The one thing about a gay man’s life that gives him both an undeletable scar and the privilege of having observed the world from different vantage points is the fact that we all have, at some point, “been” straight. Or, at least, tried to.

We all had to go through the years of identity travestying, in which, like actors doing very serious, method-acting type of laboratory work, we pretended to be “other.” Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Except during masturbation — that was our homo break.

While the constant attempt to a methodic, neurotic and pathologic imitation of an identity that isn’t yours can’t be that good for you, it does force you to realize the plurality of human race, and brush up your acting skills.

But, it occurs to me, that if straight people could only fathom how cruel it is to have to make out with a gender you do not lust for and to have to police yourself at every second of the day to make sure you are not coming off as who you are, they may actually feel bad. Maybe even apologize. And, who knows, by 2047, maybe we will get some sort of post-traumatic pension from the state, too.

While coming out of the closet seems to partially erase recollections of the burden of having a self-constructed pseudo-replica for an identity, I do remember tales of back when I was straight.

I was 16 and wearing a button-up shirt. My buddy (gay people have friends; straight people have buddies, apparently) Matt and I went to a homecoming dance with a girl named Danny (that should have been a sign) and her cousin, Teresa.

Obviously this was before cell phones. And, obviously, I had missed out on that rule too. My character was starting to come off as unconvincing, it seemed. So I cut out little pieces of paper from my notebook and put them in my pockets.

The awful thing was, as idiotically hetero as Matt sounded, he was about the hottest guy on the planet. Toned body, inhumanly blond hair, cinematically blue eyes, an incomprehensible urge to go to boot camp and “blow shit up,” a forearm tattoo and an overflowing sense of self-assurance that produced its own gravity field.

So while he described what he wanted to do to “chicks,” I imagined the scene inside my head, slapping white-out on the image of the “chick” and replacing myself in it.

When Teresa starts making out with Matt in the front, Danny starts touching my thigh in the back of the car. Now, making out with a good looking person is fairly do-able whether they are a guy or a girl, and Danny was pretty hot. But I kind of wanted to be her more than I wanted to fuck her. And, maybe, if I were her, then it could have been me making out with Matt in the front seat.

I listen to Matt and Teresa in the front. Mutually agreeing on giving continuity to this prosaic thing we call normal — blindingly. Their Columbia winter jackets chafing each other like Eskimos making love, their act so mute, so unthought of, so deliciously effortless, invisibly conditioned. Ours, so clumsily performatic.

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