"Jack and Will make fun of everything Grace wears on 'Will & Grace,' so I need to be like that."

Said Phillip Picardi, quoted in "Condé Nast’s 26-Year-Old Man of the Moment/Is Phillip Picardi, a former intern who now heads up Teen Vogue, the future of Condé Nast? Anna Wintour seems to think so."

Mr. Picardi grew up in North Andover, Mass. His father, a devout Catholic, owned a technology company. His mother was a homemaker and an executive assistant.... It made for a sometimes challenging environment for the young Mr. Picardi. “I was gay,” he said. “G.A.Y., with an exclamation mark and a little asterisk.”

He came out to his parents in the summer before ninth grade. It was 2 in the morning, and Mr. Picardi, who had just finished watching “Queer as Folk,” burst into their bedroom and said: “Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you.” His mother sobbed as he said everything he had to say. Ten minutes later, his father rolled over and asked what was going on. He had slept through it.

His parents sent him to a Catholic therapist and instructed him not to tell his neighbors, his friends or his younger brother. Before coming out, he had wanted to be a lawyer. Now, he decided, he should work in fashion.

“I watched ‘Will & Grace,’ and that’s what it felt like they were doing, more or less,” he said.

TV is influential!

You know, I find "Philip" such a hard name to spell. It it one L or two? It's hard to see, because the lower-case i also looks like an L. Picardi is a 2-L Phillip. He even spells "Phill" with 2 Ls, which seems excessive, but it was "Will & Grace," not "Wil & Grace."

Philip means fond of horses. "Phil" is love, of course, as in "philanthropy," and "ip" is the same as "hippos," which means horse. (A hippopotamus is a horse of the patomos (the river).)

Anyway, did you as a child get any ideas about how to live and be your true self by looking at some TV-show character? Here's a list of the top-rated TV shows when I was in 9th grade. Who would I have looked at and thought, well, that's where I'm going? I see 3 housewives and a "jeannie." The jeannie and one of the housewives had superpowers, and the other 2 were Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore) and Lisa Douglas (Eva Gabor). I can see why I was so deeply affected when the hippies suddenly appeared on TV...



And, people, Gomer was gay.

ADDED: I found that 1969 Gomer clip because I was looking for things with "Goldie" (that is, Leigh French), and I did not recognize — until EDH asked about it — that the other hippie there is Rob Reiner. And here's Reiner as Mitch the hippie in a scene in a 1969 episode of "The Beverly Hillbillies":