I was very young, but reader, before you’re horrified, I challenge you to speak openly about your history of sexuality with yourself. This was a free, beautiful environment to explore my sexuality. It wasn’t about being gay or straight or whatever, it was about getting off with my best friends. In retrospect, we were in a quasi throuple before there was a name for it, for about four years. We did all the things parents would have nightmares about—sex, drugs, parties, orgies—but we did it all in a group of trusting, loving friends.
It wasn’t all dicks, dicks, dicks. I had many experiences with girls as well. In fact, my biggest regret about this era is that I had girlfriends the whole time. I felt that if I had a girlfriend, I couldn’t actually be a homosexual. I was with one of my girlfriends for almost two years, and she, like most of the other dance students, knew about the sexual history between Kurt, Jordan, and me. I’m mortified that I used her to make myself feel better, and I’m horrified that societal norms made a thirteen-year-old boy think he needed to con a young woman into dating him to hide his obvious homosexuality. These are wrongs that affect a life. These are wrongs that change people into almost-people.
I always kissed the girls, but I never kissed the boys. I thought that if I kissed them, I’d be gay. I could suck their dicks into next Tuesday, but if I kissed them, then I’d be gay. Jordan often tried to kiss me, which for some reason was egregious to me. I found his hot breath revolting, even though I was attracted to him. My mind had somehow convinced my body to be repulsed by intimacy. Despite all these sexual exploits, intimacy was something I had yet to discover. When I look back at my attempts with girls, they feel like self-imposed sexual molestation. Like my mind was hijacking my body to perform an unnatural and unwanted deed at the horrifying expense of these unwitting girls. These were extreme, sick acting exercises I implemented upon myself. “Can I be what I’m supposed to be?” I’d ask myself. “Can I play this part?”
* * *
—
At sixteen, I was essentially a horny E.T. with acne and bad grades. My friends knew I was gay, but I still vehemently denied it, even though I wore skin-tight Gap sweaters and knew every lyric to every *NSYNC song. JC was my favorite, and in my nightly wanks I’d frequently envision him and Ricky Martin getting it on.
Enter Noah, an out-and-proud, tall, blue-eyed brunette with straight teeth and a Hollywood jawline, who wore his hair in the ski-slope swoop popular in 1999. He was a geeky theater guy who just happened to be devastatingly handsome. He was a senior and his mature body fascinated me. I was introduced to Noah at the local coffee shop, which is naturally now a Starbucks, and I fell for him immediately, even though I was still closeted. We had friends in common and consistently ended up at the same parties.
One night, at a party at my friend Al’s, I noticed Noah paying me more attention than usual. We were smoking blunts and drinking our requisite forties of Olde English when he said, “I’m feeling pretty tired. I’m gonna go upstairs for a bit.” He headed up the stairs and I watched him go, feeling perplexed. Who gets tired at a teenage party? But then a force stronger than reason lifted me out of my seat. I placed my forty on the coffee table and floated across the burnt-sienna, medium-pile carpeting as Missy sang knowingly, “Hot boyz . . . Baby, you got what I want.” I silently ascended the stairs, telling no one my destination, and slipped into the first-floor living room, where Noah lay supine on the sofa. The only illumination came from the stove light, which shone from the adjacent kitchen. Large green houseplants glinted in the weak glow and a dull, club-next-door din emanated from the floorboards.
I sat on the floor, perpendicular to Noah. Neither of us said a word. He dropped his right hand over the edge of the sofa and ran it through my hair. This was my first taste of sensuality. I was frozen in place as he single-handedly (literally) changed my mind about myself.
After what felt like eons, I turned to look at him. His left hand cradled his head like a pillow, and his right continued stroking my hair and face. Upon meeting his gaze, I felt an overwhelming shame. I dealt with it by hastily unbuckling his belt, removing his penis, and putting my mouth around it. Nothing leading up to this moment had prepared me for the confusion I felt. My discomfiture was directly tied to my fear of intimacy. I had never wanted to kiss a boy before, and in my mind, I believed that wanting to kiss a boy was actually what made you gay, not all the dick sucking.
Startled, Noah whispered, “Whoa. What are you doing?”
