> > "Dad, gay son, swimmingpool an[d] gay brother with cam"
> >
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOotrvIYB78>
> The father is a terrible, sadistic bully. . .
> Wow, I'm so glad this video exists.
You know, it crossed my mind later to wonder how
that video came to be on YouTube. It's on a channel of
heterogeneous content called "PiP media", and with
122,056 views it's the second-most-frequently viewed clip
on the channel, far ahead of nearly all of the other
clips.
I suspect it wasn't actually posted by the brother
who cammed the incident. Maybe he shared it with
friend(s) or relative(s), who may in turn have shared it
with others, so that finally it escaped control
altogether and ended up as one of YouTube's miscellaneous
clips.
The title's characterization of the two boys as
"gay son" and "gay brother" may also have been chosen by
the poster simply as a kind of disparagement of their
behavior (the one boy's cowardice at the pool, and the
other boy's presumed lack of respect for privacy in
filming an unflattering family scene without anybody
else's knowledge or permission) rather than based on
any accurate information about their sexual orientation.
As in, they're both acting "so gay".
But I too regard at as a fascinating documentary fragment,
whatever its provenance.
I have some very early memories of being a "sensitive" (easily
upset, cowardly, "scaredy-cat") kid. Some kids,
for example, **love** being picked up, tossed
in the air, or being turned upside-down.
I **hated** that sort of thing, and I have a very early
memory of being terrorized by somebody (an uncle, maybe;
my father probably realized early on that was a no-go)
who tried to do that to me, and only succeeded in making
me afraid of him. One of the things I remember
we had to do in first-grade gym class (along with
square dancing, which didn't bother me so much ;-> )
was "tumbling". The mats would come out, and we were
supposed to do things like forward rolls, backward rolls,
and handstands. I could **barely** manage a forward
roll, but I never learned to do a backward roll properly,
and as far as a handstand is concerned -- forget it.
I could not deal with the disorientation of being
upside down -- it terrified me. I also have very clear
memories of the gym teacher (who was the same one in first grade
as I later had in sixth grade) -- the only female gym teacher I ever had.
She was married (Mrs. W.), but she was short, and stocky
(her posterior stuck way out in her tight shorts), and very mannish.
I couldn't help but wonder much later if she was a lesbian. In sixth
grade, I was summoned one afternoon to Mrs. W.'s
office for criticism on my posture (I already walked
with a characteristic round-shouldered slump, with
head down, which was probably as much a reflection
of my social status by then as anything inherently to
do with the articulation of my body). on the way back to class
after receiving Mrs. W.'s critique, I passed knots
of teachers gathered open-mouthed around radios.
It seems that President Kennedy had been shot.
I also, as a 3-year-old, was afraid of the upright
vacuum cleaner my mother used in the house.
I reacted to the noise it made the way cats do to
such things. Later on, I sometimes accompanied my father to
the barber shop in the local suburban shopping center
that served our neighborhood. That barber was
outfitted in a way I don't think I've ever seen
since. After your haircut, and after having the
hair shaken out of the "dropcloth", instead of then having
the remaining hair whisk-brushed off your shoulders and neck,
the shop had a row of small cannister-type electric
vacuums, with the cannisters attached underneath the shelf
running behind the chairs, and a hose attachment
which the barber would use to suck up loose hair
off the client at the end. These made a lot of
noise, as vacuum cleaners always do, and I was
more afraid of having one of them used on me than
I was of anything else about the process of getting
a haircut. When I was first taken to that shop to
get a haircut, my father had to **promise** me that
the barber would be instructed not to use that
thing on me. On other occasions, I'd accompany my
father to the local Sears automotive service center,
where there would often be lots of loud bangs
and buzzes from pneumatic wrenches or tires being
inflated on rims. I was always alarmed (to the
point of real fear) by that, too, and I tried to keep
my ears plugged the whole time I was anywhere near
the garage. There were other things -- silly things,
some of them. I didn't know how to blow my nose
as a really little kid, and I hated having it
wiped or having one of my parents
hold a kleenex across my face while shouting at me to
**blow**! It felt like I was being suffocated. On
such occasions, my father would always lose his temper,
and I remember him once threatening to use the
"snuffer" on me (a rubber aspirator that you use
to suck mucus out of babies' noses). My early visits
to the dentist were nightmarish, despite the dentist
ostensibly specializing in childrens' dentistry (I
remember him as a short-tempered, sadistic SOB, but
then again I may well have been his worst patient).
