Ganymede's Paul McCartney Story :P
| My Paul Story - Paul's Role in My Life:
by James Sanghyun Han (Ganymede :P)
(written 6 May 1998 and last revised on 18 April 1999 by James Sanghyun Han)
Every Paul fan has a story, so here is my own. Read this when you have nothing better to do. ;)
When I tell people that I really like Paul McCartney cause he was cute in his younger years, reactions range from disgust to surprise. Some people call me corny for liking "the cute Beatle," and there are still others who hate the Beatles in general, and those who hate the fact that I choose a "teen idol" type to like, et cetera - the disapproval for my Paul obsession is widespread.
It's true that Paul McCartney isn't that popular an idol among gay guys like myself, especially among any person around my age (I was born 8 November 1979). But I do stress that I don't really like Sir Paul as he is now: today he is old (too old for me, at least :P); he produces safe, "blah" music every few years; and in my eyes he has stopped growing in an artistic sense, although his music remains fun to listen to... in smallish doses. *g* Back in the 1960's, he was young and gorgeous, a babyface with talent and artistry blooming at a fast rate, and he was one of the few people (two people?) resculpting the music world at that time. It is that *young* Paul which I admire and like.
HOW I MET PAUL - THE LONG STORY:
As a kid in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1980's and early 1990's, I made it a habit of going to sleep listening to an oldies station: 96.5, "K.O.I.T. - light rock, less talk, playing the great music of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties." At that young age I was obsessed with writing a huge series of fanfiction involving a conglomerate of characters from Nintendo games, partly since that short-lived television show Super Mario Brothers (SMB) sparked my own imagination for spin-offs... did any little boy besides me think that Link from the Friday Zelda segments of SMB was totally hot? :P
ANYway, I would type out my fanfiction furiously after school at the archaic typewriter at my father's officeplace. In Hitchcockian fashion, I had written myself into this series that I was writing, and in similar fashion when I would go to sleep each night with K.O.I.T. on the radio, I would always imagine myself on a stage, singing the songs coming from my radio with some of my favorite Nintendo characters singing along at my side. In my imagination I'd have an arm around Link, and we'd both be in sparkly white tuxedos, singing a Supremes song, or perhaps a Beach Boys song, or a Beatles song.
Although I was thus exposed to the Beatles at a very young age, I did not discover Paul McCartney till the middle of eleventh grade, just after I turned fifteen (I skipped a grade). I was always more interested in playing music rather than listening to it (except of course when I went to bed and turned the radio on as I drifted into sleep), and although I had heard mention of "the Beatles" and "John Lennon" and "Paul McCartney" as a little kid, I did not connect those proper nouns with the many songs I was imagining singing with Link or some other Nintendo character right before I slipped into sleep every night. Nor did it help that K.O.I.T. had a habit of playing six or seven songs back to back and then rattling off the names of the performing artists too fast for a half-asleep young kid to catch. As I grew up and moved on to middle school and then to high school, I became less interested in oldies music and started listening to political and philosophical debates on K.G.O. (a talk station) at night, while listening to Sinead O'Connor, Mariah Carey, the Beach Boys, and other similar pop during the day. The Beatles music and the other "oldies" music were something I had grown out of (for the time being, at least ^_^) and, by the time a friend told me during my tenth grade year that she was a fan of John, Paul, Ringo, George, and Beatles music, I truly had no idea who or what she was talking about, although I had heard their music every night as a child. I told Amanda that though I hadn't heard tell of them, the names were hauntingly familiar.
Then, for Christmas of 1994 (my eleventh grade year), less than two months after I turned fifteen, my mother got me two things: Erich Segal's book The Class (which I detested even after reading it twice), and the Beatles' "Live at the BBC" double album, which had been released two or three weeks earlier, earning rave reviews even though I had no idea what all the fuss was about.
At first I was disappointed at my mother's choice of gifts. It was obvious that although she knew how much I loved to read, she didn't know my preference for books by authors like Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks, nor did she realize that I detested fiction of the Danielle Steele/Erich Segal ilk. As for the Beatles live double album, I knew my mother had just gotten it for me because she knew it was some new release that people were talking about, so as a teenager who liked music her son would like some new, trendy two-CD release, right?
Little did she or I realize how right she was.
At first I sighed to myself and told my mother how great the presents were and went to my room to listen to the CD. Hanging out with Amanda the year before had reintroduced me to the Beatles somewhat, so I could kinda sorta distuingish between each Beatle and put a name to a face. Sometimes. All I knew was that the big-nosed one was called Ring-something, the prettiest one was Paul, and the one sporting granny glasses was John.
So I got to my room, popped the first CD in, and I removed the booklet inside to read along as I listened, which is what I always do when I hear a new CD for the first time. I flipped through the booklet briefly, paused a bit at the cute pictures of Paul circa 1963 (up to then I had only seen a few unflattering pictures of Paul from 1969 or something), and pressed "play."
