And then, at night, the TV would go on and I would be transfixed by the cops I saw there, the men who seized a piece of my consciousness when it was at its most impressionable, captured my imagination, and made me believe in their effectiveness. I had not thought about those Hollywood policemen for a very long time. But this spring and summer, they came back to me — more accurately, I realized that they had never left. The seemingly countless videos of men in uniforms committing acts of casual brutality that have filled our screens have forced us to understand something that is not at all new but, thanks to smartphones, is now visible and undeniable. For many white Americans, especially those of my generation, it has been a year of belated education, anger, and no small amount of shame. I have become painfully aware of how little, over the decades, I have had to think about cops, largely because cops don’t spend all that much time concerning themselves with me. People who look like I look fall squarely in the category of those the police “protect and serve,” not those they target.
But although the term “white privilege” covers many of the things I didn’t have to grow up fearing about the police, it doesn’t quite encompass the strangeness of what I did grow up thinking and feeling about cops, something I rediscovered only when I started to rewatch the police shows of my childhood. They were, if not exactly nuanced, less baldly retrograde than I had imagined they might be — but they were also undeniably indoctrinations into what authority meant and where you fit into it, and as such, their mildness only made them more effective. They were, for me, seductive in ways I had not wanted to think about for decades. Those imaginary men in blue had an unnerving and enduring hold on me. They were my gateway — to the world of adult TV, to the mysteries of adult men, to my own father, and, as it turned out, to the lonely realm of my own unnameable longing.
I learned all about the police — or thought I did — when I was much too young to be aware that I was learning anything. Like many proto-gay kids of my era, I would have been happy to take in nothing but cartoons and sitcoms — Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Brady Bunch — forever. But my father would mutter “Why are you watching that garbage?” whenever he walked by the TV set, and the contempt that seemed to splash onto both the programs and me left me feeling what I already knew on some level — that I was failing a kind of test. I knew he would have preferred that I watch the shows that he and my brother enjoyed: Westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. But stories of men on horses threatening each other or fighting over cows or fences or land bewildered me. I was an allergy-ridden boy who needed to be injected with epinephrine and sent to lie down every time I got near a pony, and so the main subject of those dramas always felt to me like it was the mysterious absence of asthma. Only Michael Landon — the sensitive son on Bonanza (there was no one sensitive on Gunsmoke) — was enough to keep my attention from wandering for an hour, even if I didn’t quite understand what his character Little Joe was doing or why I was so interested in watching him.