American High

CanadaGirl’s friend had to cancel on me, and we rescheduled the apartment tour for Monday. So instead of seeing an apartment yesterday evening, I was a sloth and watched four hours of television. Someone’s blog yesterday turned me onto “American High” on PBS, but for the life of me I can’t remember whose.

Whoever you are, thank you, because the show is done very well: a few students at a high school outside Chicago were videotaped, documentary-style, as they lived their lives, and on top of that, they were each given a video camera to tape what they wanted. Another reality-TV series, in a way, and at one point I had to remind myself that nobody was being voted off the show at the end, but it really got into the hearts and minds of these students, including a gay one.

On top of that, I watched “Dawson’s Creek” last night and got to relive the emotional roller coaster of the season of college acceptance packets and rejection letters.

I’m fascinated by teenagers. I want a second chance to live my teen years, to correct the things I did wrong. It’s weird — I’m 27, and sometimes I think I’m so young, that I have such a long life ahead of me. And I do. But then I forget that I’ve already had a pretty long life up to now. I forget that at 16 or 17 or 18 you’re already intellectually and emotionally aware and that lots has already happened to you. How soon I forget.

But — despite my whirlwind schedule of high school activities, despite having had a great group of high school friends, despite the fact that I spent three adventurous years attending high school overseas — I just feel like I didn’t live my teen years as fully as I could have. But you know, I’m sure I’m just romanticizing it. Television makes everything look rosy and exciting. And the Mythic American Teenager is one of the most romanticized figures in our culture, sort of the same position the cowboy held in our culture a century ago. It’s something that’s hard to live up to — that very few people live up to.

As for “American High,” the teens they chose to spotlight in these two episodes were pretty gifted. One was a female guitar player who might be the next Lisa Loeb. Another was a gay guy with a terrific body who creates art and dances. Still, who knows – I could have felt pangs of nostalgia even if they’d shown a teenager sitting at home watching TV.

But it’s not just high school that I miss. It’s college. From where I stand now, I look back at my 17-year-old self, at the end of high school, with four years of college ahead of him, a blank slate for exploration and reconstitution of the self, and I envy him. And there are some things I wish I could tell him. Among other things, I wish I could tell him to screw his parents and come out of the closet as soon as possible.

The first time I came out to someone, anyone at all, was during the spring of my first year of college, when I was 18. But after a year I went back into the closet, and it took several asexual years for me to venture out again. It wasn’t until the beginning of my last year of law school, when I was 24, that I was willing to call myself gay and had my first relationship with a guy. In between were years I could have spent exploring myself more deeply, years I could have spent meeting more gay people, and dating, and having sex.

I wish I could tell that 17-year-old guy, on the brink of college, not to worry so much about everything. I wish I could tell him to have more faith in himself, to have more faith in his convictions, to stand up for who he is, for who he knows he is, to not try to figure everything out beforehand, to live life, to do some scary things, to have more fun. I wish I could say to him:

What are you so afraid of?