I had to lower the volume when a deep voice scared me by booming out his greeting: "I'm Ringo and I play the drums." But when a lighter, husky/sexy Liverpudlian voice proclaimed, "'ey, I'm Paul, and I play the uhh... uhh... bass," I was intrigued and drawn into the rest of the two CD's. Thanks to that opening track where each Beatle identified themselves, I was able to distuingish between the Beatles' voices and tell when it was Paul who was singing or talking, and I listened to both CD's back to back, relishing the music as I realized that these Beatles were the people who wrote and sang many of the songs I went to sleep listening to and dreamed about singing with Nintendo characters as a child. I replayed the tracks that I liked (mainly the ones that featured Paul), and pored through the booklet as I listened to my heart's content, my enjoyment of the music and my intrigue with Paul both growing fast. Isn't that pic on page 23 of the booklet where Paul is resting his chin on his fist the most gorgeous thing?
By the time I had finished my listening for the day, I was head over heels in love with Paul, though I don't think I knew it at the time.
MY OBSESSION AND PAUL'S ROLE IN MY LIFE:
From that point on, I had an obsession with Beatles music, and an obsession with Paul specifically. Besides buying a new Beatles CD every month or so and a high-quality picture book on the Beatles every so often, I went to the library both at school and downtown at home, checking out all the Beatles biographies and photo books as fast as I could read them (which was pretty fast), and I soon became a biography conneisseur: I could tell within a few pages into a Beatles biography if it was gonna be a sincere effort at chronicling the Fab or just a trashy/sketchy do like Peter Brown's book (even though I secretly like what Peter said about John Lennon and Brian Epstein's little trip to Spain *g*). Plus, the many pictures of the young Paul provided my hormone-filled brain with tons of teenage fantasies involving Paul - ask anyone who knew me at the time: even though I never as of yet had told anyone I was gay, my friends couldn't get me to shut up over how "cool" the Beatles (especially Paul :P) were.
This leads me to the main point of all my babble, which is that Paul was way more than my first teenage crush obsession/crush; it may sound laughable or corny to people at first read, but Paul played a vital role in my search for self-identity as a gay guy. You see, I had known I was gay since I was twelve, but I never thought much of it, and automatically/subconsciously pushed the entire issue out of my mind. I knew I was attracted to boys, but for some reason I also still thought that I would get married to some nice girl just like every other good all-American boy does, right? Little did I realize that only the IDEA of settling with a girl appealed to me, and even then the only reason that idea appealed to me was because it was the only thing I had ever known or seen (on TV, in books, and in real life), not because I would actually be romantically attracted to any girl.
My newfound love (and trust me, it was love) with Paul pushed the issue of my sexuality to the forefront of my fifteen-year-old mind, an issue I purposely had forgotten long before. In March, three months after I got that fateful Christmas present, our school was in the middle of productions for their yearly benefit, and they had sent me a promotional group picture of the senior class with famous music stars interspersed among them via the magic of computer graphics; one of the stars was dear ol' Paul himself. It wasn't a great pic of him, but during a hectic school week I had taken a nap listening to the live double album (i.e. I fell asleep while studying *g*), and I had a sexual dream involving that picture of Paul McCartney.
Moving on, the main result of that dream was that I had to realize that I was no longer able to ignore the fact that yes, I was GAY. It wasn't an obvious "I see the light" moment for me, nor was there any trumpet music symbolizing my newfound awareness, and at any rate realizing that one is gay isn't one big epiphany but usually a set of smaller ones; but in any case I knew then that I could not ignore the issue any longer. I would never settle down, or at least never settle down with a girl. Preferably I want(ed) to settle down with a Paul lookalike, since the real one was too old and straight... unless something happened between Paul and John one night that no one knows about. :P
Admittedly, at that point I was a fifteen-year-old male and my hormones were raging just like that of any healthy fifteen-year-old boy with libido bubbling out of every pore, so perhaps the issue of my sexuality would have come up whether or not I was in love with Paul; but the fact is that I *was* in love with Paul, and being in love with Paul (god, I really sound corny, I apologize *L*) gave me enough self-awareness to provide me the necessary impetus to face the issues I had been avoiding for years.
COMING OUT - THE HEIGHT OF OBSESSION:
Two months after the dream incident, I came out to a friend for the first time. We were just having a blast after school together since we had to wait until the evening when we would both be performing at the school's music concert that night, and we had been shopping and talking on that warm May day in California, enjoying the last lazy days of school. Incredibly nervous, I managed to stammer out to Shenaya the fact that it wasn't Emiko but her boyfriend Mark that I kinda liked, and she took the news well, thankfully. Even so, my subconscious worked in a weird way and Shenaya never talked about the issue again, and thus I promptly forgot over the summer that the incident had ever happened; in fact I completely forgot that she was the first person I came out to till over two years later.
