Oh I love this. I hope you have time to read what I've sent you. This was written for a parenting issue of NYmagazine that we didn't move forward with, but I think you'll find it of interest.:
On Hampstead Heath
Some men are born sissies, some achieve sissyhood, and some have sissyhood thrust upon them. I’ve been a sissy as long as I can remember, certainly since the time in grade school when I promised my wrestling partner in gym not to put up a fight if he would agree not to hurt me (I didn’t, he did anyway). I have no taste for violence. My lack of enthusiasm for such male rites of passage may have its roots in the way I learned the multiplication tables: I sat on a dining room chair flanked by my two considerably older brothers, with my dad — an English teacher and track coach who prided himself on his physical prowess — at the far end of the dinner table armed with flash cards. I had three seconds to come up with the answer before my brothers were free to punch me, hard as they liked, to the merriment of all three of them.
When I was a little older, a prominent Southern rabbi arrived at my summer camp and promptly flipped out, angrily demanding that the rifle range be shut down, appalled that a Jewish child’s first exposure to a gun would take place at a Jewish camp. His fiery insistence was greeted with general derision by most everyone except me. I found in him my first hero. A few years later, as my draft counselor, this same man would help me to articulate, and then defend, my position as a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam, a position that was also greeted by most with derision.
As I said, I have no taste for violence.
I do, however, have a twelve-year-old son. He’s athletic and sweet, existentially flexible except when it comes to his private code of justice, and game for almost anything. After years of weekly Tai Kwan Do classes, he can split a piece of wood with a well-aimed kick.
Nicky and I do most of the standard-issue father-son guy things: We’re well into our sixth season of West Side Little League, and our uniforms bear the logo of the magazine I work for, which makes him proud. We ride our bikes and play catch and go one-on-one at the basketball courts in Riverside Park. Ferociously competitive, he’s the kind of boy who always plays to win. He is so much not a sissy, in fact, that he recently announced a name change: Nicky é mort, henceforth he was to be addressed as Nick.
Not long ago the whole family flew to London to visit Nick’s godfather, Wilder, and his lover, Declan. I’ve known and loved Wilder since the second grade, something like 45 years. On a hot summer day in Rhode Island a few years back my wife and I and our two children had attended Wilder and Declan’s wedding — they declined to call it a commitment ceremony — and now they live a splendid life, though far away, in a tiny apartment near Hampstead Heath.
One afternoon we went for a walk on the heath, and Declan began horsing around with Nick. Fairly quickly, their playing escalated into something much more intense. Declan is Irish, from a big family with a lot of boys. He prodded Nick to hit him hard, no harder, no, Nick as hard as you can! and Nick obliged. Wiry and powerful, Declan patiently showed Nick how to defend himself, though more than once my boy took a fall that knocked the wind out of him. Each time, Nick bounced back, punching away, hopping around in the grass, face flushed red as beets, dancing for more. He seemed transported to a rare state of exhilaration.
Watching them, I felt a swoony mixture of apprehension, elation — and jealousy. I felt slightly, if momentarily, usurped. “American boys from nice families never learn how to fight properly,” Declan declared later, “but I’m convinced that boys absolutely need this kind of release or they’ll just find less constructive outlets for their energy. Fighting is an essential element of maleness.”
I’m not totally convinced of this; kids tend to find outlets for their energy with or without their parents’ help. Even as a toddler, back when Nick was still Nicky, there were times when he would literally rise up and pound his chest with his fists, bellowing like a young gorilla showing the world who was king of the jungle. I hadn’t put on boxing gloves with him, and never thought I would. Truthfully, Declan’s lesson notwithstanding, I still don’t think I will.
Though I occasionally suffered for my sissyhood, I never was ashamed of it, probably because it wasn’t ever connected to my sense of my own maleness. While other girls watched their boyfriends play basketball, mine got to go to Brecht on Brecht at the Theatre De Lys and jazz at the Top of the Gate in Greenwich Village: I learned early on, in fact, that nearly as many girls go for sissies as for jocks, and some of them are even pretty.
And yet there I was on Hampstead Heath getting a friendly lesson in guyness from my oldest friend’s tough, tender husband.
Indeed, the effects of that afternoon linger, and not just because my son now wants to beat the crap out of me as often as possible. Not long after our visit, my father succumbed to the athlete’s worst humiliation at the end of a long path to dying from Parkinson’s Disease that had robbed him tortuously of his physicality while leaving his mind intact before finally killing him.
He was never a sissy and what good did it do him, in the end?
With Nick, well, I’ve learned to let our affection go in that rough-and-tumble direction, along with the baseball and bike riding; in thick middle age I’ve allowed myself to become more of a standard-issue guy, though my children still have seen more Broadway musicals than any of their friends, (so of course they’ve seen me cry a lot, too). I still have no taste for violence. But thanks to my best friend’s lover, my son has taken me to a physical place I never dreamed I’d go.
