The Television in Start Without Me: A Refuge and Window to a Larger World

What the Television Is in This Memoir

The television in Start Without Me is a literal household object—a set in the basement of the family home in Queens, a new color set in the living room, a screen that broadcasts The Carol Burnett Show on Saturday nights and The Wizard of Oz once a year around Easter. But across the memoir it operates as something more: a refuge the narrator retreats to when the outside world demands too much, and a window through which he glimpses lives, performances, and possibilities that his own world doesn't seem to offer. For Gary Janetti, the television is both a hiding place and a horizon.

The Basement: Television as Refuge

The most concentrated image of television as refuge comes in the summer when the narrator is nine. After refusing sleepaway camp—a proposal he experiences as a hellscape—he spends his days in the basement in front of the TV. The details are deliberately domestic: his sofa, his cat, potato chips, Coke, sunlight creeping through small basement windows. His mother wants him outside; he wants to be underground with the screen. When his father finally relents and says, defeated, to go downstairs and watch TV, the basement becomes his official summer residence.

This is not just laziness or avoidance. The basement TV is the one place where the narrator feels safe from the things that frighten or bore him: other children, organized activities, the expectation that he should want to play. At seven, at day camp, he had already learned that other kids were like something from another planet. The television doesn't ask him to be anyone he isn't. It doesn't require him to throw a ball or make small talk with children. It simply plays, and he watches.

The refuge quality is heightened by what's happening outside. That same summer, New York is terrorized by Son of Sam, and the city experiences a heat wave and a two-day blackout. The basement TV becomes a kind of bunker—cool, controlled, and full of stories that make sense, while the city outside is hot, dark, and dangerous. When the narrator says he would tape the basement windows with cardboard if he could, he's describing a desire to seal himself off completely. This is the popular culture as refuge and self-discovery theme in its most literal form.

The Carol Burnett Show: Television as Connection

If the basement TV is a refuge, The Carol Burnett Show is what makes that refuge feel alive. The narrator's week is organized around Saturday night: he starts getting excited on Wednesday, can't eat by Friday, and by Saturday the show is the only thought in his head. He reads the TV Guide to learn what sketches will air and who the guest will be. The Eunice, Ed, and Mamma sketches are his favorite—like a perfect little play inside of the show.

What's striking is how much the show means to him as a relationship, not just entertainment. He dreams of being in the audience. He loves Carol. Years later, when he meets Carol Burnett at a charity event, he can't bring himself to tell her that she was his childhood, that she saved him some weeks, that imagining new endings to her sketches was how he started writing without knowing it. The television, here, is the medium through which a lonely child forms a one-sided but deeply felt attachment—and, crucially, the place where his creative life begins. It's also an early instance of the performance of identity: he watches performers and begins, unconsciously, to imagine himself performing.

The Son of Sam night crystallizes this. His mother has refused to let him stay up for the show. Then police arrive at the door—a possible sighting in the neighborhood—and suddenly all bets are off. He sits in front of the TV watching Eunice, Ed, and Mamma while policemen comb the backyard with flashlights, and he thinks life doesn't get much better than this. The juxtaposition is darkly comic but also revealing: the television is so central to his inner life that even a serial killer scare becomes an enhancement rather than a disruption. The show is the fixed point; everything else is background.

The Wizard of Oz: Television as Window

The Wizard of Oz chapter shifts the television's meaning. Here the set is not just a refuge but a window to a larger world—and, specifically, to a world in color. The narrator first sees the film at age three. On a later viewing, with a new television set, he's shocked when the screen turns color as Dorothy enters Oz. He describes the moment as a mind fuck and says he always waited for the other shoe to drop in other movies afterward.

The annual Easter airing gives the film a ritual quality. He watches with his sister Maria on Sunday nights, screaming IT'S STARTING! when it begins. Because it airs only once a year, he has to wait twelve months between viewings to confirm lines and details. The scarcity makes it precious. He reflects that the film never seems dated, and he offers a reading of why it has endured as a gay touchstone: Dorothy as the quintessential fag hag who hangs out with three gay men, the black-and-white-to-color transition as one big drag reveal, the Wicked Witch's unsoftened menace, and Judy Garland's visible pain at sixteen—raw hurt that gay viewers recognize. This reading connects directly to the memoir's themes of coming out and self-acceptance and the search for belonging and connection.