After losing control of the drill and nearly severing the
ligament under my tongue during one visit because of my trying
to pull away, the dentist prescribed tranquilizers that I had to
take before coming to the office. But these came in
capsule form, and I always ended up biting them through
and then spitting the bitter contents into the kitchen sink.
So instead of being tranquilized in preparation for my visit
to the dentist, those Saturday mornings would begin with my father
raging at me, and threatening me with his belt, to try to get me
to swallow the capsule properly. The characteristic smell
of the lobby of the downtown medical building where that
dentist had his office -- a blend of interior construction,
floor cleaner, and the disinfectants wafting from the
doctors' offices -- is an odor I would undoubtedly recognize,
likely even with a familiar pang of fear,
to this day. The curious thing is, I eventually
outgrew all of that stuff. I have no problem going to the
dentist today, or the barbershop, or the Sears automotive
center. I can drive a car, even through crowded
metropolitan traffic, and I have no problem with vacuum
cleaners. ;-> But I've certainly been told, even as an
adult, that I come across as a "wary" person. (And one
personal "tic" that's lingered is that I **hate** to
have to use the telephone. And I know that my being "on
edge" with strangers very often comes across as hostility.)
I had an interesting experience around swimming, which
in a way goes to show that "slow to warm up" kids can
master something as long as they're not expected to do it
at the lock-step pace required of average kids (which means
that, yes, they're "more expensive" to deal with in
that they take more time and attention -- something that
your average Republican might well think they don't deserve. ;-> ).
When I was 10-ish, give or take, my father got me a
summer membership at the local public swimming pool.
And that pool also offered swimming lessons, so I ended
up being signed up for those. And I was my usual scaredy-cat
self in the water (just like that poor kid in the video)
and basically ended up flunking the course. But somehow
(I can't remember how -- maybe it was the instructor's
idea), I had the opportunity to take the class a second time.
(Or maybe, come to think, the deal was that if I couldn't
pass the course, I wouldn't be allowed to use the pool.)
And the second time around, I did OK. I never learned
how to do the Australian Crawl (a competition stroke,
where you have to learn to keep your head underwater
and gulp air by turning it sideways in coordination
with your arm movements), but I could tread water and do
anything else as long as I could keep my head above
the water. But here's an interesting wrinkle. The
second course ended with each member of the class having
to climb up the pool's high-dive, at the deep end,
and jump in. Not **dive** in head-first or anything fancy, just
**jump** in, feet-first. Now, this would have been my
chance to humiliate myself all over again, because I
would have been too scared to do it if it had been
sprung on me unexpectedly. But for some reason that
I can't remember, I had some time earlier taken it
upon myself, during one of my regular summer afternoons
at the pool, to see if I could work up the courage to jump off the
high dive on my own. And I had actually done it. So when
I was asked to do it at the end of the course, since I'd done it
a few times before, I managed to do it again. A minor,
but memorable, triumph.
Apropos of things sexual (or pre-homosexual), there was
a slightly off-color incident that happened during one
of those swimming classes. The instructor, a grown man
who might have been anywhere from his 20s to his 40s,
came to the classes in a pair of swimming trunks, like
the rest of us. They weren't speedos (and they certainly
weren't the long "board shorts" popular today), they
were just regular boxer-style swimming trunks. But
one day, he was sitting in his bathing suit
on the grass in front of the row of kids (it was a
co-ed class, as far as I can recall), and I happened
to notice that his trunks had no liner. And there it
was, plainly visible through the wide-open leg of
his trunks. It was only the second adult male penis
I'd ever seen (apart from my own father's).
Interestingly, it had no erotic charge whatsoever for
me; I just thought it was funny, and I was dying to
poke the kid sitting next to me with my elbow and
mutter something like "Do you see what I see?", but
the instructor's eyes were right on us, so I kept
still. The guy's name, I kid you not, was Bob Bone.
But there was no bone(r), just a big fat sausage. ;->
I have no particular reason to believe that Mr. Bone
was deliberately exhibiting himself to the kids, but
you never know (and it would certainly behoove somebody
in his position to be a hell of a lot more careful
about that sort of thing these days).