We all know about Elvis and his pelvis, and the controversy sparked by the very first rock-n-rollers when they crossed over from holy gospel music to songs about fuckin’. Basically, the church people have never gotten over it -- and neither have several generations of American parents.

One of those people was my father. He was neither a Christian nor a political conservative. He was just a hard-working salesman with a lovely wife, two small children, and one very pain-in-the-ass teenage son.

My older brother Steve was a typical teenager of the seventies, cutting classes to hang out in the park with his friends and enjoy the joints, pills and liquor that they effortlessly stole from their parents, then stumbling home and zonking out on his bed until supper time.

The soundtrack to his existence was Frank Zappa, Deep Purple, Ted Nugent, Pink Floyd, and Alice Cooper – all emanating at Volume 11, of course, through Steve’s closed bedroom door, mercilessly vibrating the thin walls of our modest little box-shaped house.

On the other side of the door, the air was thick with incense, pot smoke, and the rancid farts of skinny teenage boys who subsisted on marijuana and junk food.

I was fascinated by the large velvet poster on his wall: Frank Zappa's “200 Motels”. The huge cast of bizarre characters, especially the half-naked, big-boobed women, looked to me like a crowd of shameless degenerates being sucked down into Hell.

Growing up in repressed Protestant Wisconsin, images like this were very shocking. What made the poster even more powerful is that it glowed in the dark, inviting these titillating images to occupy my dreams and searing them into my brain for life.

My brother and his friends began getting into trouble. They were kicked out of school. They were sent to other schools, where they were kicked out as well. None of this was easy on my parents. The way they looked at it, and from what they were constantly being told by teachers, guidance counselors and psychiatrists, they had a Problem Kid on their hands.

One of the pivotal points in Steve’s deteriorating relationship with my parents was when my mother grounded him, forbidding him to leave the house for a week. After much pleading, he convinced my mother to allow him to go into the back yard. “Come on, Mom. I just wanna pick some raspberries from the garden.”

As soon as my mother turned her back, he ran off to see Aerosmith in concert. From then on, running away from home in order to see rock concerts would forever be referred to by us kids as "going to pick raspberries".

“I don’t know what the hell is going on with Steve, but your mother and I have put up with his nonsense long enough,” my father said. “They’re talking on TV about the ‘Generation Gap’, as if parents don’t know how to relate to their own kids. Baloney. There is no generation gap! The real problem is that kids nowadays have no respect.

“And you know what? It all started with that rock-and-roll. Those long-haired rock singers – a bunch of fruits is what they are! They’re the ones who warped his mind. That Alice Cooper character -- first with the woman’s name, and then all that make-up. And that Led Zeppelin. Oh, and that Pink Floyd – that guy’s the worst!”

“Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin are not individuals,” my mother corrected him. “Those are the names of the bands.”

“Well, whatever they are, they’re a bunch of low-lifes,” my father said. “Why are you contradicting me, anyway? Whose side are you on?
Who let him out to pick raspberries in the first place?”

The night of the Aerosmith concert, Steve was able to avoid punishment until the next morning by calling our Uncle Bobby– a busy lawyer and swingin' bachelor who lived downtown in a luxury high-rise condominium – and begging him to let him spend the night on his sofa.

Uncle Bobby, being the ever-hip being that he was, let him. Of course.

Uncle Bobby wasn’t like my parents at all. He was always going to clubs and having fun, and had a steady stream of girlfriends always ready to replace the one who'd just left. Every once in a while, his girlfriend of the moment would stop showing up to family gatherings. “What happened to Janie?” we’d ask him. “Janie?" he's say, as if he trouble remembering who she was. "Oh, I put Janie on the back burner.” Putting a girlfriend on a back burner was the diplomatic way of saying he’d dumped her, but I loved the way it sounded: like she was a casserole or a bowl of pasta that needed time to cool off.

Steve continued to misbehave. One night my parents left me and my younger brother Sam in his care while they went out to dinner. They returned several hours later to find all the lights in the house turned on, the doors flung wide open, Led Zeppelin blasting on the stereo and Steve tripping on acid. I don’t remember in what condition they found Sam, but I was meticulously covered from head to toe with small pieces of Scotch™ cellophane tape.

In spite of the fact that Sam and I were alive and in no need of hospitalization, my parents began to hire Steve’s female classmates to babysit us. This posed no problem for me. At the tender age of six, I was already a full-blown lesbian.

“Mom? Dad? When are you going out again so Valerie can come over?” I'd ask. Valerie was our 13-year-old neighbor. She had long, honey-blond hair down to her waist and I was completely in love with her. The last few times she’d babysat us, I had already asked her to marry me, and now I was eagerly awaiting her reply.

If she said no, however, I had back-up plans. They were named Debby, Lisa and Karen, and they were all Steve's classmates. All had long hair, which I adored combing and running through my fingers.
And if I got tired of any of them, I could always put them on the back burner, like Uncle Bobby did with his girlfriends.

I didn’t understand what could be the least bit attractive about boys. As far as I was concerned, they were dirty, loud, and frankly repulsive. After all, I had my two brothers as models.

My sexual orientation shifted gradually: first with Donny Osmond, then Sean Cassidy, and finally Andy Gibb. The first concert I ever saw was Andy Gibb at the Wisconsin State Fair Park, and I remember falling in love right from my seat in the bleachers, slick with my own drool. As soon as I got home, I ripped my faggoty Sean Cassidy poster from my bedroom wall and replaced it with one of Andy Gibb that I’d gotten my father to buy me at the concert. I bought his album, “Shadow Dancing” from Musicland™ record store, and listened to it for hours while staring at the cover photo of Andy Gibb, chest hair spilling out of his open red shirt, that impish smile on his face, and arms open as if to say, “Love me. You won’t be sorry!”