A Close Reading of Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard

“I like how you always find a way to make things gay.”

My friend said this to me when I was extolling one of the few conspiracy theories I believe, which involved celebrities who are probably in a gay relationship. (No, I won’t tell you which celebrities, this blog has hurt my professional career enough. Recently, I referenced my Ugly State Flags List and a professor told me he’d seen it on twitter. This professor doesn’t follow me on twitter. The blog is getting out there, which is great for my status as a cultural icon, but maybe not great when I’m applying to internships.)

But my friend is right. I do find a way to make everything gay. Even with all the progress gay people have made, most of the media out there is still made by, for, and about straight people. I have to translate most mainstream media, to find things in it that resonate with my life, which is often very different from the life that is being depicted on screen.

“Why not just watch it and enjoy? Why does every story have to be about you?”

Great question, Harold! Harold is new to the blog, he’s our Devil’s Advocate.

Harold, every story doesn’t have to be about me. I can watch things that aren’t about me and enjoy them, certainly. But I don’t enjoy those things as a mirror to my own life, I enjoy them more the way you, a straight white cisgender man, would enjoy a nature documentary. Straight people are something of a different species and I don’t always want to learn more about them through their romantic comedies and books about finding their purpose near a lake. And just like you, Harold, I want to see myself in stories sometimes. To quote Harvey Fierstein,

There are lots of needs for art. The greatest one is the mirror of our own lives and our own existence. And that hunger that I felt as a kid looking for gay images was to not be alone.

No one wants to be alone, Harold.

Anyway, all that being said, let’s talk about Me And Julio Down By the Schoolyard, and how it’s about two gay boys.

The mama pajama rolled out of bed / And she ran to the police station

Something happened that’s illegal. The cops need to be involved, or so the mama pajama thinks. Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard was released in 1972, and set in New York, as we’ll see later. Gay sex was illegal in New York.

When the papa found out he began to shout / And he started the investigation

New York actually had the death penalty for sodomy in 1787. The 1796 criminal code removed the death penalty, but punished sodomy with 14 years in either isolation or with hard labor. Eventually, the state changed the law to make sodomy a misdemeanor instead of a felony, which was pretty progressive in 1950. But New York didn’t strike down it’s sodomy law until 1980.

It's against the law / It was against the law / What the mama saw / It was against the law

Actual real-life sodomy wasn’t the only thing you could be convicted for. You could be convicted for just asking someone if they wanted to commit sodomy with you. In fact, you could be convicted for just standing around a place if you had the intention of asking a man if he wanted to do some light sodomy with you. New York not only criminalized gay sex, they criminalized gay flirting and gay standing. So if the singer and Julio were just gay standing around in the schoolyard, then yes, what they did was against the law.

The mama looked down and spit on the ground / Every time my name gets mentioned

Let’s say our narrator was convicted of sodomy, solicitation or loitering, on the basis of his sexuality. And let’s remember its 1972. Now it makes a lot of sense why his mother is upset by his actions. People were not at all cool with gay people in 1972. It was still not possible to work for the federal government and be gay. There were no openly gay elected officials. Homosexuality was a mental illness until 1973. So yes. Mama isn’t happy.

The papa said, "oy, if I get that boy / I'm gonna stick him in the house of detention"

We’ve discussed the illegality and the mental illness, so this house of detention could be jail or it could be a mental institution. And all for some gay flirting, or even gay standing.

Well I'm on my way / I don't know where I'm going

If Mama Pajama and papa were this upset, it’s very possible that our narrator was kicked out of his home, a fate experienced by close to 400,000 LGBTQ teens every year. LGBTQ people represent about 5% of the total population (not 10%, as you’ve been led to believe, that’s a whole other story about how Kinsey was great and boundary-breaking but his original study had some pretty glaring methodological problems) but represent around 40% of the homeless population.

I'm on my way / I'm taking my time / But I don't know where

Oh the theory that our narrator is homeless, there is likely nowhere for him to go. Even today, the number of beds and resources available for homeless teens of all sexualities is far lower than the actual number of teens on the street. Today there are specific programs for LGBTQ youth, homeless and not homeless, but no such programs existed for gay teens in 1972.

