Wil Wheaton

How do you figure out you're gay when you're only a kid, without the benefit of vocabulary and experience to describe what you're feeling? I've thought about it a lot, even if I've never been out-and-out asked, and there is more to it than "I just felt different." Of course you do, and of course I did! But how? It's hard to go back and quantify it once you're an adult, and can describe things in terms of gay and homosexual and whatnot. When you're a kid, pictures come easier than words. And, no, I'm not going to segue into saying I had a penis-drawing complex like Jonah Hill in Superbad ... but then again, see, I relate it in terms of adult ideas; I didn't think about the penis. But I'm getting dangerously close to digressing, so let me introduce you to the star of the hour: Wil Wheaton.



First: No, I don't think Wil Wheaton's gay, although those rumors did circle (from what I've read, anyway). No, I mean to go a bit further into Wil, here, and pull out who's perhaps the most reviled Star Trek character (or character, period) ever: Wesley Crusher.

I didn't hate him. I was born the year The Next Generation premiered, 1987, and my parents watched it religiously; at some points, Patrick Stewart felt like my second dad (even though my real dad looks a lot more like Jonathan Frakes). Anyway, at a time when the vast majority of the Trek audience was ripping Wesley Crusher apart for being Gene Roddenberry's fourteen-year-old Mary Sue, I didn't have a problem. I wanted to be smart like Wesley. I knew what it was like to have an awesome mom, like Wesley. I wanted to dress like Wesley. I wanted to look like Wesley. I wanted to be Wesley, if you haven't gotten that yet. It was ... well, I don't think there was anything wrong with it, and it was what it was: A slight obsession.




For my sixth Halloween, when I was in kindergarten, I decided that I was going to be Wesley Crusher. My mother found silver fabric that perfectly replicated his costume (don't ask me how), and I even had his communication badge: The toy line was in full swing by 1993, and I, of course, had a Wesley Crusher doll (action figure, of course, because he was posable and ostensibly for boys). He had a hole in his boot, which matched the raised bit on the communicator base; he could stand on his own! I didn't care so much about that, though, I cared more that his communicator said plainly WESLEY CRUSHER in the TNG font. My mother stitched it to the front of my costume, and there you go. I marched quite proudly in my school's Halloween parade, even if no one knew who I was (yeah, TNG was popular, but this was a little town in upstate New York).

I don't know what my parents thought about my Wesley Crusher obsession - probably that it would fade with time. I mean, I was obsessed with being a Tyrannosaurus after I saw Jurassic Park that same year, so what's the harm in pretending to be a space cadet?

Except it didn't fade. At least, not right away. No, I never made a shrine to him out of chewing gum in my closet, but for many years to come, he was my Buddha. I combed my hair like Wesley through many years of elementary school, and the part about wanting to be the smartest and best never went away. It was, without so many words, my first crush, even though I didn't understand it as such. I never wanted to kiss Wesley, I just wanted to be him.

I got older. It didn't go away. In fact, it started to separate from me, as I grew more into myself (though I don't know that I was ever comfortable with all of me, back then, but again, digression). I began to see Wil Wheaton as a person, not as a character; I began to see Wesley Crusher as a badly-written Mary Sue. Now, instead of wanting to be the actor or the character, I wanted to know him. I remember swimming one summer in a lake, I think probably the summer before I left New York, and bumping into an older boy who I thought looked vaguely like Wil Wheaton. He apologized, and I spent the next half hour trying to impress him. Not that I ever said so, of course, but when I dove, I would look, to see if he was looking.

I had two younger brothers, but what I really came to want was an older brother. More than that, though, I wanted one older brother in particular: Wil Wheaton. I worked it out in my head: If I was born in 1987, and he was in his early teens, how much of an age difference would there have to be? Could my parents even legally adopt him? I worried, several nights in a row, that they couldn't, and it would all come to nothing. It did, of course, but looking back on it now, I can see what I didn't have the ability to express back then.

It was love. It wasn't what I've read about in other gay men's memories, either, not the want to be the woman who was kissing the hunky lead, or a strange sexual feeling towards David Hasselhoff instead of Yasmine Bleeth. Mine was more of an obsession, and a powerful one, too, that lasted for a long time, probably until I started being able to put a name to it. But, there it is: My first love, and it wasn't a real love at all, not as I understood it for the majority of my life. Instead, I just wanted to be someone else, and when I grew past that, I wanted to spend all my time with him.

Sometimes I thought we could sit around in our underwear and talk, but that was all.