Marcus and Me

"How fair and how pleasant you are, O love, with your delights! This stature of yours is like a palm tree, and your breasts like its clusters. I said, 'I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of its branches.' Let now your breasts be like clusters of the vine, the fragrance of your breath like apples, and the roof of your mouth like the best wine. The wine goes down smoothly for my beloved, moving gently the lips of sleepers. I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me." - Song of Solomon, 6:6-10

My coming out story is pretty banal, I think. I was 16, faced with confusing and shameful feelings and while I was at summer camp I opened up and told a counselor, someone that I could both trust and not have to face in my everyday life, that I suspected I was gay.

Except I wasn't attracted to men. To my counselor's great credit, he didn't laugh in my face.

Let's backtrack a bit, because this takes some unpacking. By the time I decided to inaccurately out myself, I had dated a few girls and slept with two of them. I liked girls' hair and hips, their voices and legs, necks, eyes, et al. What I did not like was any aspect of their personalities. I found girls to be vain, superficial, humorless, disloyal, self-conscious and unpredictable. I had sex with girls and felt terrible about myself because there was never anything to say. I felt fraudulent and ashamed, pretending that I wanted to hear about internecine female drama while silently counting down the number of seconds before This Girl invited me Over to Her House. Guys, on the other hand, were open, direct, idealistic and never required displays of admiration for conversation. I loved my friends and my friends were all guys. Being 16, I still had a conception that sexuality was dependent on feeling.

I came home from camp and hung out with my friends and tried to imagine being in a relationship with any of them. They, after all, were the people that I loved and therefore should have been with. I would totally not feel like a despicable shitbag because I would never have to fake affection for these boys. The only problem was that my imagination kept failing. I looked at them and their hair was neither long nor thick enough; their hips were too narrow; their shoulders too broad; their breasts too non-existent. Plus, what would one do with a naked man? Look, I wasn't a moron, I knew what could be done, but none of those activities struck me as interesting or pleasant to pursue.

Back in school I decided to just wait and see. Maybe some guy would strike me as attractive. If I had been less of a self-absorbed misogynist moron I might have tried to talk to one of the eighty girls I thought pretty on a given day as freely as I would with one of my friends. Because the problem with my dating life up until that point was that the partners were all teenage girls. And teenage girls are awful people. Their only consistent rivals are teenage boys, but there were at least a few of them that I could relate to.

Anna and I were talking. I don't remember now how the conversation started or what was discussed. It was late in the Spring of my junior year, her senior. The days were getting longer and the school plays were done, so the only thing I had on my agenda was homework, which I never started working on before nine o'clock. So we just kept talking. To this day, I am completely obtuse on signals that girls like me, and Brett or Luis or Katy will have to inform me that someone was flirting with me after the fact. Even I had enough awareness to grasp the importance of the fact that Anna and I were lying on our backs on the hood of my car as the gloaming faded to night, still talking hours later. I never loved her with the earth-moving Hemingway intensity that I would a few later girls, but I never again had a moment's doubt as to my sexual orientation after we kissed two days later.

Whenever a public figure is clearly in the closet, whenever the sexual peccadilloes of a celebrity come out in the ugliest possible way, I think of my younger self sitting cross-legged in an alpine meadow, looking up at a sky so pure and black that the color of the stars popped radiant against it and confessing a quality that seemed rational (I hate teenage girls and like teenage boys = I'm gay) until nature won out. I wonder at the tenacity of their self-denial and the depth of whatever fervor is driving them away from their true self. I always want to call them up and let them know that the ecstatic discarding of the self and its exultant replacement with this twin, combined soul is even better than Solomon describes.

But you might have to ignore your brain and listen to your cock.