Goodbye to Rosie / the queen of Corona

Oh right, this is how we know the song takes place in New York. Corona is a neighborhood in Queens.

Seein' me and Julio / Down by the schoolyard / Seein' me and Julio / Down by the schoolyard

Rosie’s a narc.

Whoa, in a couple days they come and take me away / But the press let the story leak

I’ll admit, the homelessness narrative falls apart a little here, because clearly he’s in one place long enough for someone to come take him away. Probably to the aforementioned house of detention.

And when the radical priest / Come to get me released / We was all on the cover of Newsweek

You’d think the story would start to fall apart here (“there’s no radical gay priest!” says Harold) but this is varsity level gay analysis. I have years of training taking tiny clues to piece together a gay narrative in places where it probably shouldn’t be. You say “radical priest” I’m off googling “priest gay youth 1970s.”

And you better believe I found him. I found the radical priest. His name is Adrian Ravarour. In 1965, Ravarour (an honest-to-God Catholic priest) founded Vanguard with Joel Williams and Billy Garrison, who were two young gay men trying to fight against LGBTQ discrimination in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.

In 1966 (yes, that’s three years before Stonewall) Ravarour supported a demonstration by Dixie Russo, the head of Vanguard’s street queen coalition. Russo was denied service at a local diner, and when Russo, Ravarour and others pushed back, they were surrounded by police in riot gear for five hours. Later that night, a small riot broke out in Compton Cafeteria after street queens heard about how Russo had been treated and the stand off that day.

Sorry, Harold, a “street queen” was a term used mostly in the 1960s to describe drag queens, transgender women, and others who were LGBTQ and lived on the street.

Anyway. Street queens were always starting the revolutions, but in this case, they also had a priest. A radical priest. A radical priest who certainly could have gone from San Francisco to New York in five years. From riots to freeing our narrator.

And I'm on my way / I don't know where I'm going

“Ok, so you’ve found some connections. I’m sure if I thought about it, I could come up with just as compelling an explanation about why the song is about something straight.”

I'm on my way / I'm taking my time / But I don't know where

Thanks for sharing that Harold. You probably could find some way to make this about straight people. After all, you’ve had a lot of practice, since a good 95% of all media ever created in history is about straight people. There’s lots of straight explanations for things. Don’t forget, I grew up watching the same movies and reading the same books as you did.

Goodbye to Rosie, the queen of Corona / Seein' me and Julio / Down by the schoolyard

Since you grew up seeing yourself reflected in books, Harold, it surprises you when someone tells you a Paul Simon song, or the book the Great Gatsby, or a Bruce Springsteen song, or the movie Deer Hunter, or any film starring James Dean, is about something gay. You rarely have the chance to look at media you don’t relate to, so you don’t get as much practice reading between the lines.

Seein' me and Julio / Down by the schoolyard

So where you see a silly song about not much of anything, I see a song of an innocent crush between two boys and the social fallout that resulted from their actions. We could both be right. Paul Simon himself doesn’t really know what the song is about (though he did say it was probably “something sexual,” so that’s a point for me). That’s art! You can interpret art however you want! The difference between our interpretations is your interpretation is easily accepted by the mainstream and I have to write a whole blog post defending my interpretation because of years of people like you, Harold, telling me I was misinterpreting things when I found a way to make them relevant to my own lived experience.

Seein' me and Julio / Down by the schoolyard

Talking with you, Harold, reminded me of how many things in my life are obviously gay to me, but aren’t seen that way by the majority of other people. How much translating I do, almost unintentionally, to relate things to my experience. How starved I am for gay images overall, that I can find them in songs where they weren’t intended to be. This turned into a real reflective blog post when I thought it would just be a silly one!

And so, I’ll leave you with the Harvey Fierstein quote that has been my guiding light since I secretly made my own Amazon account so I could purchase the Celluloid Closet and watch it over and over again since it was a reliable source for gay history and stories, and also I was a very weird person.