Battlefield of Love by Anonymous-BroadLit Anonymous-BroadLit

Author:Anonymous-BroadLit Anonymous-BroadLit [Hogan, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780989020022
Publisher: BroadLit

Don’t judge a book by its cover!

MY SON WENT FROM MARINE—TO BEAUTY QUEEN!

Although True Love and True Romance both tended to be culturally conservative when it came to sex and relationships, they could be relatively progressive on some topics. In the early 1970s, for example, gay men didn’t come in for condemnation, even though in many cases their stories involved deceiving their wives about their true inclinations. Granted, pitying them for their lonely, loveless lives wasn’t a huge improvement, but it was as compassionate a portrayal as they’d be likely to get from a mainstream magazine.

By 1998, the situation had improved so significantly that True Love could run a story about a mother coming to terms with her son’s cross-dressing without going into a massive gay panic. Of course, Dean’s mother has her suspicions, and she and her husband do go through some anxiety when they discover his life revolves around fancy dresses, but it’s presented in the context of honest emotional confusion about why their happily engaged son makes his living as a female impersonator. (“We couldn’t even begin to comprehend how Paige could continue to love him,” Dean’s mother laments, “when frankly he wore a dress better than she did.”) Soon enough, they’re cheering him on at drag pageants, and all his gay best friends become their best friends, too.

Dean’s stint in the Marine Corps actually plays just a background part in this story, and even his little sister wonders if he signed up “so he could prove he’s a man.” But his military service and his drag life would naturally have to be kept separate—in the early days of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” when this story was set, getting caught in women’s clothes would surely have led to a swift discharge.

“Has anyone seen my black skirt?” my daughter Jeanie called from the top of the stairs.

“Did you check the laundry room?” I called.

“It’s not there,” she yelled back. “I already checked.”

I put an apple beside each sandwich I’d made and went to help Jeanie look for her skirt.

“I thought I hung it in my closet,” she said as I looked under her bed. She was going through her dresser drawers. “I hung it next to my blue sweater.”

“Well, it’s not my size,” I said. “I’m sure you just misplaced it.”

“Sure,” she said, “like I misplaced my beaded vest last week and my red sweater the week before.”

There did seem to be a problem with clothing disappearing in our house lately. I’d recently lost a pair of pearl earrings, and I couldn’t swear to it, but it seemed as if someone had been rifling through my lingerie drawer recently.

“Do you have something else you could wear?” I asked.

“Jeans,” Jeanie said. “The same old jeans.”

“I’ll look for your skirt,” I promised. “It’s probably in the wash, or maybe it fell behind the dryer.”

Dean was already in the kitchen when Jeanie and I went downstairs. “Hey Jeanie,” he said, “you want a ride this morning?”

I began putting the lunches into paper bags and handing them to my children.

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