Born to Be Brad Read online

  My communion, 1989.

  Age twelve: As a family, we went to see the Jacksons’ Victory Tour, and I was tenth-row center for Michael’s performance of “Beat It.” Thanks to some super-awesome special effect I’ll never quite understand—I like to think it was magic—Michael disappeared into thin air. My mind disappeared, too, when I spotted the Victory Tour T-shirt with baby-blue sleeves and an iron-on of Tito and Jermaine for sale. My parents bought this T-shirt for me, and I wore it to school for weeks, pairing it with black jogging pants that had zippers down the sides; when you opened the zippers neon yellow fabric peeked through for a pop of color. As if that wasn’t enough look, I tied a comic-book-print scarf asymmetrically around my waist. In case there’s any question out there, this was a big fashion don’t.

  Age thirteen: I discovered Le Château, a store specializing in bold fashions in flammable fabrics. It was just another mall chain, but to me it felt like some terribly important Parisian boutique. The executives at Le Château’s headquarters I’m sure never guessed it, but this place was epic for a young gay kid looking for more than a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It was the only store at the mall with anything that appealed to us. At thirteen, I bought a charcoal-gray Le Château shirt with a velvet number 5 on the front. Now, I know what you’re thinking. We’ve all had that moment: You’re out shopping one afternoon and you fall in love with a piece of clothing but think, Where am I going to wear a charcoal shirt with a velvet number 5 on the front? Well, in this case, everywhere. To drama club practice with a pair of jeans. To school with black velvet jean-style trousers.

  Looking in the mirror back then I thought I looked super-cool, but the kids at school didn’t see it that way. Actually, they thought I looked like a huge fag. The F-word? Yeah, a bully first called me that in the third grade. That was only the beginning.

  What Goes Around Comes Around

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  NEVER THROW ANYTHING AWAY. IT’S ALWAYS COMING BACK.

  When J.Crew and Jil Sander both started selling bright colors for Spring/Summer 2011, I realized that old maxim really is true: What goes around comes around. Everything old is new again. This is why we have basements and storage units and deep closets; never throw anything away. Bass penny loafers? I stopped wearing them in high school when grunge came in, but they had a massive resurgence with the preppy movement in the mid 2000s. Speaking of grunge, as I write this, flannels and parkas are back in for a nineties moment. For women, denim jumpsuits and denim-on-denim (the Canadian tuxedo) are both socially acceptable again. If there’s one item from my past that I wish I’d saved, it’s an amazing Les Misérables T-shirt.

  My sister, Mandy, refers to our childhood home as the Kennedy Compound. And it had an air of Hyannis Port about it. My grandfather Phillip bought a large tract of land on Lake Scugog and sold the subdivisions off to the family piece by piece. My parents and my sister and I lived in a house on Percy Crescent, with aunts and uncles and cousins on all sides. We could see my grandparents’ house from our backyard.

  Everyone in town knew the Goreskis, because our grandfather Phillip owned the local resort, Goreski’s Lakeside Recreation, a trailer park in the best sense of the word. He started the business in 1963, and it grew to include eight hundred trailer sites plus boat slips and a marina, two swimming pools, and a miniature golf course. Families came annually for the entire summer. What were the people like? It wasn’t the chicest crowd. The boys wore Metallica T-shirts and jeans and bad high-tops, which at the time I found mildly offensive (however, in later years it would be a look I’d try to copy; things always come around). The young girls were scantily clad. And there I was in my polo shirt, cuffed jeans, and penny loafers, my hair always done. I stood out even at my family’s resort. As kids, my sister, Mandy, and I worked at Goreski’s Lakeside. She eventually ran the kitchen (as a teenager!), cooking up eggs, hamburgers, and fish-and-chips while I rang up the customers out front. For some people, working in a greasy take-out diner would be the worst summer job. But as an overweight kid, this was Candy Land—literally. I had access to all of the candy and ice cream I could eat. That is, until my uncle Ron fired me. I couldn’t blame him. Cadbury was running a contest, and I opened every single Cadbury caramel looking for the golden ticket. I was Canada’s answer to Veruca Salt. I want an Oompa-Loompa now, Daddy.

