I want my excuse to be that I was still in my single digit years, and therefore more vulnerable to the Disney like nature of musical theater.  But I distinctly remember living in the Lakeview house, and we didn't move there until I was eleven.  One of those friends of the family that my parents had me call Uncle was on the outs with his wife.  While I was shipped off to summer camp, he stayed in my room.  He brought with him clothes, a stack of magazines ranging from The Weekly World News to Newsweek, and a small beige briefcase full of cassettes.

My parents listened to oldies, classic radio shows, and country music.  When I was six, I told my grandmother that I didn't like any music made after 1967.  That Christmas, my parents gave me a copy of Michael Jackson's Thriller, and an incredibly premature Best Of The 1980s collection.  Tony Basil and Donna Summer became my favorite contemporary artists, and my favorite song on the Elks Club jukebox was Kool & The Gang's Celebration.  So maybe the whole musical thing shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise.  Still, I'm thirty-four now, and much more comfortable talking about that hilarious time I ejaculated into a man's anus, then I am talking about the first time I listened to Cats.

Of course it was Cats.  The green eyes on the black background, the catchy poems that Andrew Lloyd Webber set to saccharine music, the obligatory tacked on diva belted ballad.  If you're going to leave a copy of Cats in an eleven year old's boombox the same week he gets the lead part in a play about fairy tales, you should go the extra centimeter and paper his bedroom's wall with pictures of greased up men with little or no clothing.

It's never been discussed why Uncle Mo spent two weeks living in my room while I slept in leaky cabins, and on the beach, but I suspect it had something to do with marital problems stemming from his pronounced lisp, gravity defying hands, and bright floral print blousy shirts.  Or possibly he just needed a break from his own pre-teen boys who, the next year, would introduce me to ACDC, A Clockwork Orange, and the curious site of a twelve year old boy shoving a harmonica up his ten year old brother's ass.  Whenever I start to think my own childhood was perversely gay, I think back on Cousin Bruce and Darren's oddly incestual Truth Or Dare games, and a wave of heteronormalcy washes over me.  It feels like the opposite of a facial.

Once I'd memorized the lyrics to Cats, I moved on to Phantom Of The Opera, Les Miserables, A Chorus Line, and Hello Dolly.  Later that fall,  I grew tired of the weirdly homosexual overtones of Boy Scouts, and quit the troop to be in a production of Bye Bye Birdie.

When you grow up knowing all the lyrics to An English Teacher and Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend, you have two choices: be a debonair straight boy who spends his teens and early twenties  training to be a professional cunnilinguist, or be a fat homo with body issues and a fake girlfriend.  All my exes describe me as "charming".

Even at eleven, I knew that liking musicals was, like waking up hard with your arms wrapped around your tentmate in Webelo camp, something you kept to yourself as long as possible.  His future boyfriends would call him "charming" too.  His ex-wife has other adjectives.  Very few thesauruses connect her descriptions to "charming".

When Queen Sarah The Formerly Popular had her parents turn their loft into her Phantom Of The Opera style bedroom, I was the only one who described it as "cool".  A week later, we sang a thirty second variation of All I Ask Of You on my answering machine, recording over my auspicious hip-hop debut. "You have reached 428-1383, we're not home right now, as you can see.  Leave your name and your number right after the tone cause right now we can't be reached by telephone right now right now right now."  I was born a decade too late to be a Beastie Boy.

Our recording caught the attention of precisely no one except for my parents who erased it because it was "too long".

The first musical I was in was You're A Good Man Charlie Brown.  I played Linus.  I had a crush on Schroeder, and rat tailed Lucy with my blanket on opening night because she decided to improv and kiss him on the lips.  That the actor playing Schroeder was hopelessly straight, or that the actress playing Lucy was his sister didn't cross my mind until I was in my twenties.  That there was a disturbing amount of vaguely incestual sibling activity on Cape Cod didn't occur to me until I started writing this paragraph.

I'd like to thank my parents for making me an only child.

The closest I had to a brother, growing up, was Kevin Harris, a professional wrestling fan who used to Weird Al Yankovic lyrics to pop songs, and expose himself to passing traffic.  But if we were brothers, then our relationship was aggressively incestual.

Cats led me to try out for musicals.  Phantom Of The Opera influenced my outgoing message recordings.  Les Miserables enticed me to read the unabridged Victor Hugo novel when I was twelve.  It wasn't for another decade, when I was playing Eddie and Dr. Scott in The Rocky Horror Show, that I started connecting the dots between my affinity for musicals and long showers after gym class.

Last week, I found myself at a party with Wiz, Emily, and an assorted mix of poetry friends and strangers, when a girl pulled a eukalale out of her backpack, and began playing songs from The Jungle Book, The Lion King, and Evita with honest to tone deaf sincerity.  A group of lispers and belters joined in.  I knew all the words but had no desire to sing them.  This is what I call Gay Pride.  Unfuck parades, drag shows, quilts, and rainbow glow sticks.  I am proud every time someone shouts "One!" and I don't reply with "Singular sensation!"  That's what I call progress.