. . .
Betty couldn’t have known all the things I was feeling, back when I was a kid. She couldn’t have known what to do. I didn’t know what to do. I just knew that I loved them and didn’t want them hurt by the fact that I wasn’t right. That was what the world told me, what I always heard, that people like me weren’t right. Gay kids hear everything. Because they are hidden in disguise or listening in silence. No one holds back. People will say anything about gay people. It still goes on. Pick up a newspaper. We hear so many terrible things about ourselves. People think it is their right. They just don’t get what being different feels like, on the inside, for a kid and they don’t care.
When I was not chosen for the football team, I was relieved, but there I was, at a new school; I was on my own. Before the first bell, I stood by the door of the algebra room waiting and watching. In Madison, I had friends, but in Paris there was no one at the start, and so I stayed in my head, imagining myself someone who lived in the city, the son of rich people, an actor on Broadway or in the movies. I made up lives and fell into them when I was alone. I just got lost, imagining myself as other people. You can make up a world and live there for a while, float down a river to someplace secret.
As time went on, I found another way: From movies and television, I stole lines and jokes, this and that, tried to stitch together an act that passed. Did I know what I was doing?
I know it now.
“Do you think you have trouble with intimacy?” they asked at rehab.
“Only when I try to get close to someone.”
To fall in love you have to think you’re okay, stop watching for clues you’ve done something wrong.
. . .
At school, I imitated teachers: an ancient southern belle with hair gone slightly green; the study hall monitor whose hair resembled the helmet of a Roman charioteer; the kids I was actually most drawn to: the different ones. I wanted no part of them and often aimed my harshest comments in their direction. I learned to make people laugh—and I always could. I had to, and when in conversations the topic strayed too close to things I did not want to talk about—sex, or girls, or whatever, whatever could trip me up—I learned to steer the talk away, subtly, without anyone ever realizing. Even me. It was an animal thing—camouflage. It has taken me so long to see it all.
Sometimes, on bad days, it would happen again. It did not stop. Walking down the hall, I would see Kevin coming in my direction: “Fuck you, fucking faggot.” I tried to stay in my body and not to disappear. If I felt hurt, I cut it off fast as I could manage. I mean, what I was feeling? I could never ask anyone for help because what he said was true and all I wanted was for everyone to ignore it.
On TV, I hear them saying these things that they say about people like me, not caring if we have to listen. They don’t care if the things they say leave their mark. They are so brave they can make kids feel terrible, these perfect family folk, so certain their lives are all so fine. They stand and say it is their right to say things that injure children who have learned to hate themselves.
Kids even have to hear things from their own families.
We grow up hearing everything.
“Shame is inventive.” It can do so much and you never know.
. . .
A guy named Freddy often strolled alone through the crowds in my high school, and that first year, I tried to attract his attention, because he seemed to be on his own too. In class, he turned bright red at the slightest thing and had a kind of funny walk—from a back injury, I later learned. He didn’t seem to quite belong with anyone. I sensed something familiar. I thought he did too, even from way across a room. I scared him, I knew, because I was different, just what he did not want to be. But I wanted to try to reach him if I could.