  Burning question: Brad, please settle this once and for all. Is it OK to wear white after Labor Day?

  * * *

  This is one of those questions that persists over the ages. I have to say, I couldn’t care less. And neither could designers. I was in YSL and saw a gorgeous white cashmere coat. It’s called winter white for a reason. Because you’re supposed to wear it in the winter.

  My sister had her own sense of style. Sometimes she dressed like a businessman, in a button-up and trousers. Other times she wore jeans and blazers. (She dresses the same way now.) Getting her to wear a dress and makeup became my mission in my youth. I succeeded once or twice; however, it never really took. I ended up wearing more dresses and makeup than she ever did. But she was my protector, and I am forever grateful to her. In grade five, for Halloween I dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West, which didn’t go over so well. I wore a black turtleneck, with a red sequined spiderweb on the front of it and a glittery spider stuck to the web. The skirt was this shredded mess of black and red fabric, and then I had a long cape on a black sequined headband. It was a riff, not an exact replica. Three boys from my class cornered me in the hallway and threatened to beat me up. Thankfully, a teacher came by and broke it up before they could land a punch. But my sister really let them know what was up. Out on the playground later that day, she tracked down those three boys and said, “If you’re planning on hurting anyone, you’ll have to answer to me first.” And then she pounded the crap out of them.

  I was not the little boy from all of those television sitcoms—the one who tells his sister to back off, the one who insists he can fight his own battles. I just accepted that this was my lot in life. And I could no more change these boys than change who I was. Mandy was another of those superhero women in my life watching over me. Though I certainly didn’t make it easy for her. When she won the school’s citizenship award and she went up to receive the trophy, I stood up in front of all five hundred students and shouted with a lisp, “That’s my sister!” That was me. I was dramatic. I was the performer in the family. At the time, I was taking dance lessons. And when Grandpa Phillip had family over to the house, he’d parade me around the dining room saying, “Bradley, I’ll pay you five bucks to dance for me.” I happily took the five dollars, though I would have done it for free.

  Christmas 1979 at my grandmother’s house. This is one of the few documented instances of my sister, Mandy, wearing a dress.

  * * *

  “That was me. I was dramatic. I was the performer in the family.”

  * * *

  My grandfather Harry, meanwhile, was a pharmacist and my mother worked in his office, putting on her starched white uniform every day. Sometimes I went to the pharmacy after school, sitting in the back, playing on the calculator and eating chocolate bars while waiting for my mom—anything to avoid riding on the school bus with the other kids. Though I could stomach the bus ride if it meant getting off at our grandma Ruby’s house. My sister and I would sometimes take the bus to her house, skipping down the hill, the smell from her kitchen getting stronger the closer we got. When I look back, I like to think I looked like Laura Ingalls in the opening credits to Little House on the Prairie as I ran down that hill, though maybe I looked more like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. But in reality, I was wearing a full snowsuit and moon boots, and I’d throw my head back and shout, “She’s making roast beef and steamed apple pudding!” Like most chubby kids, I had an excellent sense of smell. I was a cartoon character, Preppy Le Pew, floating on air to the kitchen.

  When we arrived, Ruby would be sitting in her rocking chair or standing in front of the kitchen stove beyond the saloon doo
rs. Their house was a fifteen-hundred-square-foot cottage, with a pump organ where I’d sit waiting for a snack, banging on the pedals. “Bradley, stop playing that goddamn organ!” Grandma Ruby would shout out from the kitchen. That’s how she spoke. She was a buxom woman, and vocal. We’d go shopping, and when my mother refused to buy me something I’d sometimes cry. Ruby would shout out, “Bradley, I’ll give you something to cry about!”

