I thought I had some idea in mind when I wrote that but it's escaped me. Now I'm deliberately watching an offensively bad movie, The Book of Henry. I found out that the screenwriter was fond of Jordan B. Peterson!

Thing is, this wretched contribution to #cinema happens to feature representation—appalling, inept representation, but still, there it is—of a few subjects of personal pertinence to myself.

What's it actually like, being one of the smart kids in early school years? For one thing, in retrospect I don't detect a lot of smarts in my childhood behavior. Cleverness, yes. An ADHD-driven fascination with a multitude of topics that were way over my head—yep, there was a lot of that. But actually being smart?

What mattered, though, was being treated as smart. To be blunt, I checked off enough of the whıte-American social boxes for my eccentricities to be taken—for a time—as being "gifted" and thus worthy of special troubles and a privileged education compared to the plebs.

(cont'd)

As a result of being judged as "gifted"—I don't remember exactly when or how this determination was made, and I only vaguely recall some testing procedures—my sibling and I got to attend wealthy junior-high and high schools that weren't in my immediate neighborhood. (They were in roughly the same neighborhood as where our dad worked, which made the arrangement feasible.) We lived in Mira Mesa, a rather poor and shabby suburb where my dad could get a cheap tract home (blasted by noise from nearby Miramar air base) but the kids could go to school in La Jolla, the insular seaside whıte-flight community which loved to pretend that it was distinct from San Diego proper. Some of the wealthiest families in Southern California lived in La Jolla.

And here's where I bring up a young queer person who wound up with a very different experience of La Jolla and its wealth.

Do you remember this young man? Andrew Cunanan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Cunanan

He became famous for exactly one reason: an extraordinary spree-killing which ended with the murder of world-famous Italian designer Gianni Versace.

(cont'd)

Cunanan was the child of a Filipino-American family, a family that ended up disintegrating spectacularly in Cunanan's adolescence: the father, a former chief petty officer in the U. S. Navy who then became a stockbroker, fled abruptly to the Philippines to evade arrest for embezzlement. Cunanan was judged bright and capable in school but he seemed to pick up his dad's habit of dishonesty and, insecure about his family background, Cunanan began a Tom Ripley-esque habit of inventing elaborate origin stories for himself.

He was queer, which brought him into inexorable conflict with his very Catholic mother, and eventually he bailed on school and fled home in order to seek refuge in San Francisco's Castro District. Eventually Cunanan settled into a pattern of looking for wealthy queer sugar-daddies (forgive the blunt language) wherever such persons were to be found...including the Hillcrest neighborhood of San Diego, and including La Jolla.

Apparently Gianni Versace was one of these men, but Versace's family officially denies that the designer ever knew Cunanan.

(cont'd)