Oh I love this. I hope you have time to read what I've sent you. This was written for a parenting issue of NYmagazine that we didn't move forward with, but I think you'll find it of interest.:
On Hampstead Heath
Some men are born sissies, some achieve sissyhood, and some have sissyhood thrust upon them. I’ve been a sissy as long as I can remember, certainly since the time in grade school when I promised my wrestling partner in gym not to put up a fight if he would agree not to hurt me (I didn’t, he did anyway). I have no taste for violence. My lack of enthusiasm for such male rites of passage may have its roots in the way I learned the multiplication tables: I sat on a dining room chair flanked by my two considerably older brothers, with my dad — an English teacher and track coach who prided himself on his physical prowess — at the far end of the dinner table armed with flash cards. I had three seconds to come up with the answer before my brothers were free to punch me, hard as they liked, to the merriment of all three of them.
When I was a little older, a prominent Southern rabbi arrived at my summer camp and promptly flipped out, angrily demanding that the rifle range be shut down, appalled that a Jewish child’s first exposure to a gun would take place at a Jewish camp. His fiery insistence was greeted with general derision by most everyone except me. I found in him my first hero. A few years later, as my draft counselor, this same man would help me to articulate, and then defend, my position as a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam, a position that was also greeted by most with derision.
As I said, I have no taste for violence.
I do, however, have a twelve-year-old son. He’s athletic and sweet, existentially flexible except when it comes to his private code of justice, and game for almost anything. After years of weekly Tai Kwan Do classes, he can split a piece of wood with a well-aimed kick.
Nicky and I do most of the standard-issue father-son guy things: We’re well into our sixth season of West Side Little League, and our uniforms bear the logo of the magazine I work for, which makes him proud. We ride our bikes and play catch and go one-on-one at the basketball courts in Riverside Park. Ferociously competitive, he’s the kind of boy who always plays to win. He is so much not a sissy, in fact, that he recently announced a name change: Nicky é mort, henceforth he was to be addressed as Nick.
Not long ago the whole family flew to London to visit Nick’s godfather, Wilder, and his lover, Declan. I’ve known and loved Wilder since the second grade, something like 45 years. On a hot summer day in Rhode Island a few years back my wife and I and our two children had attended Wilder and Declan’s wedding — they declined to call it a commitment ceremony — and now they live a splendid life, though far away, in a tiny apartment near Hampstead Heath.
One afternoon we went for a walk on the heath, and Declan began horsing around with Nick. Fairly quickly, their playing escalated into something much more intense. Declan is Irish, from a big family with a lot of boys. He prodded Nick to hit him hard, no harder, no, Nick as hard as you can! and Nick obliged. Wiry and powerful, Declan patiently showed Nick how to defend himself, though more than once my boy took a fall that knocked the wind out of him. Each time, Nick bounced back, punching away, hopping around in the grass, face flushed red as beets, dancing for more. He seemed transported to a rare state of exhilaration.
Watching them, I felt a swoony mixture of apprehension, elation — and jealousy. I felt slightly, if momentarily, usurped. “American boys from nice families never learn how to fight properly,” Declan declared later, “but I’m convinced that boys absolutely need this kind of release or they’ll just find less constructive outlets for their energy. Fighting is an essential element of maleness.”
I’m not totally convinced of this; kids tend to find outlets for their energy with or without their parents’ help. Even as a toddler, back when Nick was still Nicky, there were times when he would literally rise up and pound his chest with his fists, bellowing like a young gorilla showing the world who was king of the jungle. I hadn’t put on boxing gloves with him, and never thought I would. Truthfully, Declan’s lesson notwithstanding, I still don’t think I will.
Though I occasionally suffered for my sissyhood, I never was ashamed of it, probably because it wasn’t ever connected to my sense of my own maleness. While other girls watched their boyfriends play basketball, mine got to go to Brecht on Brecht at the Theatre De Lys and jazz at the Top of the Gate in Greenwich Village: I learned early on, in fact, that nearly as many girls go for sissies as for jocks, and some of them are even pretty.
And yet there I was on Hampstead Heath getting a friendly lesson in guyness from my oldest friend’s tough, tender husband.
Indeed, the effects of that afternoon linger, and not just because my son now wants to beat the crap out of me as often as possible. Not long after our visit, my father succumbed to the athlete’s worst humiliation at the end of a long path to dying from Parkinson’s Disease that had robbed him tortuously of his physicality while leaving his mind intact before finally killing him.
He was never a sissy and what good did it do him, in the end?
With Nick, well, I’ve learned to let our affection go in that rough-and-tumble direction, along with the baseball and bike riding; in thick middle age I’ve allowed myself to become more of a standard-issue guy, though my children still have seen more Broadway musicals than any of their friends, (so of course they’ve seen me cry a lot, too). I still have no taste for violence. But thanks to my best friend’s lover, my son has taken me to a physical place I never dreamed I’d go.