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Finding Tulsa 15

I don’t mind being ghettoized into the gay filmmaker category.
Categories are nice. They help your audience find you. We have our own
shelves. I just don’t want gay people coming to my movies expecting a gay
aesthetic, camp, or Bette, or poppers, or any of that, as if I’m just another
Judy queen with a touching story to tell about a love affair between sero-
discordant club kids in P-Town.
I’m sorry, but while this homo was being reared, so to speak, some
other things took his fancy, like Aerosmith, Battlestar Galactica, and
Aquaman.
“Puppets,” I tell the businessclone.
“What?”
“How I got into directing.”
“Oh.”
It was on a family trip to Mexico. I was ten. In a crowded market
street, I bought a set of marionettes from an old woman, her face brown
and dry as terracotta. My parents had lost me in the maze of tents and
shops. My mother tells me she got the inkling I would become a very
efficient director when they found me haggling the old woman down to
ten bucks for three puppets. “Cutting the budget even then,” is her much-
repeated joke.
But it wasn’t about that. I only had ten dollars, and I thought those
puppets were friends, that they couldn’t be taken away from each other.
In that dusty grotto in Nogales, a little clown with guns, a red-caped bull-
fighter with tight, spangled pants, and a mustachioed cop danced under
my hands. On the plane back to Ohio, I refused to check the marionettes
with the luggage, insisting they each get to see the clouds.
I tell the interviewers about my movie nights, charging neighborhood
kids five cents for a Halloween showing of the last reel of Phantom of
the Opera—preadolescents couldn’t take all four reels, even with our con-
cocted rock music accompaniment—preceded by a bad horror Super8
one-reeler my brother and I made.
In our Jekyll and Hyde, I was transformed by downing a magic liquid
of water, bicarbonate of soda, and green food dye. It foamed thanks to our
crewmember, Mike Humerkauser, a chubby blond boy who would later
initiate me into the joys of Kiss, Alice Cooper, and Bowie’s Diamond Dogs.
I also borrowed his fake fangs, which he let me keep when I tried to return
them coated in drool.
The film also included the traditional Jekyll-goes-mad scene, in which
we lit our backyard like a London park, propping up ancient black gates
my dad had removed in favor of white waist-high fencing. He also played