My Tribute to The Guys
I contributed to the Tribute booklets for the guys at Sur Con. My piece was an attempt to write a greatly abridged version of pretty much the same stuff I've posted in the early days of this Livejournal.
I grew up in a family where my parents considered themselves intellectually superior to the vast majority of human beings, and intelligence was the only human quality that mattered. My parents had no friends. The word “love” did not exist in our family, except as it referred to romantic relations. The word love used in any other context was scoffed at. My parents weren’t cold - cold has a passion behind it - but they were automatically invaliding of any expressed emotion by others, including their children.
The one subject my parents were willing to talk about was sex. They considered themselves greatly advanced, compared to other parents, and since they were so obsessed with sex, they pretty much assumed that’s all their children thought about, too. So, they would try to turn any conversation into one revolving around sex.
By the time I was a teen, I had only the most casual of friendships at school, and didn’t understand why some kids very much wanted to be in the company of certain other kids. I was suicidal, because I didn’t see any point to being alive. There was nothing to look forward to. I looked down on others, because I was supposedly their intellectual superior. That also meant I looked down on myself. After all, if human beings have no worth in the world, and I was a human being…. Plus, I had feelings about things, which I became so good at covering up, that I was a walking, expressionless robot. I knew that feelings were very naughty, so it was surely a cosmic mistake that I had ever been born.
In December of 1975, my curiosity got the better of me, and I stooped to watch an episode of yet another silly cop show called Starsky & Hutch, out of curiosity, because so much was being said about it. I’m 52yo now, and that still ranks as one of the top five most influential events of my life. That episode was the one where Starsky was shot in a restaurant.
Of course, I’d seen plenty of other cheesy TV dramas where one guy gets shot, and his buddy, or whoever, frets and worries about him dying, while whatever bimbo of the week does all the first aid and hand holding. But this S&H episode was unlike anything I had ever seen before, or was even capable of imagining. So much tenderness! Between two macho men! So much warmth. Petting and cuddling. Actual concern about another person - like that person deserved it, or something. I was spellbound. It all felt so good. But I didn’t even know how to put a name to what those feelings were.
I just knew that, after the episode was over, I kept running those scenes over and over in my mind. I soon convinced myself that I was exaggerating the memory - that the blond guy hadn’t really used that tender of a tone when talking to the wounded, curly guy. That there really hadn’t been a moment when they rested their foreheads together.
That was the beginning of an intense love affair with the series. I ate up everything I could get my hands on having to do with S&H, but was very careful not to talk about it. At school, girls would speak of which star they thought was the most handsome, and boys would talk about the damn car. I was the Only Person On Earth who watched because it made me feel warm and fuzzy all over.
Even the banter of the less dramatic episodes had me spellbound. When one of the guys talked, the other actually listened! Like what one said was worth the other paying attention to. It wasn’t like actors just spouting lines at each other.
It was at least as important to my S&H experience, that when you guys, as the actors, made statements to the press, or on talk shows, you kept talking about that “love” thing. “Starsky and Hutch is, first and foremost, about two people who love each other.” “Whatever else the show is about, there’s one thing you can’t get past, and that’s that it’s about two human beings, loving and caring for each other.” Hearing statements like that - that’s when I knew that my mind wasn’t making it all up, or exaggerating what I’d seen on screen. I really, really needed that reassurance. It was all the more mind blowing that you guys were men! I didn’t know of any men who would dare say things like that in public.
So, thanks to you both, I had a name to put to what I was experiencing. And it didn’t even have anything to do with sex. That was so wonderfully reassuring.
I started making friends. I started to believe that human beings weren’t awful. I reached out to adults for help, so I could learn how to navigate the world, and began to look forward to, and be excited about, the future, rather than feeling that every day was full of pointless irrelevance.
I credit Starsky & Hutch, and what you two said at the time, with having taught me about love.
It is a bit disconcerting, all these years later, that the modern media seems determined to emphasize its belief that the show was, first and foremost, about the damn car.
