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Did the inkling that you might be queer start with a crush you had at childhood? That was the case for Ann Helfrich and Alexander Zuccaro. Ann’s crush was on Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island (and yes, she hated the Movie Star). If no one was around, Ann would kiss Mary Ann the moment she appeared onscreen during the opening credits. Alexander’s crush was on Hercules from the Disney animated movie by the same name. He even had a Hercules pillow case that he would sleep with and – on occasion – make out with.
In this episode, Phil and Alex discuss Ann and Alexander’s stories, their own queer crushes, and the importance of queer representation in media.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:01
Hey, this is Phil aka Corinne. And I’m Alex Berg. And you’re listening
00:13
to the I’m From Driftwood Podcast.
00:19
My name is Alexander Zaccaro. I’m originally from Toms River, New Jersey.
00:24
My name is Ann and I’m from Pleasantville, New Jersey.
00:28
I can remember growing up, always feeling strange, odd, and different, not just for,
00:38
you know, being gay, but being artistic as well. I never really hung out with the, you
00:47
know, the boys who wanted to play sports, but I didn’t really like to hang out with
00:50
the girls either on the swing sets. I wanted to, you know, do my own thing.
00:55
Okay. So there’s like this whole thing about, like, when did you know you were gay? Right?
00:58
Like, and I never really – I always had half of me that knew. And then half of me
01:04
that didn’t know, like half of me was totally in denial.
01:07
Alexander and Ann both talked about these childhood crushes they had on famous pop culture
01:12
characters, and how that helped them recognize their own sexual orientation.
01:16
Like the half of me that was, like, disappointed when my softball coach got married. Like I
01:22
was like, what the fuck? Or like when Darlene, like got a boyfriend on Roseanne, like, what
01:26
are you talking about? Just… but I didn’t know I was gay. Like I was still, but I was
01:30
so disappointed that she, was, you know, that she had a boyfriend. It didn’t make any
01:36
sense. She talked about being very, really upset
01:40
about Darlene getting a boyfriend, which I thought was so great because Darlene, you
01:47
know, is not a queer character, although she was in some ways. Because I was so starved
01:52
for queer characters as I was growing up, there were definitely people on TV or at a
01:56
time that weren’t queer, but, you know, they just… Joe from “Facts of LIve”
02:00
So, listen, I mean, there were plenty of butch that I know who were like, “Oh my God. Yeah,
02:05
we’re all Joe. We’re all Joe. It’s always so fascinating when we, as LGBTQ
02:10
people see ourselves in these people, or at least are attracted to them in a way that
02:14
makes us realize we’re not straight. So when I was like a little kid, I was like
02:19
five years old, my best friend, Dorothy, he used to kiss Michael J. Fox on the TV, right?
02:25
So should we get up and like run to the TV. “Oh, Michael J…” I can’t believe – we
02:28
were little, like five. We were little, but she would run up and kiss him. And I tried
02:36
to do that. Like I tried. I wanted to be able to kiss Michael J. Fox, but it wasn’t – it
02:41
didn’t. I was like, it just didn’t work for me. Like I would try and I like felt it
02:46
in my body, like it wasn’t right. And the person that I had a crush on that
02:49
I really wanted to kiss was totally Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island. And, I loved her
02:57
and I remember when I was like… when no one else was in the room… and I was little,
03:06
I was like, as tall as the TV, like I remember the TV being like here and I was standing
03:11
up, I would kiss Mary Ann from Gillian’s Island.
03:15
I would wait for her, you know, like in the credits when the circles come up, you know?
03:20
So I would wait for her circle to come up. I remember, like, waiting and then “The
03:25
Professor and Mary Ann”, you know, and I would kiss Mary Ann. I loved Mary Ann. She
03:30
was so sweet. For me, it made me think about some of those
03:34
early characters that I saw and I have one that’s a little bit embarrassing, which
03:38
is… I want to know who it is.
03:41
Okay. So Legolas, one of the elves from Lord of the rings.
