarely saw him at all.  Yet he was there during some of the most memorable moments of my childhood (I haven't posted about all of them yet):

The first time I hear about gay people on tv.

The secret message at Washington Junior High

Philippine Tubes

The drawing in the basement

Finding out what the graffiti meant

And "How Deep is Your Love"

On December 23, 1977, when I was in twelfth grade (a month or so after the Black Student Union Dance and some six months before I Figured It Out), my brother Ken hosted a party for his Rocky High crowd.  He draped our basement rec room with tinsel and offered guests pingpong, foosball, Happy Joes pizzas, Christmas presents, and disco music (but no dancing -- against Nazarene rules). 

I played pingpong for awhile with a stocky, dull-eyed girl named Anne.  Then Brian arrived with a friend from Bettendorf (across the river in Iowa).  He was thin and taut with a misty smile, his hair much darker than in grade school.  He was wearing a green sweater awash with little red bells, and tight faded jeans that bulged like a teen idol’s. 

 After they said "H'lo" to Ken, they started mingling, and when they got to the mistletoe, I said "Hey, everybody, my first victims!" and kissed them both on the cheek.  Everybody laughed.

Later I ran into Brian alone, and sat with him on the couch. "Cool joke!" he said.

We about talked his classes, AP English and German.  We talked about my college applications.  We talked about Pajama Game and Ragtime, Happy Days and The Great Gatsby, and a hundred other things I couldn’t recall later. We played pingpong and foosball.  We went outside to look at the stars. Then, because his friend didn’t want to leave yet, I drove him through the black, bitter cold night to his house in Bettendorf.

We parked against the hard-packed snow and sat for awhile in the darkness. In a stumbling goodbye, I said “Just because you live in Bettendorf doesn’t mean we can’t get together once in a while.” And then I reached over and hugged Brian. I felt his slim taut chest, looked down at his belt buckle glimmering in the darkness. His breath smelled of cough drops. I hugged him tighter. 

“Sure, I’ll call you,” Brian said. He disentangled himself and crunched across the ice to his back door.

When I got home and went back downstairs to the party, Ken immediately tromped over. “You’re a regular Fonzie!” he exclaimed. “When’s the big date?”

“Are you calling me a Swish?” I exclaimed. “I was just giving him a ride home.  No way am I a Swish!” (That was our high school word for "gay.")

Ken rolled his eyes. “Cool it, Captain Spazz! Everything isn’t always about Swishes. I saw you cozying up to Anne before.”

“Oh. . .Anne’s not my type. I don’t date 10th graders.”

Suddenly very tired, I went upstairs to our attic room and crawled into bed and turned on my clock radio.  The #1 song of the season was playing, "How Deep is Your Love," by the BeeGees:

Cause we're living in a world of fools, breaking us down

When they all should let us be.  We belong to you and me

I lay in bed, my thoughts blurred, varying between "I wonder if he'll call?" and "No way am I a Swish!"

Brian didn't call.

Gay Hints in High School

I entered high school utterly unaware that same-sex desire exists. Gay people were simply not mentioned, ever, in class, by parents, on tv.

I knew about swishes, boys who like girly things, but I never for a moment imagined that boys might desire each other, form romantic relationships, have sex.

In spite of all my crushes, romantic relationships, sexual experiences, and about a thousand hint and signals.  Here are 20 steps on my road to "figuring it out."

(All models are over 18.)

10th Grade

1. Soon after I enter high school, Warren, the head of my lunch table clique, warns me not to go out with guys at night, without girls along, or people will think I'm a swish.

But swishes hang out with girls.  Why would it be suspicious to hang out with a guy?

2. The coach offers me a job as an athletic trainer.  I had to measure the jocks for uniforms, including cup sizes,  massage them, and pass out towels as they walked naked toward the showers.  Best job in the world!  Why does the coach think I would be particularly interested?

3. Trying to convince me to go to work in the factory after I graduated, Dad takes me on a tour, including the locker room where sweaty factory workers showered and changed clothes.  Why does he think that he sight of naked men would dissuade me from my college plans?

4. At music camp, I share a room with Todd, a cute Lebanese boy.  I have a full-fledged sexual experience, although I didn't interpret it that way at the time.

11th Grade

5. I see my first real-life swish, a witness at a trial my political science class observed at the court house.   I discover that "swishes" date each other, and presumably have sex.  But what could they possibly do in bed?  Who would be the boy, and who would be the girl?

6. I catch Cousin Joe with a girl, and accidentally claim that I've "given BJs" to lots of girls.  They tell me that boys don't give them, they get them.  Unless, of course, they're swishes.

