When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made

Free to Be the Dads We Want to Be

154 Free to Be the Dads We Want to Be Jeremy Adam Smith When I was a kid in Saginaw, Michigan, I made a horrible mistake: I chose to play the flute in my school band. I was the only boy to do so. And at first, I was just awful. There were twelve chairs, and for the first half of the first year, I was dead last. The girl flutists ignored me. The all-male drum section made it their habit to inflict on me the full range of junior high school torments, from tripping me up in gym class to writing “faggot” on my locker in magic marker to straight-up beat downs. But like William with his doll, I wouldn’t give up my flute. William was the protagonist of a cartoon segment featured on the 1974 television special Free to Be . . . You and Me—a little boy who was far ahead of his time. “A doll, a doll, William wants a doll,” chant the children, their faces taunting. In response,William’s father knows just what to do: He buys a basketball, marbles, a baseball glove, “and all the things a boy would love,” sings Alan Alda, just before he would become a fixture in America’s living rooms as star of the hit TV series M*A*S*H. Then Grandma comes to William’s rescue: So William’s grandma, as I’ve been told Bought William a doll, to hug and hold And William’s father began to frown But Grandma smiled, and calmed him down Explaining, “William wants a doll So when he has a baby someday He’ll know how to dress it, put diapers on double And gently caress it to bring up a bubble And care for his baby as every good father Should learn to do” William has a doll, William has a doll ’Cause someday he is gonna be a father, too. I was only five years old when this cartoon appeared, but I remember it. I may have seen it in reruns when I was older, although I have Free to Be the Dads We Want to Be 155 no specific memory of that now. Watching it today as a middle-aged father, it is familiar to me in the same way that Happy Days, The Brady Bunch, and Gilligan’s Island are familiar, a pop comfort food that reminds me of running home after school and switching on the TV. Today, I don’t even own a TV, and my seven-year-old son doesn’t spend more than a few hours in front of a screen every week. It horrifies me that I spent so much of my childhood absorbing countless, commercialized messages about who we are and how we should live, from the shows as well as the advertising. Most of those messages said there was one way to be a man and one way to be a woman. Although Free to Be . . . You and Me was just a pebble of dissent in an ocean of gender conformity, it meant something to me as I grew up. It meant something because I felt like William did, and I never, ever saw anyone like me on TV, which was probably the only form of culture I consumed in the deracinated suburbs where I grew up. After I made my ill-fated choice to play the flute, “William’s Doll” consoled me, but it didn’t stop the other kids from tormenting me. Still, I played on. Do I sound like a rebel? A gender nonconformist? Don’t be too impressed. I was just clueless. Eric would call my friend Jim a “fag,” and Jim would say, “I’m not a fag! You’re a fag!” Then Eric would give Jim a push into the locker, and that would be that. But when Eric called me a fag, I would just shrug. What’s a fag?, I wondered. I had no idea. I was just a kid, and so was Eric; I don’t think he really knew what a fag was either. I still got pushed into the locker, but unlike Jim, I just didn’t see the problem with the whole “fag” thing. And yet an undeniable menace lurked inside the word. Being called a “fag” meant that you were weak, an easy target—in short, a girl. But the word’s true menace, I now realize, arose from its inchoate intimation of sex...