  In a sometimes-rocky childhood, Ruby was the constant. When I was in kindergarten, our parents briefly separated. Though they soon reconciled, that threat of instability loomed over our house forever. Whenever our parents would have a big disagreement, my sister and I would ask each other, “Do you think they’ll get divorced?” But Ruby never wavered. She taught me to appreciate glamour. She had her hair done once a week, a permanent, of course. She was old-school in her charms. She preferred sensible shoes and cotton shirts with a cardigan over them, and a locket around her neck every day—work clothing, because what she did around the house was work. She was famous for baking. At Christmas, people couldn’t wait for her to drop off her famous cookie trays. But she was modern, too, especially in her unfailing acceptance of me. She took me to auction sales. She taught me how to act around the dinner table and how to act around adults. She had a toy room in her house with antique toys, model planes hanging from the ceiling and dolls everywhere, and we could play with them. She never criticized me for playing with dolls or Barbie, whom I loved because she always had somewhere to go. She always had a big date at night or an event. She barely had any day looks because she didn’t work. Barbie was all about night looks, and she existed to be glamorous. What is the impact of having your grandmother sit you down, put on a movie musical, and tell you anything is possible? I’m here to tell you it’s immeasurable.

  Dessert Oasis

  * * *

  GRANDMA RUBY’S RECIPE FOR FRENCH SILK PIE

  TO MAKE THE FILLING

  1 cup sugar

  ¾ cup butter, cut up

  3 squares of unsweetened chocolate, melted and heated through

  1½ teaspoons vanilla

  3 eggs

  1 pie shell, baked and cooled (recipe below)

  Cool Whip for the top (optional)

  Using a steel-blade processor, combine sugar and butter until very smooth and light, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Leave the processor running, and add chocolate and vanilla through the feed tube. Add eggs one at a time through the tube and process until the mixture is smooth. Turn into cooled pie shell and chill several hours or overnight.

  TO MAKE THE PIE SHELL

  5 cups flour

  2 tablespoons sugar

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 pound lard (Tenderflake preferably)

  1 egg

  Water

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Mix flour, sugar, and salt together, then cut in lard. Beat egg slightly in measuring cup, then add water to measure 1 cup of liquid. Mix together and roll into a 9-inch pie pan. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes.

  My sister never took a guitar lesson, but she certainly loved to wear the damn thing around her neck. I have my own favorite accessory here: a Barbie doll. She’s naked because she’s changing outfits.

  Ruby’s most important contribution might have been Marilyn Monroe. Our local supermarket, the Value Mart, was selling black-and-white photographs of Hollywood stars like Humphrey Bogart and the Three Stooges. But one day, there she was. I was twelve years old and holding this photo of her in a silver plastic frame with this border that was supposed to look like the lights of a dressing room mirror. I became obsessed with Marilyn—with her look, with her skin—yet I hadn’t seen any of her movies. So Ruby plopped me down in front of the television, put on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and taught me to appreciate a good movie musical. All I needed to see was Marilyn in the pink dress singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” From then on, I was obsessed with blondes. When my aunt Kim got married, I refused to dance with anyone who didn’t have doll-colored hair.

  Which sort of explains what happened next. In grade eight, my English teacher asked everyone in the class to prepare a presentation on someone we admired. You can guess who I chose. By now, photos of the late icon covered my bedroom walls. I had a Marilyn Monroe commemorative plate from the Franklin Mint hanging by my bed. Of course I couldn’t do just any presentation. I wanted to put on something as dramatic as, and worthy of, her life. And so I produced a video presentation, which my sister and I shot on my uncle’s video camera—the kind that was like a VCR with a lens attached to it. It was a two-day shoot, and my sister did all of the camera work. She’d complain, “My shoulder hurts.” And I’d shout, “Keep filming!” It was going to be my masterpiece, my homage to Marilyn if you will.

  I was heavily invested in the project, which was something of a low-budget Ken Burns knockoff. My sister would zoom in on photos of Marilyn—first with Joe DiMaggio, then with Arthur Miller—and I’d narrate the story. “Her wide eyes, her moist lips, the soft curves of her body,” I said, reading off a script I’d typed up, trying to make eye contact with the camera. Later, viewers saw me, an overweight, prepubescent Brad Goreski, drinking ginger ale out of a wineglass—it was supposed to be champagne—toasting the actress’s glamorous life. The video was all kinds of inappropriate. I styled my cousin as Marilyn, in a wig we had left over from some Halloween costume and an evening dress hanging in my mom’s closet, which I don’t think she ever wore but was perfect here. I also included a naked photograph of Marilyn. I talked about her rough years in explicit, ridiculous detail. “She did not receive the love that every child receives,” I said, “so as a teenager she was a prostitute.” A prostitute. I felt like a major success that day. Until another girl in class had the audacity to make a video presentation, too. I sat in class thinking, Mine’s definitely better.

