Bending gender

When I was an eleven-year-old boy I had a friend from school, a round-faced boy whose shirts billowed out at his middle and whose fingers were always a bit sticky. Cal was his name, short for Calvin. Our friendship solely focused on our near addiction to horror comic books— Vault of Horror, Weird World, Haunted Horror, Beyond, Eerie, Tomb of Terror. He somehow was able to cobble together a growing assortment of such titles and we would pore over each issue after school, our sessions always called to an end by his mother advertising the preparation for dinner.

Much later I realized that these afternoon sessions with Cal also featured a Billy Elliot moment