This is probably the longest post I’ve written. Though it might seem as if it derails the thread, it is pertinent to threads on the male experience and fatherhood, and I think Emily’s suggestion is alright.
If it is too long winded for some or seems like it goes into odd territory, I am sorry. You don’t have to read, or can stop reading partly through if it bores you or you are uninterested.
Same here. Hence the full week to reply here.
I’m a little low on energy at the moment but I wanted to continue this discussion, because obviously threads like this are of high interest to me. While I cannot and likely should not divulge all about me, I think it’s clear that I am an open book on discussion issues about sexuality, family, and so forth, particularly from the male lens and my own experiences.
There have been a lot of posts in this thread, and the post I made in response to yours does did not link, I think. So I will attempt recall what I can. I recall you wrote you are an at risk young person, which, obviously I can relate to considering we have repeatedly covered social deviances that occur with fatherlessness and that my own brother was not only at risk, but got into serious trouble with the law, and thank goodness he went on to be squared up and has a career for quite some time. He has since changed careers, but in the late 2000s he was making up to 175k as a wine and liquor distributor, mostly with customers on the Las Vegas strip. That’s equivalent to 260k a year now, as I looked up the adjustment. Not bad for a guy with a GED and a former teenaged drug dealer (and I don’t mean selling dimebags on Friday nights to fratboys).
When I divulge stuff about me, I seek no pity or sympathy. I am simply here to discuss experiences as they pertain to sexuality, fatherhood, family, and the male experience. One of the risks of fatherlessness is teen suicide, and as I’ve stated several times, I had depression at a young age and had on-and-off suicidal ideation. I also believe a risk factor that I did not succumb to was gang membership and the anti-social activity of graffiti, which I’ve loosely mentioned here and there throughout the years. Thankfully my sensivitive disposition, sense of right and wrong, and justified fear of being harmed (people should be scared of “writing” and even writers are scared but do it anyway, as I will discuss), ruining my life, and not wanting my mother and family to flip the hell out on me, I did not participate.
- I thought this would be brief, but whatever. I’ll continue. It’s not a big deal. If people are uninterested, they can stop reading. I also have satisfaction in putting my thoughts down, even if just for recreation.
I was from a suburban town in Queens, but my mother would routinely take me to see my great grandmother in a nursing home in the Bronx. My uncle and grandfather owned two stores in Woodside, Queens. My dad has a store in Queens Village. And one of the most prolific graffiti crews of the 1980s and '90s, who really more functioned like a gang, as they were criminals who who had penchants for graffiti, had members in the high school I would attend and was formed in a nearby suburban town. I think, considering you lived in NY for a time, and your age, you know exactly who I am talking about, as other Gen X New Yorkers on here likely do.
All of the aforementioned areas were graffiti hot spots. The highways in NY were also covered with graffiti. When my mom would take me on the highways throughout Queens and the Bronx and to the city during the holiday season, I was just a boy who would sit quietly in the backseat and would stare at the block and bubble letters I saw. The first time I noticed graffiti was on the Clearview Expressway in Bayside. It was an enormous “blockbuster” (big straight letters) by a deceased, infamous writer. I was seven or eight years old (1987 or 1988), and I was mesmerized from the start. I remember exactly what I saw, and there are several pictures of it on former writers’ accounts on Instagram.
All of the parks I played at as a kid were filled with graffiti. I even got a glimpse of train graffiti as a kid in the late 80s in Manhattan and the Bronx. One day I went to the library down the block from my apartment after school in 1988, at eight years old, and I discovered a book called Subway Art by Henry Chalfant. It was photographed documentation of late 70s and early 1980s subway graffiti. Some of the stuff was beautiful and highly artistic. And I even recognized some of the names I had seen on highways. I don’t think I’ve ever been moved by a book like that ever since.
The following summer, I was at the community pool near my house, doing my best drawing letters on paper. Some teenaged couple shared the table with me. The guy said to me, “Boy, what do you write? And how old are you?!” I responded, “Nine.” The woman, surprised, replied, “Nine?!” The guy actually turned out to be a member of the gang I mentioned above. He signed my book and spoke to me a bit.
The group I refer to was all over the highways and mentioned, made the cover of Newsday, and was interviewed on 10:00 News in 1990 with the retired reporter John Johnson in a shopping center my mom used to take me to, and where I saw my first film in the theaters: Goonies. There was a week-long series on gangs throughout he boroughs and I just so happened to stay up late one night to see their slot in it. I am not going to lie: I seriously looked up to these people, but obviously could not “get down” with people ten to fifteen years older than me. Their names were all over the highways and streets, in some cases in the grimiest of NYC towns, and they were involved in the train era of NY graffiti. They formed in the mid 80s. What was unusual about them was that they were from a suburban area but were extremely wild, violent, and always looking or ready for a brawl. Again, I think you might know who I’m talking about considering your former NY residence.