I didn’t have the power to speak or even look at him. He took my chin in his hand and tilted my face up to meet his electric gaze. He then slowly removed his left hand from behind his head to gracefully pull my face toward his. As if buoyed by helium, I ascended. I could feel his soft breath on my face, a mix of cheap malt liquor and marijuana, and meekly lifted my eyes to meet his. Noah then kissed me in earnest, and in that moment, I came flying out of the closet.
Our friends burst through the stairwell door, laughing. It turned out that Noah had made a bet with my friends that he could get me to come out, and who could resist Noah? I should’ve been indignant, as my coming out was the result of a bet, but I didn’t have any time to care. I was awakened to feelings. I had endured sixteen years without them. I had tortured many girlfriends with obligatory nonemotions, while I’d carefully stifled any intimacy that could have blossomed between Kurt, Jordan, and myself.
I thought about Noah constantly. I spent every waking moment enjoying my new freedom. I came out as though I had pioneered homosexuality. With a drop-dead-gorgeous senior on my arm, I was emboldened, and I flaunted my gayness like my cat flaunts her anus. He took me shopping at the Salvation Army while the rest of my schoolmates shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch. I was proud of the silver-glitter, secondhand Sauconys I found and a T-shirt that had an iron-on glitter appliqué of a frog that said, “I’m so happy I could just shit.” My teachers always made me turn it inside out when I wore it, and I’d call them homophobic.
Noah and I would often drive around listening to Ani DiFranco in his dusty-blue, late-eighties Toyota and park somewhere to blow each other before he’d drop me off at home. One fateful afternoon, he pulled into my driveway to drop me off, and we noticed my mother’s car was not there. We figured she was out and continued making out in the driveway until we saw my mother’s shell-shocked face in the kitchen window. She bolted to the door and opened it, her yellow, dish-gloved hands still dripping with hot water and Palmolive, and shouted, “JAMES BRUCE WHITESIDE, GET YOUR ASS IN HERE!”
Terror shot through my body in the form of adrenaline. This was a moment of true horror. I’d have preferred an axe murderer any day. Being caught in the act is petrifying for any teen, but for a queer teen, it’s a slow and agonizing death, like having your nose hairs plucked out one by one and then sprinkled over your last meal.
I marched myself up the steps and into the house. I squeaked, “That’s Noah. He’s my boyfriend.” And then I ran to my room and locked the door. I blared Fiona Apple as my mother pounded on the door, demanding that I come out and talk to her. I did not oblige. Perhaps it’s a blessing that she saw us that day. Who knows when I would’ve mustered the courage to actually come out of my own volition.
Later that night, my mother asked me to talk. Things had cooled down a bit and I timidly stepped out of my room. She said, “Family meeting,” and led me into the living room, where my stepfather waited for us. She sat me down in a chair and began a denial-laden diatribe that was so traumatic I actually remember very little of it. She said she didn’t want me to get AIDS and die, as some of her friends had. I sat in the chair as she bawled, “I DON’T WANT YOU TO DIEEEE!”
I was mute and immobile. It was just like a World War II movie after a bomb went off; like the sound had been sucked out of the room and all that was left was a dull, high-pitched ringing in my ears that vaguely resembled my mother’s voice. Every now and then I’d glance from my mother’s pain-racked face to my stepfather’
s concerned one. Had I ruined my family? I liked my family. I didn’t want to break them, but I had finally felt feelings. I finally felt like everybody else, even though what I felt made me feel nothing like anybody else. I hugged them both, saying nothing, and retreated to my room.
In the coming weeks, my mother tried to get more information out of me, but I was very loyal to my silence. She even suggested I date Beyoncé, as if we were buddies and went to the same high school. “You like Beyoncé, right? Why don’t you date her?” As I was doing my homework and watching Sailor Moon, she’d come regale me with stories of people who’d gone through this gay phase. One afternoon, I became more irascible than usual and interrupted her, shouting, “I AM A BIG . . . FUCKING . . . FLAMING . . . FAGGOT!” She told me not to curse and shut the door quietly.