03:44
Yes! I don’t know if you remember.
03:47
Yes! Very sexy. Very sexy. I get it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I feel so vindicated.
03:52
So Legolas is played by Orlando Bloom and the reason, so this character has very long
03:57
hair, is like extremely androgynous and it was one of the first really androgynous characters
04:04
that I saw. And I was like, Why am I the only one of my friends who thinks that Legolas
04:09
is a hottie? You were alone. That’s a shame.
04:12
I know, isn’t it? You had no one to talk to about it. This is
04:15
terrible. But for me, I think that seeing this character,
04:19
it helped me realize, okay, maybe I’m experiencing attraction in a different way than some of
04:24
my friends, which I feel like that’s a little bit of what Ann and Alexander talked about.
04:28
It’s interesting because with Ann, her childhood crush was Marianne from Gilligan’s Island,
04:35
oddly enough, and Alexander. He was all about Hercules.
04:39
When I kind of subconsciously knew I was gay was when I was about five years old, which
04:47
was in 1999. I had a bedspread from the animated movie Hercules, which came out in 1997.
05:00
I remember when I watched the movie and I believe there might’ve been a cartoon as
05:04
well for a short period of time. I just thought, you know, this, like, muscular man is saving
05:11
all of these people and he’s really strong and heroic. Like that was very attractive
05:17
to me as a young child. And I wanted that kind of figure in my life.
05:21
Listen, even cartoons, even cartoon characters are sometimes the queer representation that
05:28
we need. You know, this is long before I realized it
05:30
was queer, but you know what I have to say that Lindsey Wagner, the Bionic Woman got
05:33
me every time. Oh, that’s a good one.
05:36
Oh, I was so into it. Much like Ann,I would say that I was also sort of split in terms
05:42
of how I was viewing crushes, because to me, I had no real language to say what that feeling
05:48
was, but I knew it was like, I just enjoy this person a lot. I really enjoy this person.
05:53
I want to be around them and want to see them. I want to – didn’t have the language to
05:57
know that it was a crush and I kind of understand Ann’s love of Mary Ann and realizing,I think
06:03
she mentioned in that episode, how her friend was so obsessed with Michael J. Fox and she
06:07
was just like, I can’t get into this. Try as she might, she just could not get into
06:12
it. So I didn’t have the language, but I knew it was there. And it was just a feeling,
06:17
but I had no real words for it. I think that you bring up such a good point
06:21
with, which is that, even though sometimes we know we have this – these characters
06:25
are appealing to us, we don’t have the language to describe what that even means. And that’s
06:32
something that you then have to figure out or be able to have that contrast with a lot
06:35
of your friends. One way for me, that that also happened is
06:39
that as a femme queer person myself, I would always see them characters that were straight
06:44
women, who I was like, wait a second, there’s something about that character that I really
06:50
connect with, but I’m not sure what it is. And it was always like really strong female
06:55
bad-ass characters. One of them would be Jennifer Love Hewitt
06:58
in the movie Heartbreakers. It was like a movie in the early 2000s. And she is a con-artist
07:05
with her mom, who’s played by Sigourney Weaver. Basically, the whole plot of this
07:08
movie is that they are trying to con men out of money and use their like femininity and
07:15
they had just have amazing fashion and they’re so… they’re actually like really driven
07:19
by their intelligence as well. And so I always really identified with her.
07:24
And in some ways, the fact that she was like this strong bad-ass, who was like a little
07:30
bit mean kind of cunning for some reason, that really resonated with me as a femme.
07:35
And the way that she performed her femininity kind of just really sat with me, I feel, like
07:39
in a way that it didn’t with some of the straight women who I was around.
07:43
I mean, I say that, that you, that sort of depicts you right now today, you know, today.