  You’re the One That I Want!

  * * *

  GREAT FASHION MOMENTS IN MOVIE MUSICAL HISTORY

  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

  Everyone knows the pink, strapless dress Marilyn wears to sing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” But what’s maybe even more impressive is the film’s opening, where Marilyn and Jane Russell sing “Two Little Girls from Little Rock.” The long-sleeved gowns with the plunging neckline make this the most fabulous opening to a movie ever.

  Summer Stock (1950)

  Judy Garland sings “Get Happy” wearing the iconic blazer with the hat, the hose, and the pumps—every designer has done their version of that look ever since. But it’s really about the red lip. And who doesn’t love this song? I didn’t think you could improve on this song until she and Barbra Streisand did a duet of it on The Judy Garland Show in 1963. Perfection.

  Cabaret (1972)

  Yes, there was Liza Minnelli’s amazing performance as Sally Bowles, and the makeup and the hair. But to me, this is all about the green nails. It’s such a strange character choice and something that comes up in fashion over and over again. As I write this, it’s all about the jade nail. Liza did it first.

  West Side Story (1961)

  Whenever I try something on and feel beautiful, I want to dance around the dressing room like Natalie Wood as Maria, singing “I Feel Pretty” in that simple white dress.

  Grease (1978)

  I often feel like Olivia Newton-John’s character Sandy, who is reminiscent of Sandra Dee. She’s the goody-two-shoes, and so put-together with her cardigans. But we all have another side to our personalities—a more daring, sexy side. I’ve always been obsessed with her at the end of Grease. As a kid, I’d wait for that moment when she comes out as dressed in the leather jacket and the high-waisted pants with her hair blown out big. Everybody has a wild side, and this is a reference I come back to again and again.

  Top Hat (1935)

  Ginger Rogers wearing the feather dress, with the perfect flow that floats on air and barely exists in our world? The combination of this light chiffon gown and Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire danc
ing together is a match made in heaven. I could watch that dress move as much as I could watch her dance.

  But Ruby loved the video presentation, not for its aesthetics but for what it represented. Because all Grandma Ruby ever wanted was for me to be myself. She was perceptive in that way—a truth sayer and see-er for both of us Goreski kids. My sister dated a boy in high school, and when they broke up, Ruby said to her, “He wasn’t right for you. He never looked me in the eye. He would have held you back.”

  Everything I Know About Fashion I Learned When I Was Five

  * * *

  PLAYING DRESS-UP ISN’T JUST FOR KIDS

  The first question we ask ourselves in the morning is always the same: “What am I going to wear today?” Why is that? Because what we wear is our armor—it announces our identity while protecting us from the stresses life throws at us daily.

  I am known for wearing bow ties, and I have something like 150 in my collection. Believe it or not, the bow tie started as a joke. My boyfriend bought me the first one while he was on vacation in London. We were going out one night with some old friends to a straight bar, and I thought I’d test it out, pairing a bow tie with a cardigan and a dress shirt—just to see what the reaction would be. Well, I found it was a conversation piece. In a good way. Strangers were coming up to me all night telling me how much they liked it.

  * * *

  “Believe it or not, the bow tie started as a joke.”

  * * *

  I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and the bow tie became a reaction to the laid-back, casual cool of L.A. It was a way to get noticed in a sea of people all trying to be noticed. And something was in the air. Labels like Thom Browne and Band of Outsiders were playing with shrunken proportions, and the bow tie seemed to go along with the playful silhouettes. There was a sense of humor to dressing up that I appreciated. For a while I was wearing tennis sweaters to the office. I’d sit there in a polka-dot tie and tennis whites wondering, Why am I dressed like this? In a way, it was a return to my roots, to the classic American, Ralph Lauren look I wore in the third grade. I realized I was playing a character.