While I was at home, I was a tensed-up ball of stress. Every interaction had the potential to lead to a “serious talk” of which I wanted no part. Verbalizing emotion is damn hard, and I did not yet have the tools to do so. I felt like an infant who didn’t yet have the words to say, “I would now like to take a nap, please.” So I just huffed and stomped and screamed bloody murder into my pillow while blasting angsty chick rock. It felt good at the time, though I know it was doing nothing for my emotional intelligence. Emotional tantrums are like silent-but-deadly farts. You’re glad you got it out, but boy, do they stink.
Noah and I dated for a while, until he told me he was no longer interested. I came to find out later that he was already sleeping with my friend Max. Teenage heartbreak feels like being torn asunder. Aging whittles down the impact of intense life events, breakups, tragedies, deaths, until you’re so familiar with the feelings that you gain power over them, accepting them as part of the whole “I’m alive” schtick. But as a teen, I was destroyed. Decimated. Razed. I made a tormented, ironic piece about it in art class. The background was a watercolor prism of rainbow colors that I washed in water so the colors dripped down. On top of this sloppy, depressing rainbow, I drew a man and a woman. That’s how rooted I was in my self-loathing. The man was sitting on the ground with his hands around his legs and his chin resting upon his knees. Above him was a woman lying on a cloud amid a starry sky, reaching down to him with her right hand. On plastic film in calligraphy over the drawing, I meticulously quoted Fiona Apple. I wanted this piece to be amusing, but it was just melancholy. I still have it.
I asked myself, “Without Noah, am I still gay? Can homosexuality be limited to one person?” I became lonely and confused. Pre-Noah, I had felt powerful by using denial as a flotation device. Now I was sinking into loneliness, mired in my own bewilderment and doubt. What had once made me feel special now made me feel alienated. Were any of those feelings of true desire worth the torture I now felt? Was belonging to the norm better than being oneself?
Soon after our breakup, I developed a sore throat and a fever. I brought it to the attention of my mother, who, as a nurse, quickly informed me I must have gotten herpes from my gay boyfriend. She took me to the doctor’s office where she worked and had me tested for all sorts of things, convinced I was riddled with STIs. Turned out I simply had strep throat and was given antibiotics. She didn’t apologize or try to explain herself. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me as she dragged me to her Dodge Caravan, shouting that her sixteen-year-old son had herpes and God knew what else from his gay boyfriend. I learned quickly the effects of stigma.
My confusion finally waned when I met a boy named Sean who went to my high school. He was short and stocky, with a wide nose and crooked teeth. I found his personality and bad posture endearing. He wore Aéropostale, which is what people who couldn’t afford Abercrombie & Fitch wore. You can’t spell it without the word stale. Sean was fun and friendly and very in the closet, which didn’t stop me from developing a crush on him. Facing my feelings for him further solidified my place in the hall of homosexuality.
Despite all my crushing and weird teenage flirting, Sean didn’t come out to me in high school. A decade later, though, I ran into him in the restroom of a gay club in Boston. I screamed, “I KNEW IT!!!” as I washed my hands and he quickly dashed out of the restroom.
* * *
—
In the year 2000, I went to ballet boarding school in Virginia, foreswearing my Connecticut roots in search of a more unbridled, Southern bigotry. During winter break, I went home to visit my family. My friend Jeremy, who was the gayest person I had ever met at that time, invited me to his New Year’s party at his apartment in Alphabet City in Manhattan. By this point I had completely surrendered to my ferocious gayness, wearing cutoffs and crop tops, lisping unashamedly, and piercing my tongue with a blue marble barbell. I wore glitter and metallic fabrics exclusively, and I was a mincing thorn in my mother’s Greenwich-raised side. Jeremy’s party looked exactly like a teenage New York New Year’s Eve party in 2000 should: wine coolers, Jell-O shots, lamé, and wide-leg, low-rise jeans.
Early in the evening, I ran into Max, the interloper who had sealed my fate with Noah. When the ball dropped, Max and I looked at each other, nodded, and walked out into the hallway together. “There’s a bathroom over here,” he said, looking over at a communal bathroom. We stripped and got in the shower together. I recall removing my tongue piercing to perform fellatio. This act felt like a final fuck you to my first love, as if I were saying, “He doesn’t just want you. He wants me, too!” I was hooking up with Max to make myself feel better about the break with Noah. Though Max was very attractive, it was not terribly satisfying. I learned that sex cannot be used to erase anguish.
