GLR January-February Supplement 2024

tux for the formal, picking up his copy of the yearbook. “I want everyone to sign it that is popular,” he writes. It comes as no surprise that DeLear loved music, which he listened to on 8-track cassettes. The list of his favorite artists brings us right back to the late ’70s: Donna Summer, the Village People, Sound Factory, Sister Sledge, Cheryl Lynn, Peaches and Herb, Machine, Blondie, Bonnie Pointer, Sylvester, Rick James, Led Zeppelin. His high school seems to have been a progressive one. In addition to the usual subjects, he takes classes in oceanography and photography (his favorite). Still, he finds school a bore. When his report card comes out during the fall of his freshman year, all his grades are Ds and Fs. He keeps re solving to get his act together, but at age sixteen, he drops out. Sean is also gay, and he uses the diary to explore his grow ing understanding of what that means. He puzzles over who is and isn’t gay in his class. He’s keen to pick up more informa tion about homosexuality, and does so by reading The David Kopay Story and stealing copies of Blueboy , Honcho , and Man date . But reading is not enough. He can’t wait to see “all that fat cock” in PE class. He makes forays to malls and bowling al leys, where he picks up “a wide variety of tricks.” Soon he has taken to “working the streets, just being your typical little hus tler boy.” He tries on heels—“but they were not big enough so I have to go somewhere else”—and flirts with bisexuality: “So what, so I want to go to bed with a man or a women [ sic ]—no biggie is it?” At the end of June, he sucks his first uncut cock, then goes to his friend Lori’s house and sucks on her boobs. “My

first girlfriend,” he writes. Arrested for masturbating in a pub lic restroom, he has to attend counseling sessions. The shrink turns out to be “pretty cool.” Sean wants to be hypnotized in order “to skate better, do my schoolwork, not lie, not cuss, bowl and golf better, and not be shy around people I don’t know.” A month before his fifteenth birthday, he gets a fake ID so he can go to a gay bathhouse. Still, he worries about being busted if he gets it on with an adult. Sean’s diary shifts between a sweet, almost childlike preoc cupation with the quotidian details of a high school freshman’s life and candid accounts of his sexcapades. Often, within the same paragraph, his attention is drawn to both the puerile and the prurient. At the end of the school year, for example, he wants either a Mickey Mouse watch or the book Marilyn Monroe Con fidential . That summer, he makes and films a Claymation fea turing Mr. Bill of SNL fame. Later, in the same entry, he wishes he “could fuck or suck some man for money.” Those kinds of quirky juxtapositions became an essential feature of his per sonal and professional self-presentation. In his introduction to the diary, Brontez Purnell writes: “So very little is written about the lives and the bold sexuality of young queers, and specifically young Black queers, that I also have to give regard that there is something ultimately explosive about this text.” DeLear often ended a diary entry with the ex pression “Oh Well.” It was a kind of offhand expression of ac ceptance—radical acceptance, I’d say—at simply being the “super bitchen” young person he was. He remained “super bitchen” his entire short, glittering life.

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January–February 2024

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