I Feel So Sleezy

Remember these? High school gym shorts from the 1980′s. Wow. At the time I thought they were pretty hot, at least on certain guys. You had to have pretty great legs to pul[ this look off, but there were always a couple of guys in gym class who fit the bill. I think the poly-knit ones we had in high school were actually a bit tighter, perhaps a bit shorter which was only made possible because the slits up the side were not quite as high. The closet of my youth was filled with the hope of a 'costume failure'.

No one would ever dream of wearing these today, except perhaps on Halloween. High school gym shorts today are perforated nylon, loose, and come to the mid-thigh. Equally hot, on the right guy of course, if you ask me, but I've always thought that men are the most beautiful creatures.

The reason I mention this is that on my way to a meeting yesterday I came across a pair of the modern gym shorts from my alma mater. My usual Saturday meeting is in the choir rehearsal room on the third floor of a Presbyterian church about five blocks from my house. Access to the room for AA members is via the steep, metal fire escape in the alley. I call them the scary stairs. You really want to hold on to the hand rail, especially as you descend. Across the alley is the gymnasium building of my old high school, which, like Alcoholics Anonymous, was erected in 1936. As you enter the alley, there is a blue dumpster standing against the brown brick wall of the gym. I guess the custodial staff have been cleaning out the lockers because as I was walking past I glanced in and saw a pile of clothes in it. Gym clothes. Including several pairs of Boise High School gym shorts.

I couldn't help it. I rifled through and found a pair my size and took them.

In fact I've always had a thing for other men's clothes. Thrift stores are paradise to me. Before I lost everything a couple of years ago I had accumulated a collection that included uniform items from the football program of Gonzaga University, cheerleader items from Idaho Falls and Bishop Kelly high schools, Marine dress uniforms,  a Boy Scouts of America scout master uniform (the BEST thing to wear to a gay bar on Halloween), construction clothing including a hard hat and jack boots (you never know when you'll want to climb a telephone pole), cowboy hats and boots, both dress and working, assorted other athletic wear that I would never have bought unless they came of someone else's body, a tuxedo and over 100 neckties, good ones, nothing that retailed for under 80, fatigues in a variety of colors, jackets from armies around the world from WWII to the present, and a pea coat (a real one).

I have a uniform of my own, one I've always used to present myself as I want to be seen, one that takes the focus off my obvious defects. There is something about the uniforms of other men though that I think must have something to do with wish fulfillment. I think that the desire to possess someone else was really an unconscious desire to be someone else. Since I've gotten sober though the same attachment to other men's clothes has all but vanished. I still eroticise athletic wear. That will probably never change. But my attachment to every other uniform as subsided, if not disappeared; even my attachment to the 'Kennedy Casual' costume I've spent my life disguised in.

As I've begun to discover who I really am, my attachment to who I'm not has queitly been disappearing. In the words of Martha Stewart, that's "a good thing."
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