The nail in the coffin of my heterosexuality arrived with a return to its origin. During spring break of 2001, I went back to Connecticut to find that Noah had become a beekeeper, and Max-the-interloper had moved to Washington, DC. I hadn’t spoken much to Kurt and Jordan in two years; we had fallen out of touch, as kids tend to do. I called Jordan and asked if he wanted to hang out. He invited me over. I drove up to his house, the same house in which I’d had my first homosexual experience, feeling the anticipation streaming hot in my veins.
His parents weren’t home. We spoke somberly and quietly, not quite sure how to bridge the distance that had grown between us. We played a computer game upstairs in the home office for a while. I recall the atmosphere of the cozy Connecticut study in the late evening, with the floodlight from the garage peering severely through the slatted windows. I remember studying his pale face in the film-noir light, how his beard was coming in, how his hair was longer than it had ever been in the past. I thought, while looking at his soft lips, that I had wasted years not kissing them, when, out of nowhere and everywhere all at once, without taking his eyes off the screen, he said, “Wanna hook up?” Jordan identified as straight, and still does, but what teen can resist liberal, magnanimous sex?
I said, “Sure.” We undid our pants and gripped each other’s already erect penises, as though we knew it would come to this. Everything was the same and everything was different. I was myself, the same self I had always been. I was my number one fan and my own worst enemy. It was acceptance that was the difference.
He said, “You’re gay now?”
“Yup,” I whispered.
He said, “This is the last time we can do this.”
And I replied, “I know.”
A BOOM BOX AND A BOX CUTTER
When I read fiction like Hanya Yanagihara’s devastating and relentless A Little Life, it makes me furious. How could someone invent such merciless horror? Then I realize that horror is at the crux of simply existing. Tragedy has the power to bolster relationships, test virtuosity, and inspire great, feeling wisdom. It’s never for nothing, even though fair is an elusive nonsense word we spend our entire lives hunting.
As a gay man, I have experienced much bigotry and violence, though never as much as many others in our country who don’t have the ashamedly real benefits of being a white, cisgender man. I find American society ironic be
cause it often talks the talk of inclusiveness and diversity but rarely actually walks the walk. If America claims to be the home of the free, then why is it free only for some?
* * *
—
The year 2002 was my first as a professional ballet dancer, and the first year I encountered real violence. I had just left the comforts of my mother’s home in Fairfield, Connecticut—where the worst brutality I had experienced was the kind of insidious psychological pre-internet bullying that was the white American teenager’s most deft skill—and moved to Boston’s South End with one of my new Boston Ballet coworkers. In 2002, I was eighteen, and the South End was gay and lovely. Now, naturally, the young families have moved in, blocking every doorway and sidewalk with double-wide, Jeep-size strollers. That’s really how neighborhoods evolve: from poverty to the homosexuals to the young families with too much money.
One evening, one of my coworkers invited my roommate and me to a party at her place in Roxbury. She rented a room from Paul Thrussell, who was then a principal dancer. I idolized Paul’s dancing and also had a crush on him. Leave it to me to have a crush on the reigning champion of the company. Power and talent have always been sexy to me. What does that say about me, I wonder? I used to stand behind him at the ballet barre during class, and if he moved spots, I’d follow him to his new location. I was a little gay puppy, sniffing out talent and a formidable Snausage.
This was my first time at a principal dancer’s home, and I was nervous. I imagine I was twitchy and strange, giggling at a high pitch while spilling my Tang-and-vodka mix. Paul flirted with me the acceptable and requisite amount, enough to egg me on without inspiring me to action. All in all, it was a fabulous party, filled with beautiful people and talented artists.
When it was time to go home, the apprentices made their exit en masse. Many of us lived in the South End or in Back Bay, so we decided to take the T, which is Boston’s subway. Roxbury had a reputation for being dangerous, but we were filled with the boldness of youth. Trains in Boston come once every seventeen hours, it seems, and so we waited on the platform for quite a while, giggling over the night’s incredulities. My soon-to-be boyfriend, Mason, took out his Discman, which was loaded with Mariah Carey’s #1’s album. We sat on a bench, one earbud in each of our ears, and snickered at Mariah’s high notes in “Emotions.”
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