And of course, all this time my Paul fixation :P was growing and growing. I continued to borrow or buy books, buy CD's, and obsess. Summer came and went, and when I started my senior year, still fifteen, I began writing male/male fiction for my school's underground publication. It was sort of an indirect way of coming out... people would compliment me on my writing quality and give me weird looks, but they never were brave enough to ask: "So does this mean you're gay?" Obviously, not many straight men these days would write stories about two guys falling in love, but in the same vein what one wrote about did not necessarily reflect one as a person, so writing the stories was my way of kinda sorta coming out to my school without explicitly saying it.
By the way, one of these stories was an atrociously lame slash fanfiction piece where Paul McCartney and John Lennon became lovers. Well, so sue me, I told you I was obsessed! :P
In late November of my senior year, the wonderful "Anthology" series aired on TV, and I happily/lovingly recorded all six hours (I still don't have the money to buy the uncut, ten-hour version that's available in stores), watching them with avid interest, especially when the young Paul was in motion. I was probably one of the very few sixteen-year-old boys who got hot and bothered watching Paul McCartney sing "Hey Jude," as he stared up at the videocamera with those huge brown eyes, wearing that burgundy jacket and arching his eyebrows with each high note. :P
My obsession peaked around that time. At this point I was even photocopying all the cute Paul pictures I found in library books and began assembling a black and white collage, painstakingly cutting each picture around their complicated edges till my fingers hurt. Do you know how HARD it is to cut out stuff like windscattered moptop hair and the tuning knobs on a guitar? :P
Unfortunately, my mother was upset one day at the fact that I was spending more time procrastinating than doing my homework, and when she caught me working on the collage, she promptly dumped the cut-out pictures and half-done collage into the trash. What with my Paul obsession and the fact that the collage was one of my few art endeavors that would actually have looked damn good, it was one of the few things my mother has done that has really hurt me. I checked out the library books again, and I vowed that no matter how much the late fine would be, I wouldn't return them till I had finished the collage.
It's been a few years, and I still have the books. *L* I haven't even gotten around to photocopying the pictures again. But I will, trust me. I pride myself on finishing things that I say I'll finish.
By the time of this collage incident, early 1996, my subconscious had made me forget the fact that I had come out already to Shenaya, so I was burning with an intense need to come out "for the first time" (and I really did think it was the first time; I didn't remember the incident with Shenaya till countless months later). This time, I didn't want to just come out to one person; I needed to tell *all* my friends that the person they were friends with was gay. So, on a trip down to Southern California for the California convention of a Latin/classics club I was part of (some of you may have heard of it - it's the Junior Classical League), I told John - an acquaintance of mine who was the only openly gay person at my school - at three A.M. in the morning that I was gay while our two other roommates slept soundly in that hotel room, and as I spent some time crying/shaking in happy relief, I managed to babble out that a good deal of my Paul McCartney obsession was one of lust. John, like most other people my age, gave me a rather skeptical look, silently/tacitly telling me that he couldn't understand what I saw in Paul, and I said I would show him a picture of Paul that I really liked. He then proceeded to tell me about a different Paul that HE liked, a Paul who went to our school, and I listened with rapt attention, finally glad that I was getting a chance to even talk about these feelings.
One of the first things I did the next morning was rush to John and show him a picture of Paul McCartney that I adored - it was from "Rubber Soul" - you know, that black and white picture of Paul with his eyes closed and a cigarette in his mouth. Looking at it now, it's not a great pic, but at the time I thought it was the bee's knees since it showed off Paul's eyelashes and the cigarette in his mouth was suggestive. :P John merely made an effort to prevent himself from rolling his eyes and smiled cutely, politely commenting that the pic wasn't to his taste.
After the convention, I went home, and started slowly but surely coming out to more and more friends. By the time I was leaving for college, nearly all my close friends and most of my acquaintances knew I was gay, and when I went to Brown University, I went as an out gay guy for the first time. It was a tough road ahead, but after wallpapering my half of the room with Beatles posters that had a cute Paul in each one, I knew I would be fine. :P
THE BABBLE ENDS HERE - PAUL TODAY:
My point in all this digressional blather and talking about my coming out was just so that I could tell my Paul story, to explain to Paul-haters or the Paul-indifferent why this person is was important enough to me for me to make a site for him. As of now my obsession for Paul has simmered down considerably: I don't fantasize about him that much anymore, and the music I listen to nowadays is not just Beatles, but also includes Ani DiFranco, Bjork, the Cocteau Twins, Fiona Apple, They Might Be Giants, Sinead O'Connor, and Madonna. :P But though my obsession may not be as big and scary as it used to be, the young Paul will always be close to my heart, for his youthful beauty that drove me nuts, for the music that permeated my childhood nighttime Nintendo fantasies and my teenage daydreams, and (perhaps most of all) for the rather large if unwitting role he played in the shaping of my formative years.
love ya, Paul :P
- James
SOME PAUL INFO AND LINKS...
full name: James Paul McCartney |