07:48
I thank you. You’re welcome. You’re welcome. You know,
07:51
I think one of the things I found very striking about both of these examples is that they
07:55
happen at such young ages. I remember Hercules was on my pillow case
08:01
and thinking to myself, this is my boyfriend, you know, and as a five year old, I was making
08:09
out with it. I was kissing it and holding it and thinking like, my God, you know, my
08:15
boyfriend’s here and… with me, like, you know, at five years old, like what do you,
08:19
what does a five-year-old know about, you know, making out? But it was, you know, with
08:24
my pillow. It was just something I kept to myself because
08:26
I didn’t want anyone to find out. I would do it in my room alone in the dark. This private
08:33
secret thing that no one would know about that only I could get fulfillment from. It
08:38
was meaningful to me because it kind of gave me an escape and an outlet to release these
08:45
feelings that I felt, because I didn’t feel comfortable enough to approach a classmate
08:51
of mine on the playground and kiss him.I wasn’t – I just couldn’t do that in my head something
08:56
was telling me that was wrong. Like he knew that in private was where he
09:01
could really have these feelings. And he couldn’t really just go up to someone on the playground
09:05
and like that to some guy or kid on the playground decided to, you know, express feelings. He
09:09
knew that like this was something they need to keep themselves in private, alone at night.
09:15
And it’s just so interesting because I find those two stories so, like, it’s just so
09:21
interesting that they started so young to understand their feelings. I didn’t have
09:25
that in my life. You know, I didn’t have it until I was much older.
09:29
Yeah, same. I don’t think that I, you know, again, you talked about not having the language
09:34
to be able to describe what it all means and your identity. And I definitely didn’t have
09:38
access to that kind of language until much later, or even was able to identify myself
09:43
in that way, I think, until my early twenties. But it’s also so striking that one of the
09:48
things you said was that privacy aspect was that Alexander knew. That even though maybe
09:55
he hadn’t explicitly been told that he couldn’t express those feelings, he knew that he still
10:00
had to keep it to the privacy of his own room. Even at such a young age. And it just, to
10:05
me, it’s so signaling of the ways that we’re taught as queer people from so young that
10:11
you know, that that is something that you can’t openly express.
10:16
But, you know, it’s interesting because Alexander could have really decided that because
10:20
he knew it wasn’t right. He knew he couldn’t express this outwardly in public. He could
10:24
have really decided to sort of shut that part of himself down. Right? He made a decision
10:30
to have these moments with his Hercules pillowcase in private, which I thought was fascinating
10:36
because he could have really decided there there’s some people who go – queer people
10:40
who go through this experience very early in their lives. And instead of acting on it
10:44
in some way and expressing it privately, they decide that they are just going to put it
10:47
away. I find it interesting that he really was able to go ahead and continue to have,
10:51
to express those feelings to the pillowcase. So Hercules is very muscular, sort of like,
10:56
you know, a heroic sort of like character instead of society, you know what? This is
11:01
not right. And I’m not going to be, it’s not going to be okay by express these feelings.
11:05
It’s pretty, pretty brave for a five year old.
11:08
So by kissing my pillow case, it wasn’t, he couldn’t talk back to me and he couldn’t
11:15
make fun of me or ridicule me or tell me I was wrong. It was something that was just
11:20
natural and just, you know, I could just do without any problem. That was the first time
11:25
I really knew I was… I was gay and I had these feelings that weren’t like other boys,
11:31
or even like other girls. Yeah, and I still have the Hercules pillow case today and I
11:36
still use it. We live in a culture that discourages us from
11:39
being able to talk about these things and talk about sexuality and attraction in an
11:43
open way, even outside of being an LGBTQ person. And I really love that he even still has the
11:50
pillowcase, because I think that there are also people who would feel like this is a
11:54
shameful experience. And I think it’s amazing to be able to own that moment, like own this
11:59
moment that otherwise may have been imbued with shame or that you were taught to keep
12:03
private and people don’t hold that Hercules pillowcase and be like, I still got it. It
12:08
still brings me joy to have this around. I think that that’s, that’s really amazing.
