Like a lot of young boys, I was fascinated by Bugs Bunny. He was sly and confident and knew how to get what he wanted. Next to Bugs, everyone else seemed corny, too wrapped up in ego to see the architecture of the game at hand. I had sympathies for other Looney Tunes—I understood Wile E. Coyote’s frustrations and the sweet embarrassments of Porky Pig too well—but Bugs was the one I wanted to be.
One day I was sitting in the basement of my dad’s apartment with my friend Jaime watching an old Bugs cartoon called “Rabbit Seasoning”. This was 1987; I was 5 or 6 maybe. If you’ve ever watched cartoons, either as a child or adult, you probably have dim visions of Bugs dressed as a woman, in wedge heels and lipstick, or with his ears pinned back by a bow. As a kid, this image short-circuited me: Suddenly, my idol was my pinup. (Apparently, I wasn’t the only one for whom Bugs in drag struck a nerve).
Halfway through the cartoon, Jaime and I turned to each other, had a brief discussion whose terms I don’t remember, then walked into the bedroom and decided to get naked. At 5, you have no conception of the difference between gay or straight or anything else, just that sometimes your body tingles like it’s ripe for something. Regardless, I had the good sense to know that whatever we were doing should be done with the door closed. It was the closest I ever came to playing doctor.
Around the same time, I found a bootleg copy of Prince’s Black Album on my dad’s tape rack. I didn’t know who Prince was, and it was only some nascent, inborn idea about the auteur theory that led me to assume that the person on the tape’s cover—a small man dressed in flashy women’s clothing—was the same person who made the music inside. I didn’t listen to the tape; I was afraid that even opening it would set off some secret alarm in my dad’s chambers, or at the very least result in some obscure smiting by an even more obscure god. Still, the image rooted in my imagination and blossomed, and on occasions when I was sure I was alone, I’d tiptoe to the tape rack and look at the Black Album with a fascination reserved for things you aren’t supposed to see.
I first ended up hearing Prince’s music in a movie theater in Lower Manhattan, my dad on one side of me and my kid brother on the other, watching a matinee of Tim Burton’s Batman. Though Prince fans don’t seem to take it seriously, especially at the end of a 1980s run that included Purple Rain and 1999, the Batman soundtrack made perfect sense to me, especially as a kid. Like the movie, it was slick and theatrical, but it also stabbed at an underlying weirdness so deep it couldn’t be spoken about, only gestured to in sputtering guitar riffs and vocal interjections that sounded like someone being tickled, or maybe punched. Batman was the first time I had occasion to think about body modification surgery, or how someone might invent another identity in order to negotiate trauma, or about how violence, comedy, and sex (whatever that was) came from the same primal wellspring.
Both Prince and the Joker loved purple, too, a color that has always connoted mysticism and ambiguity in part because it exists only as a combination of red and blue, somewhere off the spectrum of visible light—because it isn’t, in the strict sense, a color at all. These were men who had not only made peace with their desires but came to celebrate them without shame, which to a shy 7-year-old made them instant heroes. And then there was the matter of seeing Batman in the theater proceeded by, of all things, a Bugs Bunny cartoon—basic marketing synergy on the part of Warner Bros. that touched my young brain as serendipity of the highest, most religious order.
But purple, purple, it all inevitably came back to purple: Not a single thing but a combination, more a fluid state than a fixed identity. Prince could have just as easily called the Black Album the Purple Album, a title that would have hinted at his own playful in-betweenness—that transvestite dream on the cover of my dad’s bootleg tape, or his alter-ego, Camille, voice pitched up to sound not quite like a woman but a little less like a man. More than anything else, it was Prince who taught me the meaning of the word “psychedelic”: A state where the visible and invisible lines barricading different categories blurred to the point that they could be crossed, somewhere where one thing could easily become something else. Psychedelic was Prince in the movie Purple Rain playing a woman a tape of what sounds like laughter only to reveal that it’s crying, played backwards, or Prince on 1987’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend”, wondering why his lover won't let him pick out her clothes, trying to wriggle out of the three-piece suit heterosexuality puts on him. As a kid, nobody has to teach you to think this way: They shame it out of you as time goes on.
It took me about 15 years to get around to listening to the Black Album, or any of Prince’s other ‘80s records, in part because I had an uncanny sense that I’d already heard them: Like a story about your childhood whose memory is constructed out of hearing your parents tell it, my experience with Prince was secondhand, filled in by flashes of dance-party ecstasy with “When You Were Mine” or “U Got the Look”, or the even more prevalent “1999”, “Let’s Go Crazy”, “Little Red Corvette”, and so on, but never pursued in any kind of private way. I knew Prince’s music like I knew water.
As someone whose most primal musical affiliation lies with punk, or any other music that shivers with energy it can’t quite control, Dirty Mind is my favorite Prince LP, followed by Controversy. These are eight-song albums that provide flashes of social utopia and sexual liberation so bright it’s no wonder Prince bunkered down in Minnesota and almost never came out—the real world is, generally speaking, a more temperate and disappointing place than the riot of his imagination.
Put another way, the reason there’s only one Prince isn’t because more men don’t dream of being Prince, but because they wouldn’t know what to tell their coworkers. Instead, they ride their own Bruce Wayne/Batman divides, nice guys of the neighborhood, superfreaks of the mind. As for Jaime, the kid who came into the bedroom with me, I think he moved to Mississippi. Seven-year-old boys don’t write letters, not that I had anything to say if they did.
A few weeks ago my wife and I sat down to watch an Al Pacino movie from 1975 called Dog Day Afternoon, which tells the story of a botched bank robbery in Brooklyn that flares out into a hostage situation. One of the movie’s more unexpected plot turns is finding out that Pacino—who plays an angry, alienated guy named Sonny—is robbing the bank in part to get money for his lover’s male-to-female transition surgery. Eventually, the lover appears; her name is Leon, a sympathetic—if simplistic—image of a queen in the era before AIDS even had a name: willowy, nervous, sick with existential heartbreak. She lisps, sighs, and flicks her wrist as though her life was a joke, which for the cops—a ring of guys with Styrofoam cups barely suppressing their rude fascination—it is.
Leon isn’t in the movie for all that long, but she is, in her way, its mysterious center: The engine for a plot the viewer never fully understands. We know Sonny is robbing the bank in part out of love, but what we know of that love is sad and obscure, fraught with telepathic communications between two people used to living in secret.
Leon herself is defined by her non-definition: She’s trying to become on the outside who she thinks she already is on the inside. She broke my heart.
The next morning, I was listening to Prince’s Dirty Mind and doing some writing when I got a text from a woman who, in the parlance of Prince, used to be mine. We’re friends now, and have been for a long time, in that ricocheting, unpredictable way exes can be friends, and still maintain a strong psychic connection—I feel her coming before she reaches out the way you feel moisture in the air before a storm.
“You showed up in my dream in drag,” the text read. “How are you?”
I wrote back immediately: “How’d I look?”