Now I know that gay people exist, date each other, have sex with each other.  But they're frilly, feminine swishes, nothing like me at all.

7. While I'm sick, I remember a comic book from my childhood about an Island in the Sky where Greek gods live together.   We look everywhere for it, but it's missing.

8. I begin dating Verne, the Preacher's Son.  Double-dating, actually: there's always a girl.  We envision a future together as preachers in adjacent churches, being "best friends."  But why do we need wives?  Why can't it just be two "best friends" together?

9. My friend Aaron, the Rabbi's Son, tries to outdo me in homophobia.  We both have "best friends," but we don't interpret them as romantic partners.

12th Grade

10. Our new preacher discovers homa-sekshuls, and blames every social problem and natural disaster on them.  Although I am homophobic, I can't believe that gay people are responsible for everything wrong with the world.

11. I have another sexual experience, with Tyrone after the Harvest Dance.  But he has a girlfriend.  Why can't it be two guys together?

12. At Christmastime, I kiss Brian under the mistletoe, then ask for his phone number.  He doesn't call.  I think "no way am I a swish!"

13. Aaron and I go to Leonard Bernstein's Mass, and I write a poem, "We live in masks."

14. Everybody seems to know.  Even my friend Craig invites me to a graduation party, and stresses that there will be mattresses downstairs, in case I want to "get down with...um...anybody."  No way am I a swish!

15. I lose it at the movies.  During the summer after graduation, I see Grease, with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.  The movie itself isn't exceptional, but the theme song is:

The adults are lying, only real is real.
We stop the fight right now, we got to be what we feel.

I'm probably the only person in history to start sobbing uncontrollably in the theater during Grease.

What Does "Brian Gives Free LBJs" Mean?

Rock Island, June 1974

One Saturday in the summer of 1974, just after eighth grade, the sky was clear and bright, the air smelled like new lilacs, and the grass was sprinkled with dandelions. I invited my friend Craig  to ride bikes.

As we passed the back of Washington Junior High, we saw a small, strawheaded seventh-grader in a blue windbreaker standing against the red brick wall, near the windows of the gym. When we drew closer, we saw that he had a sponge and a yellow bucket sloshing with soapy water. He was scrubbing furiously at a piece of graffiti.

This model is much older, but he has Brian's sandy hair and slim physique.

I recognized him as Brian, the boy my parents used to babysit.  They stopped because he had a smart mouth.  Once when we were playing in the back yard, he offered to tell us “a dirty joke,” right in front of my Mom! It didn’t matter to her that the joke was “The boy fell in the mud!”

“Hey, Brian!” I yelled. “You’re not supposed to be writing on school property.”

“You gonna call the fuzz, big guy?” Except for the belligerent smirk, he was cute, with a tanned face, sandy blond hair, pale blue eyes with eyelashes so blond we were almost white, and thin, pinkish lips.





His hands were raw from scrubbing at a line of graffiti: Brian gives free LBJs in letters nearly a foot high.

“What’s a LBJ?” Craig asked.

“It’s the president, Gomer!  I mean the old president, Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense!” Craig said.  "You can't give away presidents!"

“So what do you give?” I asked. “Can I have one?”

“I didn’t write it, ok?  It was a Mean Boy. Now can it, before I pound you.”



I tried to restrain a laugh at the thought of this slim, slight boy trying to pound me, after years of wrestling and judo. The posturing seemed to be hiding something scared, something wounded. I thought of Bill, who also threatened to pound me, long ago.

What kind of insult did giving LBJs signify?  Brian's feverish attempt to destroy the evidence made me suspect Acting like a Girl -- but graffiti was an unlikely Mean Boy punishment.

“You can’t erase paint with soap and water.  Why don’t you just mark it out?”

“Sometimes you can  And the paint’s in the garage, and if I go through there, Emmitt will see me. Ok, Mr. Know-it-All?”  Emmitt was his Dad.

“Why would Emmitt care what a Mean Boy says about you?”

Then we heard a clumping noise inside the building: a teacher or custodian, insanely working on the weekend, coming to the window to accuse us of disfiguring the school!  Brian kicked the bucket over and started to run away, but I knew he'd never find a hiding space by running east: the schoolyard in that direction was empty scrub for hundreds of miles. So I yelled “Get on my bike!”

Brian jumped on without protest and wrapped his arms tightly around my waist, and we sped away past the back of the school. We hid in the alley for awhile, panting and laughing. Then we went back to pick Brian’s bucket and sponge, and rode him home.

