The Embarassing Brother

(This is from an article I wrote in 2009 and posted on one of my other blogs.) 

I was looking at an old Sears “wish book” catalog from the early 1960s. Seeing the pink cardboard kitchenette brought up a memory from my childhood.

I have never spoken of this publicly because it is still embarrassing

One of the most embarrassing things for a child is to be the brother of a conspicuous sissy. My brother was a big sissy. We were adopted. I am of German / Nordic stock from Northeast Pennsylvania. My younger brother and sister were ‘imported’ from Ireland.

My mother thought that my “brother” was wonderful. She wanted a “nice” boy to show off to the people at her church and to her relatives. Her definition of nice did not leave room for normal. She preferred a sissy. My brother was about as sissified as a boy could get. It was his natural state.

One Yule, my brother wanted a pink cardboard kitchenette set, an EZ Bake oven and a make believe iron and ironing board. He got it, too. I remember his reaction to it. Think of Martha Stewart getting a new kitchen. My mother thought he was a treasure. I wanted a G.I. Joe, a toy bulldozer and a toy tommy gun. To “mother,” I was no good. Being relatively normal evoked her unkindness.

Worst of all, I had to play with him. If I did not, my mother would give me a lot of grief. I could not even complain that my “brother” was a very embarrassing sissy. That would be enough to get the belt. Whatever the game, “brother ” had to be included or I risked a beating.

For instance, we were playing secret agent one day. My “brother” insisted on playing a female agent. He was running down the block waving a cap pistol while half singing / half shouting lines from a Dianna Ross song. “Brother” ran like a chubby little girl.

My parents bought him the Marx tin-litho dollhouse. One day, my friends and I got hold of it and put it to better use. We used it for army men. We had snipers in the windows and the barrel of an M41 protruding through the front door. “Brother” came home and saw this. He shrieked! That got the attention of my mother, who ranted at us as if we were the worst creatures on earth. That’s right. We caught it just for being normal kids.

When it came to toy cars, my “brother” had his own ideas. He wanted – and got – the Dale Evans jeep with a striped canopy and a fringe. He called it his “surrey with a fringe on top.” I kid you not: by age seven, the boy was into show tunes. And my mother was more than happy to buy him all the Barbara Streisand, Dianna Ross and show tune albums he wanted. She let him hog the record player, too.

There was the time several of my friends and I were sitting at the picnic table in the backyard. My so-called brother suggested we play a game. He wanted to have a make-believe talk show. He wanted to call his make-believe show “Ladies.” At that point, we ran for my friend’s house. Life is swell with Lionel, and we preferred running electric trains to playing some sissy game.

I can tell you for a fact that when your brother is a flamboyant sissy, you get embarrassed many, many times. Even worse, my “brother” was also a rat. He loved ratting me out to my mother.

I have no contact with any of the family for some years now, and I rarely think of them. Life has always been better without them. At their best, they were unloving and bizarre. At their worst, well, imagine that you are twelve years old and your father is trying to smash your head into a concrete step with all his might. Sometimes something happens to remind me of the craziness of those days. It is distant enough in the past that I can get a good laugh out of it.

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Despite my brother, I do not have anything against gay people. . I feel sorry for gay people because my brother might count himself as one of them. That is an embarrassment too awful to bear. They do not deserve to be burdened with that kind of humiliation.