As graffiti spilled out onto the streets from the “train era” in the late 80s and 90s (the trainers got cleaned up and the Vandal Squad was formed specifically for subway graff) it became even more dangerous and the street gang experience became intertwined in the culture because writers had to deal with other elements on the streets: gangs, drug dealers, cops, store owners, civilians. When I got to high school, which had some of the most prolific writers of the 80s, the graffiti scene was gone and only two younger members (second generation) of the aforementioned group were there. I am thankful for this because of my high interest in it. Even if it were there, I likely would not have partook for the aforementioned reasons, and because I was not designed for that sort of subculture. And I wanted to live. Many writers died at early ages. This past summer, I was at an event in Manhattan and bumped into a prolific writer of the 90s, who grew up in a housing project, and said to him, “It wasn’t for me, and I was too young back in the graff heyday to get busy,” and he knew exactly what I meant. He replied, “It was not for everyone; all of us had razors on us”. He was an original member of a Manhattan gang of criminals, some of whom wrote graffiti. Another former writer I know and who I looked at in the 80s and 90s on the highways, now squared up with a family and career, (we actually befriended each other on IG and met several times and sometimes talk by phone) and living near a family member of my wife said to me last summer, “You know shit was live in the early 90s”. This is a guy who hit someone with a tire iron back in the day. He was from Queens but wrote prolifically on Bronx Highways when I was just a boy.
With all this said, and even though I am a square living like a square, I do not think me looking up to such people and wanting to be involved in a status-seeking culture (graffiti is all about status, whether through artistic style or proliferation with simple lettering or tagging) and gangs was unusual at all. Nearly all participants had no dads or some whacky or neglectful family setup. Some of their stories are miserable or very odd. And all wanted respect and attention. Even though we can reasonably say they were “piece-of-shit” criminals in their younger years, they raised each other. And sadly, they showed each other more masculine affection and made more of a stink over each other (even to this day as squared-up adults) than overly domesticated squares who actually do dump emotional loads on their women and disappear from male social circles (“I need to check in with the boss”) and might not even understand what “backup” means, corny as it might sound. All this shit about men not being able to find women, can’t get jobs, can’t make money, don’t have connections, and various other complaints (some justified)–all that shit can either be dealt with or solved by male networks. And though I don’t care to analyze the female-attraction code, isolated and atomized don’t get women. Women like men who are strong, dominant, and socially connected. Hence they become hypnotized around them, whether they are good or bad men. And yes, I have seen up close how women act around some of the types of people I’ve mentioned, as annoying as this sounds to some people.
Something else that scared me from graffiti were documentary-style videos produced in the 90s, such as Videograff, Out Ta Bomb, and Forbidden Art Video. Fictional Movies like Beat Street, Wild Style, and Dreams Don’t Die, and the documentary video Style Wars presented graff as a sort of benign youth subcultures. The former had interviews with writers and had footage of them on the ground in the 90s and showed the mean reality of it all. All of these are available on YouTube and Tubi.
One time at work, in one of our offices, two young female co-workers and I were talking over lunch, and we were discussing raising kids and I told them about such matters, as I am friends with them outside of work and attended one of their weddings. One asked me, “What if your son wanted to join a gang or write graffiti?” I answered, “These subcultures are not around us here in LI. They were in the lower and low-middle-class areas back in the day. And we don’t have a household and family that creates such a desire. But I would be 100% sympathetic to his feelings, this yearning for protection, status, masculine affection, access to females, and rebelliousness. I would inform this is not how you go about life and you can destroy or end your life through these activities.” Fatherless males get their identities through violence. My son will not be fatherless.There is hardly any highway graffiti around anymore, especially LI. But when we go through Manhattan, take a trip to PA, we do see much of it as it has made a resurgence. Sometimes my son will say, “Dad, look, graffiti,” and I’ll respond, “Yes. But remember, we’re keeping it to your markers and books.” There is a place near here called “Graffiti Lab,” opened by a very talented artist and former writer, which my friend and I are going to take our kids to. They even have workshops and events for adults who want to dabble with airbrushing and spray painting.
I could have gone on, but this was my very long-winded explanation of my own risk factors as a kid (thankfully not actualized). It is also why I make a stink over matters I discuss here or why someone mentioned a peculiar interest in them.
I’ll likely comment on what you said about the ridiculous manosphere soon.
I sometimes have wanted to share pictures of my little graffiti library and “black book” in other threads featuring pictures or other off topics but I highly doubt anyone would want to see. I only posted some in the extreme music thread because of the link between graffiti and New York Hardcore (and rap).