We became friends, of a sort, after that, but Brian didn't tell me what LBJ meant, or who wrote it, until many years later, when we were both in college.  By that time, I had already figured it out (You probably think it has something to do with sex, but it doesn't.)

Season after season, year after year, Brian gives free LBJs remained on the wall, faded but still faintly legible, stubbornly resistant to the generations of custodians who attempted to erase it.  It was the biggest riddle of my childhood, and not mine alone.  Generations of junior high students have wondered who this Brian is, and what LBJs are, and if they find out, how such things can exist on 20th Avenue in Rock Island, Illinois, in the world of everyday experience.

As far as I know, it's still there today.

See also: The Secret Message Behind "Brian Gives Free LBJs"

The Ghost Artist in the Basement

Rock Island, November 1980

I didn't like going down to the basement in our house in Rock Island, not by myself, especially at night.  The rec room was ok -- we used to invite our friends over to play pingpong or foosball or watch tv.  But off to the side there was a laundry room, and beyond an artist's studio belonging to Mr. Kint, the previous owner of the house.  He was an engineer, but his hobby was painting.

No one had touched it since the day he died, except to empty the file cabinets.  There was a calendar from 1966 on the wall, jarsful of pens, pencils, and paint brushes, and a slanted desk with a slide rule and a t-square. It looked like he was just upstairs getting a drink of water, and he would be back any minute. Sometimes I imagined his footsteps on the creaking wooden stairs.

One Saturday in early November 1980, my junior year at Augustana,  I invited Haldor from the dating competition to dinner.  I planned to cook roast beef at my parents' house, and then serve it in the dorm kitchen.

I let myself into the house around 2:00 pm.  It was deserted.

After awhile I needed an onion to slice atop the potatoes, and the only onions in the house were in a big bag in the laundry room.  I planned to rush down and up again in less than ten seconds.  But then I heard a noise coming from Mr. Kint’s studio. A chair scraping across a bare concrete floor.

My first thought was that my brother Ken had come home unexpectedly and hid in the basement to scare me.  I said “Ha-ha, big joke!” and walked briskly to the doorway.






Someone was sitting in the old swivel chair, bending over Mr. Kint’s desk, drawing furiously on an oversized pad of art paper. Pale light streamed through the basement window above him.

It must be Ken.  He liked to draw.

“Hey, Bro, what you working on?” I took two or three steps closer to him and peered over his shoulder. It was a drawing of a row of men of various ages and races, facing forward. All were naked. They seemed to be arranged by penis size, from tiny to absurdly enormous.

"Big fan of naked men, huh?  Me, too."  Ken was the family member I was out to.

I saw that the hand was trembling a bit. It was very pale, sprinkled with brown spots. The fingers had long crusty nails. The hand of a monster.




Was it Mr. Kint, returning to complete the drawing he’d been working on when he died?  Suddenly terrified, I screamed.

He swung around. It was Brian!

You remember Brian, the seventh grader who was trying to scrub the mysterious graffiti "Brian gives free LBJs" from the school wall in 1974?  Who I kissed under the mistletoe at Christmastime in 1977, and then asked him to call, but he didn't call?  I hadn't heard anything about him for almost three years.

"Are you from East Moline, Dork?" he said angrily.  "You almost made me ruin my drawing!"

"Well, you scared me to death!  What...what are you doing here?"  His hand was perfectly normal.

“Visiting Ken -- what do you think?  He went out to pick up a half-gallon of ice cream.  He should be back any minute.”

“I mean. . .what are you doing here in Mr. Kint's studio?"

“I have a sketch due Monday for art class, and Ken said I could work down here.  The light is perfect."

 "Why are the men all naked?"

He began to blush.  "Oh...I was just fooling around.  I'll fix it before I turn it in."  He paused.  "So what did you mean by 'me, too'?"

Now it was my turn to blush.  Struggling for a way to change the subject, I said "Hey, I'm making roast beef for my friend Haldor at Augustana.  You and Ken want to come?  Bring the ice cream."

I climbed slowly back up the stairs.  Now I was certain that Brian was gay.

Brian asks "What is a Man?"

Rock Island, December 1971

December 3, 1971, Christmastime in 6th grade.  Bill is out of town for the holidays, and my brother and I have another boy over: Brian, who will write the graffiti about "free LBJs" on the school wall in a couple of years.  He has just moved to Rock Island from Chicago.  He is a year younger than me, with a belligerent smirk, but otherwise he is cute, with a tanned face, sandy blond hair, pale blue eyes with eyelashes so blond they are almost white, and thin, pinkish lips.

This is an older model, but it will give you an idea of his hair and face.

