Mark My Words: Pink Toenails Won’t Make Your Son Gay

The media spin cycle is in full-tilt, boogie mode this morning about neon pink toenails.
ABC’s “Good Morning America” featured a story about a J. Crew catalog layout depicting a mother painting her little boy’s toenails neon pink.

What was, no doubt, intended to be a novel, stereotype-bashing, “Free to Be, You and Me” [my apologies to Marlo Thomas] kind-of-concept to sell something for this retailer has morphed into a heated ideological debate.

God knows, we should all divert our attention to this matter, instead of contemplating solutions for the world’s real problems: $4 a gallon gasoline, unemployment, obesity, World War, cancer, lopsided distribution of wealth in America…I don’t know… pick your own topic. It seems that we could find almost any other subject as a genesis for national debate.

I recall neither cross-dressing nor attempting to wear makeup as a preschooler, or at any other time. But, I do remember applying my step-grandmother’s perfume to my private parts when I was around three years old. It smelled good…but boy, did it ever burn. The adults around the bridge table probably had no earthly idea that I was wearing Mildred’s perfume on my scrotum. Well—maybe they didn’t know where I had applied it, but my copious, unmonitored application of Arpege was surely detectable over the gin-and-tonic and scotch fumes.

Ushered out of the room and placed in a bathtub of cold water upstairs, I have no idea how the adults in the room reacted to my indelicate application of women’s perfume. I assume an uproarious laugh was had by all, and I’ll bet they didn’t launch into a worrisome debate over gender identity or sexual orientation, but just chalked it up to “hijinks” and “dumb stuff kids do.”

It seems to me that my parent’s generation wasn’t so overly serious about raising children in situations when it wasn’t necessary. Was it because they had so many of them? Or, was it because after the Great Depression and World War II, they had a more realistic appraisal of what constituted “the big stuff” rather than sweating “the small stuff?” It seems they didn’t worry so much that children having all kinds of experiences would irrevocably harm them somehow.

I don’t know how many times I overheard my Mom say, “If somebody’s kid is going to do something they are not supposed to, it will probably be one of mine, and they won’t even have to be prompted.” Was this her prideful way of subtly indicating that her five children were creative, independent, thinkers and born leaders—or complete hooligans who were too stupid to know when to hold back and lay low? Somehow, I think she meant both.

One après-church, sunny, summer Sunday afternoon at the club pool, I overheard another childrearing dictum espoused by Virginia, or “Big VA,” as my high school chums and I referred to my mom, using our behind-her-back nickname. All the 30-and-40-something Mamas were clustered around the baby pool end of the pool with their Sweetheart® cups of Bloody Marys and Screwdrivers.

Mama had on a lime green-and-yellow, one-piece with built-in brassiere, the kind of brassiere comparable to the bumper guards on a 1957 Cadillac (“Dagmars”) or the nose cone of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Complementing her to-die-for-bathing suit, she wore a wide-brimmed, bright-green straw hat, with sunglasses built right into the brim, eliminating the need for carrying her pair to the pool. I think the inspiration for the chic hat was a similar one shown in an Audrey Hepburn movie that year, “Two for the Road.”

All tanned, 5’9” of Mama was stretched out on a chaise, auburn hair resplendent in the sunlight. As she exhaled fumes from her Benson & Hedges, she listened patiently while another mother related how fearful she had been the previous night, because one of her sons did not come home until after midnight. That mother had laid awake for hours, “worried to death.”

My mom pushed her hat back on her forehead, so her stylish, integral sunglasses would be pushed out of the way for maximum direct eye contact. She leveled her hazel laser beams on her weak sister and said, “Hell, I don’t lose a minute of sleep with mine. I go right to bed. If something bad is going to happen, it will, and my being awake isn’t going to stop it. If something bad really does happen, you’re going to get a phone call! And when—and God forbid if—that phone does ring, you had better have had some rest, so you’ll know what in the Hell you’re going to do to solve the dilemma-at-hand.”

As I recall, the baby pool-end of the sidewalk fell silent, and not one of the other recumbent mothers had a comment to add. They just all took big, long swigs on their Sweetheart® cups and thoughtfully exhaled cigarette smoke.

One reason people liked cigarettes so much then (this was 1966-67, I think) was they were a great prop when you did not want to say anything. You could just take a big, long drag and blow it out creatively, without saying anything. You could even think about how cool you must look while you were exhaling, modeling your style on Cary Grant or Marlene Dietrich or possibly, Bette Davis, if you were very dramatic, or a drag queen. There weren’t many of those around the Cleveland Golf & Country Club pool.

We did have one known homosexual at the CG&CC but he did not have pink toenails….I don’t think. Who knows? Unlike today, men did not wear flip flops everywhere nor did they wear open-toed sandals in public. I do remember asking Mama why “Porgy” (an affectionate, preppy nickname for George) was “funny” when I was in second grade.

“Mama, why is Porgy so funny?” I asked. “Do you mean, like, ‘Ha-Ha-Funny’ or ‘strange’ funny?” she asked. “Well, he’s just not like anybody else, so I guess I mean strange,” I replied. We were standing in the broiling sun on the terrace outside the clubhouse. Mama, in her white linen sheath, bent down and looked me in the eyes as I stood dripping pool water onto the sizzling hot sidewalk. “Honey, Porgy is not like anyone else in Cleveland that I know. He would be so much happier if he lived in New York or San Francisco.”

And that is how one very pragmatic Mama crafted an entirely true, age-appropriate response for a then-second grader. Today, as an AARP member, I still remember her tactfulness and skill in handling potentially controversial subjects and discussions. That is a skill set that appears to be on its way to becoming extinct, if this idiotic flap over the J. Crew pink-toenails-on-a-boy story is any indication.

Although I have never painted my own toenails, I did paint my husband’s toenails pink prior to his having a surgical procedure at Vanderbilt. He was already drugged-up for the operating table when I pulled out my OPI “That’s Hot Pink” and went to work on his little piggies. He was so groggy he couldn’t even muster the energy to complain.

Steve is a physician who works in the OR at Vanderbilt, so I knew it would shock [or not] his colleagues when they pulled the sheet off him in the operating room and revealed flamingo pink toes as the foundation of his professional-preppy image. Sure enough, they wheeled him away and about ten minutes later, down the hall I could hear uproarious laughter and the nurses talking about that crazy Doctor Hyman. This little piggy squealed, “Gay, gay, gay, gay….all the way home!”