When I was a child, in the sixties and seventies, I felt I was somehow set apart from my family, my friends, the people around me. It was almost imperceptible at first, but as I grew older, so grew this divide, until I found myself looking and looking and asking myself, "Who is like me? Who is like me?"

I turned away from my mother and father and brother, from my cousins and uncles and aunts, from my neighbours and teachers, from the other boys and girls at school--and I turned on the TV.

"What the hell are you watching?" my mother would shout from the kitchen. "Nothing," I'd call back...but I was, in fact, watching something: I was watching Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley, ruling the Barkley ranch (and the hunky Barkley sons) in turn-of-the-century California in bouffant silver hair and brown pleather pants; I was watching Dan Rowan, Dick Martin, Lily Tomlin, Alan Sues, Jo Anne Worley, Henry Gibson, Goldie Hawn, Ruth Buzzi, Arte Johnson, Judy Carne and Gary Owens on the sublimely subversive Laugh-In; I was watching Robert Clary and Richard Dawson--and the strangely sexy Bob Crane--on Hogan's Heroes; I was watching Billie Hayes as Witchie-Poo on H.R. Pufnstuf and wondering, 'Is that a woman? Is that a man? Is that a woman playing a man (playing a woman)?'

And I was watching Bewitched, with Elizabeth Montgomery as both Samantha and Serena, Dick York and Dick Sargent as Darrin, the domineering Agnes Moorehead, the debonair Maurice Evans, the scatterbrained Marion Lorne and the befuddled Alice Ghostley.

I was seven in 1969--old enough to know I was different but still too young to know I was gay, and all that that entailed. Yet though there were no real 'out' gay role models for me as a youngster, I found in my living room a whole world of people who were clearly different from the rest. And the most different of all, not only as the demented Uncle Arthur on Bewitched but as the very centre of the Hollywood Squares: Paul Lynde.

Of course the world has changed immensely since I was a child, and young people have many more gay, lesbian and bisexual leaders to provide inspiration and hope. And performers as diverse as Scott Thompson, Kevin Spacey, Sean Hayes and David Hyde Pierce seem to be the inheritors of the Lynde legacy. It is for this reason that I humbly suggest that you drink deeply from the wisdom of Paul Lynde and let his words guide you in your own life.

Therefore, when you're faced with a problem you're unable to solve, an obstacle you can't overcome...forget about Christ, who is just so two-thousand-years-ago, and instead ask yourself--"What Would Paul Lynde Do?"

He'd eat. He'd drink. He'd be bitter.

So come here often, and bravely witness Paul--alone or with your friends--and share his gospel, so that we may all eat and drink and be bitter together.

David Demchuk
www.daviddemchuk.com