Brian's parents are entertainers -- Beauty and the Beast, Dad playing the piano in a gorilla mask while Mom sings risque songs.  When their Friday or Saturday night gigs run late, they have arranged with my parents to "babysit" him.

He brings his pajamas, and we read comic books and play army men and watch the new portable tv set I got for my birthday,  and at 10:00 he climbs into bed between me and Kenny (we don't get our own beds until junior high).  Then late in the night his Dad swoops into the room like a vampire and carries Brian off in his arms.

Tonight The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family have been pre-empted.  Next comes Room 222, a drama about a hip, caring teacher at Walt Whitman High (Pete Dixon, played by Lloyd Haynes, left).  I don't usually watch -- some of the boys are cute, but the plots are too melodramatic, about prejudice and cheating on tests and the generation gap.  But you can't spent a whole evening without watching something!

The episode is entitled "What is a Man?"  The English teacher points out that in Shakespeare's day, boys played the girls' parts, and has her class try it out.  The jocks can't play girls without giggling, but Howard (Frederick Herrick) is good at it.  Soon "fag" is scrawled on his locker, and he is getting beat up after school.

Pete consults the principal, who says "Maybe we have two problems.  What if Howard is a homosexual?"

"What's a homosexual?" Brian asks, his mouth full of chocolate chip cookie.

"Dunno."  It's not explained in the episode.  When I hear it again five years later, I don't remember ever hearing it before.

I figure that fag is a tv word for a "fairy": a boy who pretends to be a girl.  Everyone at Denkmann Elementary School, teachers and students alike, thinks that fairy are the worst kind of being in existence.  Being a girl is deplorable enough; why would anyone deliberately pretend to be one?  (Later, at Rocky High, I found out about swishes, who were arguably worse.)

Howard proves that he is not a fairy by asking a girl for a date.  See, if you think you are a girl, you won't be interested in dating girls, right?

I look at Brian.  Soon we will be grownups, in junior high, and we will discover girls, like the adults have been crowing about.  And if we don't, we will become fairies, the most deplorable of human beings, not really human beings at all.

But that's eight months away, an eternity. We have all of our lives yet to live.

Suddenly I throw Brian down in a judo pin and yell "Kata-gatame!"  He flips me over and lays atop me, a heavy weight of hands and thighs, his chest heaving and sweaty, his breath hot and smelling of chocolate. We're both giggling.

Kissing a Boy Under the Mistletoe

See Kissing Brian Under the Mistletoe

The Secret Message of "Brian Gives Free LBJs"

Rock Island, July 1981

After reading my post on  "The Secret Message" you probably thought that the graffiti "Brian gives free LBJs" referred to some sort of sexual act.  But the real meaning was something much more profound.

I found out in the spring of 1981, my junior year at Augustana.  A student who was from Chicago, like Brian, said that in his grade school, the older boys would force or bribe the younger boys to run errands and do chores for them,  like the "fags" of British boarding school (possibly the origin of the derogatory term for gay men).

 It was called "doing a LBJ" or "giving a LBJ," after President Lyndon Baines Johnson (he didn't know why).

That summer, the famous summer of 1981, I looked up Brian, an undergraduate drama major at Carthage College.  We had a pizza at Happy Joe's, and then parked on the levee and watched the cars glistening by on the Centennial Bridge.  I talked about the day we  found Brian scrubbing at the graffiti on the wall of Washington Junior High, and how I had just discovered that a LBJ meant a chore.

"But I don't understand why a Mean Boy would write 'Brian gives free LBJs.'  What's so bad about doing free chores?"

Brian hesitated for only a moment.  "They weren't bad.  The big boys were cute, and sometimes they would let me hang out with them.  Sometimes we would hug.  I liked the way a big guy's arms felt around me. . .I wanted that. . ."

My face reddened as I realized that he was revealing something very personal.   "Um...did you ever find out who wrote it?"

"You know what? I’ve never told anybody this before, but it was me. I wrote it.”

His face was turned away, toward the  rushing river. “Why would you write 'Brian gives free lbjs’ about yourself?”

“I don’t know. I was a mixed up kid, I guess. That’s why I was trying to erase it."

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“That you’re gay."

Brian stared at me for a moment, small and fragile, alone. Then he was angry. “I am not!” he exclaimed.  “Maybe I was a confused kid, but no way am I gay!”

"Ok, ok, whatever," I said.  "But do you still like it when big guys hug you?"

I didn't wait for him to answer.

Brian and I dated a few times during the very busy summer of 1981, but that night was more about friendship, and recognition, and belonging.