Tuesday A/V: I Know What Boys Like

Yeah, I'm 40. You don't have to say it. My head is perpetually in the 80s. But hey, how can you resist a toss-back to one of hundreds of one-hit wonders from the era, like this one?

They used a sample of this, the only single that was a minor hit for the New Wave rock act, The Waitresses -- in a recent episode of The Simpsons. (Recent in the sense that I just saw the repeat here.) It was yet another brilliant use of old pop culture references, and it was the background for a montage of Lisa assimilating in disguise as Jake Boyman at the "boy's section" of Springfield Elementary after a spate of forced gender separation in the school. Good choice - because for some of us who came of age as gay boys (and also those who came of age as trannies, I guess) around the time, it became a sort of smarmy anthem for what was the best part of being gay. When you know what boys like, you got it all. And who better to know what boys like than another boy, huh? ;-)

I remember that they played this on the small dance floor at the now-long-dead D.C. mega-club Tracks one night in the mid-late 1980s, and everybody loved it. The gay boys could laugh it up, the lesbians could be all snarky and sarcastic, and the fag hags at least knew the lyrics and could pretend their evenings would end successfully, somehow.

But looking at the video now, I just gotta say that it was a mistake to show the band at all. It should have just been lead singer Patty Donahue in some J. Geils Band-ish scenario, teasing a bunch of high school athletes in a locker room or something. I mean -- who did the wardrobe for this video?? In what rock and roll manual does it say that the bassist should wear khakis and a sensible blouse to go with her Woolworth's hairdo?