Please don’t ever believe that.
For me, Starsky & Hutch was the greatest love story of all time.
Thank you.
I grew up in a family where my parents considered themselves intellectually superior to the vast majority of human beings, and intelligence was the only human quality that mattered. My parents had no friends. The word “love” did not exist in our family, except as it referred to romantic relations. The word love used in any other context was scoffed at. My parents weren’t cold - cold has a passion behind it - but they were automatically invaliding of any expressed emotion by others, including their children.
The one subject my parents were willing to talk about was sex. They considered themselves greatly advanced, compared to other parents, and since they were so obsessed with sex, they pretty much assumed that’s all their children thought about, too. So, they would try to turn any conversation into one revolving around sex.
By the time I was a teen, I had only the most casual of friendships at school, and didn’t understand why some kids very much wanted to be in the company of certain other kids. I was suicidal, because I didn’t see any point to being alive. There was nothing to look forward to. I looked down on others, because I was supposedly their intellectual superior. That also meant I looked down on myself. After all, if human beings have no worth in the world, and I was a human being…. Plus, I had feelings about things, which I became so good at covering up, that I was a walking, expressionless robot. I knew that feelings were very naughty, so it was surely a cosmic mistake that I had ever been born.
In December of 1975, my curiosity got the better of me, and I stooped to watch an episode of yet another silly cop show called Starsky & Hutch, out of curiosity, because so much was being said about it. I’m 52yo now, and that still ranks as one of the top five most influential events of my life. That episode was the one where Starsky was shot in a restaurant.
Of course, I’d seen plenty of other cheesy TV dramas where one guy gets shot, and his buddy, or whoever, frets and worries about him dying, while whatever bimbo of the week does all the first aid and hand holding. But this S&H episode was unlike anything I had ever seen before, or was even capable of imagining. So much tenderness! Between two macho men! So much warmth. Petting and cuddling. Actual concern about another person - like that person deserved it, or something. I was spellbound. It all felt so good. But I didn’t even know how to put a name to what those feelings were.
I just knew that, after the episode was over, I kept running those scenes over and over in my mind. I soon convinced myself that I was exaggerating the memory - that the blond guy hadn’t really used that tender of a tone when talking to the wounded, curly guy. That there really hadn’t been a moment when they rested their foreheads together.
That was the beginning of an intense love affair with the series. I ate up everything I could get my hands on having to do with S&H, but was very careful not to talk about it. At school, girls would speak of which star they thought was the most handsome, and boys would talk about the damn car. I was the Only Person On Earth who watched because it made me feel warm and fuzzy all over.
Even the banter of the less dramatic episodes had me spellbound. When one of the guys talked, the other actually listened! Like what one said was worth the other paying attention to. It wasn’t like actors just spouting lines at each other.
It was at least as important to my S&H experience, that when you guys, as the actors, made statements to the press, or on talk shows, you kept talking about that “love” thing. “Starsky and Hutch is, first and foremost, about two people who love each other.” “Whatever else the show is about, there’s one thing you can’t get past, and that’s that it’s about two human beings, loving and caring for each other.” Hearing statements like that - that’s when I knew that my mind wasn’t making it all up, or exaggerating what I’d seen on screen. I really, really needed that reassurance. It was all the more mind blowing that you guys were men! I didn’t know of any men who would dare say things like that in public.
So, thanks to you both, I had a name to put to what I was experiencing. And it didn’t even have anything to do with sex. That was so wonderfully reassuring.
I started making friends. I started to believe that human beings weren’t awful. I reached out to adults for help, so I could learn how to navigate the world, and began to look forward to, and be excited about, the future, rather than feeling that every day was full of pointless irrelevance.
I credit Starsky & Hutch, and what you two said at the time, with having taught me about love.
It is a bit disconcerting, all these years later, that the modern media seems determined to emphasize its belief that the show was, first and foremost, about the damn car.
Please don’t ever believe that.
For me, Starsky & Hutch was the greatest love story of all time.
Thank you.