12:12
My neighbor gave me a cutout of her recently, like the grown Mary Ann, like arrested for
12:18
smoking marijuana. She’s like, 60-something. And I had her mugshot. She was still pretty
12:25
cute. I was like, Ah, it’s pretty hot for 60 year old. So that’s my story. She was
12:40
great. Pop culture has evolved so much. I feel like
12:43
right now, if you just think about TV, even public figures, there are so many different
12:47
kinds of LGBTQ people. Well, I think, first of all, kind of what
12:51
we were talking about before, I think it’s a little easier now than it was, you know,
12:55
because there are so many more representations than there were before.
12:58
There’s a very good chance that if I’d seen more queer representation when I was
13:03
coming up, I wouldn’t have had the disconnect in my actual life, which is just taking a
13:06
little longer to come out and being a little more cautious about it. Like I made a beeline
13:10
– I’d have made a beeline straight for it if that was the case.
13:14
One other thing about the media is I think it’s so much fun to think about it in terms
13:18
of the kind of crushes that we have on these people and learning that we’re LGBTQ vis-a-vis
13:24
that way. One other thing, though, I think is that the media also teaches us what we
13:27
should think of ourselves. And at the same time, while we may be learning about our sexual
13:33
orientation or gender identity from some of these characters, I also think that, like,
13:37
a lot of times we learn shame or we learn that LGBTQ people are broken or there’s
13:43
something wrong with us too. So it’s the media, which is all to say,
13:46
I mean, the media can be such a double-edged sword in terms of both affirming us, being
13:51
a really fun vehicle to see ourselves are presented and allow for self discovery, but
13:55
it can also teach us and everybody else stuff that is completely wrong and terrible about
14:01
LGBT charitable. You know, as I was growing up, there was,
14:03
there were very few representations and these days there’s you look around and there’s
14:08
every shade and color and, and iteration of queer. And it’s really wonderful. It’s
14:14
actually so nice because there’s so many more references for people to look at it and
14:18
say, You know, I do see myself in that, or I can recognize a sliver of my stuff in this
14:22
or that. It’s kind of, it’s really beautiful. We’ve become a huge, massive community with
14:26
so much diversity. That’s pretty incredible. What’s the first line? [Unintelligible].
14:35
A tale of a tiny shipt. It was started on this tropic isle aboard this tiny ship. The
14:43
fateful trip? The mate was a might sailor man. The skipper brave and sure. The passengers
14:51
set sail that day for a three-hour tour. A three-hour tour.. The weather started getting
14:56
rough. The tiny ship was tossed. If not for the courage or the fearless crew,them, you
15:05
know, wouldn’t be lost. The minnow would be lost. The ship set ground on the shore
15:12
of this uncharted desert isle. With Gilligan. The Skipper, too. The Millionaire and his
15:20
wife. The Movie Star. The dude, The Professor and – I never liked the Movie Star. She
15:31
was so annoying to me. The Professor and Mary Ann [kiss] here in Gilligan’s Isle.
15:39
You know, I had to wait through the whole thing to get to that one, like, moment. Man,
15:50
I loved her. The I’m From Driftwood podcast is hosted
15:55
by Phil AKA Corinne And Alex Berg, and is produced by Anddy Egan-Thorpe.
15:59
The podcast is recorded as part of. I’m From Driftwood, a worldwide nonprofit LGBTQ+
16:05
story archive, and is funded in part from TD bank and Heritage of Pride New York.
16:12
I’m From Driftwood was created by Nathan Manske to help queer and trans people learn
16:15
more about their community, help straight people learn more about their neighbors and
16:19
help everyone learn more about themselves all through the power of storytelling. The
16:23
IFD program director is Damien Mittlefehldt. The stories you heard today are available
16:27
in their entirety, plus thousands more … At ImFromDriftwood.org. Please follow us on
16:33
Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. And our score is provided by ElevateAudio. Be sure
16:37
to subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
16:41
Thank y’all for listening.
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This post was previously published on YouTube and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video