Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

The problem with secret crushes: in the absence of requital the love turns bitter.

Organized religion is the school of hate, and never more exultant in its righteous indignation than when it talks about gay and lesbian. In America the unholy alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalists and the Catholic hierarchy keeps the faithful whipped up to a frenzy of witch-hunting and fag-bashing.

The Bible is still the only dirty book I've ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don't want to hear it.

But the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last fifty T cells. It's hard to keep the memory at full dazzle, with so much loss to mock it. Roger gone, Craig gone, Cesar gone, Stevie gone. And this feeling that I'm the last one left, in a world where only the ghosts still laugh. But at least they're the ghosts of full-grown men, proof that all of us got that far, free of the traps and the lies. And from that moment on the brink of summer's end, no one would ever tell me again that men like me couldn't love.

In this Puritan sinkhole of a culture, we don't teach children the uses of pleasure, and so they decide we are fools and go their own way, blindly. If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks.

The pain between them made me as envious as their laughter, because it was real and expressible, blood-red with passion, and not the invisible pain of a ghost like me. Sometimes my head filled with a scream that went on for hours but was silenced by the walls of the closet. My face still wearing its social smile fixed in place as if by a stroke.

To experience love as claustrophobia. In such a twisted paradigm lies the sick legacy of a lifetime in the closet.

What love gives you is the courage to face the secrets you've kept from yourself, a reason to open the rest of the doors.

Time to set forth alone and find out what sort of man I was, instead of being a mirror to somebody else. Swearing a blood oath, even as I clung to this ghost embrace, that I would never hold another man who wouldn't hold me back.

It was the first time I'd ever considered that gay might not just be about whom we slept with but a kind of sensibility, what survived of feeling after all the fears and evasions of the closet.

That would be my theme, I thought: once I came out, the world was all windows.

The imagination was the only country where a man could truly breathe free.

When I bucked and shot myself, hearing him greedily drink and swallow, I knew I had tasted life at last—and wouldn't end up sobbing in a wheelchair after all.

I find myself combing the past these days, dreaming dreams without sleep, puzzling over my guys, the gay and the straight and the in-between. Somewhere in there is a horror of love, and to try to kill the beast in them, they take it out on us. Which is not to say I don't chastise myself for halving the world into us and them. I know that the good guys aren't all gay, or the bad all straight. That is what I am sifting for, to know what a man is finally, no matter the tribe or gender.

I don't trust my own answers anymore. I'm too twisted up with rage, too hooked in the millennium. But I find myself combing the past these days, dreaming dreams without sleep, puzzling over any guys, the gay and the straight and the inbetween. Somewhere in there is a horror of love, and to try to kill the beast in them, they take it out on us. Which is not to say I don't chastise myself for halving the world into us and tbem. I know that the good guys aren't all gay, or the bad all straight. That is what I am sifting for, to know what a man is finally, no matter the tribe or gender.

It would take me the better part of growing up to understand that intimacy, more than sex or even sexual orientation, was the universal battleground, and no easier for straight than gay.

The better you get at being just a shoulder, the more unsexed you become.

If it's true that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, then I suppose a certain self-regard must've kept me above water during my decade of drowning alone. But I think that in my case it was the other way—that I learned to love myself because someone else finally loved me. Seeing myself whole in another man's eyes, deeper than any mirror, and neither of us looking away because there's so much lost time to make up for.

I’ve never quite understood the double Janus face of bi – Janus, the Roman god of gates and doors, especially closets.

When you finally come out, there’s a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.

And just getting into bed with somebody wasn't the magic solution, because people could hide their terrors in pure technique—depersonalizing so completely the body embraced that they felt nothing at all.

If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. The erotic can be a window into the deepest core of feeling, but more and more doesn't get you there.

The struggle for true openness and intimacy is a lifelong struggle for all of us, gay and straight alike.

Secrets upon secrets. Thus by inexorable degrees does the love that dares not speak its name build walls instead, till a house is nothing but closets.

We are creatures of the cruelties we witness.

I don't come from the past, I come from now, here in the cauldron of plague. When the doors to the camps were finally beaten down, the Jews of Europe no longer came from Poland and Holland and France. They came from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But I will never understand how the straights could have let us die like this - year after year after year, collaborating by indifference - except by sifting through the evidence of my queer journey.

I could only dimly articulate it then, but I think I believed that Art would give me entry into a no-man's-land where the laws of straight no longer applied. And that once I touched the soul of another artist, a comrade in arms, the bodies would fall into place like folds of a garment, twining us in a passion of the flesh. Pretty high-falutin', and an awful lot of effort just to get a man to go to bed with you.

Yet that's how it felt for years and years -- that Andover ground me beneath the heel of its Bass Weejuns because it needed losers to make its golden Adonises shine even brighter. I wandered through so lost and sad, I can't believe nobody ever asked me what was wrong. Nothing, I would have said, by which I would have meant Everything.

How do you think poetry helps people? he’d ask, wanting the whole thing quantified so he could compare it to digging wells in the Peace Corps.

For it turned out there were closets within the closet, and a lingering self-hatred that even the joy of connection couldn’t solve. What love gives you is the courage to face the secrets you’ve kept from yourself, a reason to open the rest of the doors.