The window metaphor becomes explicit when he connects Dorothy's longing to escape Kansas to his own childhood wish to leave Queens. I would've stayed, he thinks while watching. I would've stayed forever. Oz is fabulous; it's in color. But the chapter ends with a turn: he did leave Queens, and now he comes back often. His parents are still in the same house where he watched the film. His mother greets him at the door and calls to his father, Gary's home. The window that once showed him a world beyond Queens has become, in memory, a way back to the place he left—a meditation on nostalgia and the passage of time.

Television Across the Memoir: Changing Meanings

Television recurs throughout the memoir in different forms. At ten, Charlie's Angels premieres and he becomes obsessed with Jaclyn Smith, hanging her poster in his room and devising an elaborate plan to marry her—a plan designed, in part, to conceal being gay. The A Chorus Line commercial runs constantly in New York in the '70s and '80s, and he watches it so often he thinks of the actors as friends; it's his first glimpse of a Broadway world he wants to enter. Later, after declining the sailor role in South Pacific, he sits in front of One Life to Live watching Viki succumb to her alternate personality—a small, deflated moment that shows television as consolation after a disappointment. And in the Irene chapter, the television's comforting glow in a neighbor's home extends the motif beyond the narrator's own household, suggesting that the refuge television provides is shared by others in his world.

What changes is the television's relationship to the narrator's sense of self. As a child, it's a refuge from a world that doesn't fit him. As he grows, it becomes a window onto worlds he wants to join—Carol Burnett's audience, Dorothy's Oz, the Broadway stage. And in adulthood, it becomes a source of nostalgia: the same house, the same set, the same annual film, now viewed from the other side of the life he once imagined.

Study Questions

1. How does the television function differently in the basement scenes of Chapter 1 versus the Wizard of Oz scenes of Chapter 4?

In Chapter 1, the television is primarily a refuge—a place to hide from camp, from other children, from the heat and danger of the city outside. The basement setting emphasizes this: it's underground, cool, sealed off. In Chapter 4, the television becomes a window—a way of seeing a larger, more colorful world. The Wizard of Oz doesn't just distract the narrator from Queens; it shows him a place he wants to go. The shift is from hiding to longing.

2. What does the Son of Sam night reveal about the narrator's relationship to television?

The night reveals how completely the television organizes the narrator's emotional life. He's desperate to stay up for The Carol Burnett Show, and when his mother refuses, he lies in bed wide awake and sweating, knowing Carol is so close and happiness is an on/off switch away. When police arrive and his mother relents, he watches the show while officers search the backyard—and finds the combination of Eunice, Ed, and Mamma and a serial killer scare to be the best possible outcome. The television isn't just entertainment; it's the thing that makes even a frightening night feel wonderful.

3. How does the narrator's reading of The Wizard of Oz deepen over time?

As a child, he's captivated by the film's surface: the color transition, the annual ritual, the thrill of IT'S STARTING! As an adult, he offers a more analytical reading—Dorothy as fag hag, the three male companions as gay, the color shift as a drag reveal, the Wicked Witch as a villain who never softens, and Judy Garland's pain as the real source of the film's gay resonance. But the deeper change is personal: he connects Dorothy's longing to escape Kansas to his own wish to leave Queens, and then notes that he now returns to the same house where he watched the film. The film's meaning shifts from escape to homecoming.

4. In what ways does television serve as both escape and preparation for the narrator's future?

Television is an escape in the obvious sense—it takes him out of Queens, out of his own life, into worlds of color and performance. But it's also preparation. Watching The Carol Burnett Show, he starts imagining new endings to sketches, writing in his head without recognizing it as writing. That's the origin of his creative life. The A Chorus Line commercial shows him a Broadway world he wants to enter. The Wizard of Oz teaches him that there's a place where he might belong. The television doesn't just distract him from his life; it gives him models for the life he eventually builds.