I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

In my household, growing up, we watched Saturday morning cartoons.

Scooby-Doo, Fat Albert, Super Friends, Schoolhouse Rock.

My favorite was the Jackson Five.

The animated iconic Jackson brothers and their classic songs and choreography set the stage for Soul Train,

which brought us the latest dance crazes and fashion.

My friends and I were shaped by the worst and best kitsch of the 1980s, including worldwide wrestling,

which came on after the cartoons and the dancing.

We imitated the wrestlers fake slaps, sleeper holds, and ring tosses, violence that made us laugh,

that toughened us. Then something magical happened, something that upended our expectations in the world as boys becoming men.

Today's poem honors how popular culture made room for different kind of masculinity in the most unlikely of shows, the World Wrestling Federation,

with Chief Jay Strongbow, Andre the Giant, Hulk Hogan, Rick Flair,

and adorable Adrian Adonis.

Ode to the Pink Cowboy Hat by Quinn Carver Johnson. And in the summer of 1986, I Want to Be a Cowboy, was number 12 on the charts. And the music video featured a man, a best of the bad type. Buck naked except his hat, smoking a blunt in the bath,

and MTV hated the video, said it wasn't rock and roll. But the song was a smash hit,

so they had no choice, and that's how it found me two decades later. A child discovering the last

remnants of VHS tapes in their room as the cartoon thought bubble begins to expand, learning that a

fantasy looks like a naked cowboy in his bathtub. And that was the summer of 2006.

But in the summer of 1986,

Boys Don't Cry released their only major hit song.

And during that same summer,

and that summer only,

...