Dead Na Dead Sa Iyo!

Aside from Gentle Ben and Flipper, I also remember watching The Mod Squad and Mission: Impossible. Plus there’s this lesser-known cop-tandem series (in black-and-white): Adam 12. I remember having a crush on one of them, the blonde and blue-eyed one. I think that was the first inkling I had that I was gay. But I didn’t always fall for the blond one: I had a crush on Starsky, not Hutch. In CHiPs, I had eyes only for Hispanic brunette Eric Estrada, not Aryan blond Larry Wilcox (liked the last name of the latter, though.) Only with Miami Vice did I go back to blondes with Don Johnson.

Television opened my eyes to handsome, strong leading men who talked the talk and walked the walk. They were gruff yet heroic, beautiful in their maleness. Television also ingrained in me the notion of unrequited love. These men could never show their affections for their male partners. Only when their partner is in danger of dying do they drop their defenses and show a bit of caring. If a lead male character in a cop show is shot, I get an emotional rush when his partner goes berserk and avenges him. I looked forward to hospital scenes because that’s where a man can express his concern for his male partner without looking weak and un-manly.

Death scenes for me were dramatic highlights. The death of a leading man was often portrayed as a heroic, selfless act. One of my crushes when I was young was Charlton Heston. In most of his movies he always ended up dead. Moses died at the end of The Ten Commandments. In Earthquake, he jumped in the water in a heroic act to save one of them; he drowned after that. In a little-known movie Call Of The Wild, his character froze under ice. In Soylent Green and The Omega Man I think he ended up dead in both movies. Charlton Heston was my Patron Saint of Death Scenes. (I suspect my mom had a crush on him too; she was the one who kept dragging us into watching his oeuvre.)

Growing up having secret crushes with my handsome, hunky male classmates, I often fantasized taking a bullet to save my crush, or pushing him away from an oncoming vehicle and getting hit instead. And when I’m lying on the ground, bloody but still conscious, he’d rush to my side, look at me teary-eyed, and say, “You did that for me? Why did you do that?” And I’d place my bloodied hand on his wet cheek, mixing his tears with my blood, gasp… and die without telling him why.

Man, I had several variations on numerous death scenes. Death by gunshot, vehicular accident, stabbing, fatal disease—name it, I died in it. But in all those death scenes I was never able to tell my crush how I felt.

Hahaha! I was a bizarre pre-teenage drama queen!