Since I have nothing to blog about today, I’m going to cheat and present something I’ve already written. I found it on my hard drive this morning. In November 2001, I participated in National Novel-Writing Month, in which you are supposed to write a 50,000-word novel in a month. For several nights in a row, I sat down at my computer and just typed, typed, typed, not editing, not looking back. I never finished, but here are the first five of the 19 pages that I wrote.

So I figured that since it’s possible I could die any day, it would be a good idea to get my life down on paper before that happens. You could die in a car accident or you could die of anxiety or you could die of something totally crazy, like hypothermia. You could die. You will die. You’d better write down your life story before someone else tries to turn it into a movie of the week with McDonald’s tie-ins.

This is all about me being gay. You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard these days. I mean, today gay people get marketed and have Bud practically forced down their open throats and march in parades with their Chinese babies and so forth. But I’m neurotic, so everything has to be hard for me.

Rubber bands. It didn’t all begin with rubber bands, but that’s the first thing that comes to mind. When I was a little kid, my parents were both smokers. They quit. I remember my dad smoking these candy cigarettes because he had to get rid of his oral fixation. He used to smoke Kools, but then it became not kool for him to do that anymore, so he had to quit.

One of the methods he used to quit, other than the candy cigarettes, was by putting a rubber band around his wrist. Every time he had the urge to smoke, he’d snap the rubber band. It was supposed to be Pavlovian. You ring the bell and the dogs start salivating. In this case, though, you pull the band and it stings your wrist and it hurts. You begin to associate smoking with pain, and it makes you not want to smoke anymore.

Eighth grade, standing in the bathroom on the third floor of our house, the bathroom only I used. I decided the only way this was going to go away was if I wore a rubber band and snapped it whenever I thought about guys. Oh, he’s hot. Snap. Ow. So’s he. Snap. Ow. And him. Ow. Nice muscles. Ow. Nice eyes. Ow! Ow! Ow!

Did it work?

Damn, he’s hot.

I guess not.

Ow.

Hanging out in the den at home, looking at the bookshelves in the corner of the room, my parents’ books from the late 60s and 70s, but seeming much more ancient. Covered with dust. Cracking plastic shiny dust jackets. One of the books looks intriguing, even to my eleven-year-old self. Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). That asterisk — something so mysterious and evil about it, the asterisk takes it out of my oeuvre.

I open the book and look through the index at the back. For the very first time, I do something that I will do so many more times in my life: I turn to the index and look up the word homosexual. It doesn’t matter what kind of book it is — a book about sex, a history tome, especially books about psychology. Are there homosexuals in it? If so, I want to know.

How did I know what homosexuals were? I didn’t know I was one, did I? Perhaps I did in some way. We all know we’re gay without knowing that we’re gay. When I was in elementary school, some jerk of a kid, Billy Hollander, made fun of someone by calling him gay. Up until then I knew what “gay” meant. Happy. In an early-20th-century-kinda way, the same era when “Happy Birthday” was written and Mother’s Day was invented and Coca-Cola was only newly free of cocaine. The founding period of modern America. Everything we see as cheesy today was invented back then. Same as the word “gay.”

But he used the word derisively, made fun of it. And it was as if I’d always known it was a dirty word. But I challenged him.

“What’s wrong with calling someone gay?” I said.

“Gay means love,” he said.

“Gay means happy,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Gay is happy and happy is love, so gay means love.”

Back then, love was bad. It was something that girls did. Girls loved. Not boys. Boys played basketball with their prepubscent non-smelly sweat, free of poisonous, troublesome, devilish hormones. Girls ran around the playground. The kissing girls. Run from the kissing girls! They’d chase you around the field, running after you, trying to kiss you, and if you knew what was good for you (and all boys did) you’d run like hell to get away from them. Girls loved. Boys played games. Boys didn’t want to be loved.

Love is gay. Boys don’t love. Boys aren’t gay. Gay is bad.

And I knew that before I knew it.

“Fag,” the entry for homosexual said. This was in a list of other derogatory words for homosexuals. There was also something about sailors. Trade. Were sailors gay? Those dark lecherous sailors on the mist-covered docks at eventide, smelling of fish, kneeling down in their sailor suits to suck each other’s cocks. Furtive. They were fags. They were homosexuals.

“He’s just a frustrated homosexual,” my mom said one day. She was talking about a teacher in her school. Okay, I thought. So homosexuals are frustrated. I’m pretty frustrated. Am I a homosexual?

Parents say so many things that they don’t think their children will hear. But we’re like flypaper. Selective flypaper, anyway. The strangest things stick to us. Tell us to remember to lock the front door and it’ll fly right through our heads, in one orifice and out another. But call someone a frustrated homosexual and we’ll remember it for the rest of our lives. Some of us, anyway.

X. Sex. HomoSEXual. It’s the X that does it. You can recognize the word homosexual from a mile away, just from the X. Read the following sentence: Arrested at the demonstration were a politician, a teacher, a homosexual, and a clown. HOMOSEXUAL. It sticks out like an engorged penis. You can recognize it anywhere.

There’s another word that leaps off the page: AIDS. All capital letters, like it’s being trumpeted. You won’t miss it. “Cures to several illnesses are crucial these days: cancer, heart disease, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s disease.” AIDS just jumps right out at you. It won’t stay quiet.

Just like those homosexuals.

Except the frustrated ones.

Today, from my lofty confident vantage point, my villa in Spain and my boyfriend and my wonderful catering business, I look back and it all seems so easy. Okay, none of that is true. There’s no catering business, no villa in Spain. These days, there’s not even a boyfriend. It wasn’t supposed to work out that way. Oh, the catering business and the Catalan bungalow aren’t important. But the boyfriend? I thought that came with the territory. You come out of the closet and you get a boyfriend. Never mind the fact that there are closeted guys with boyfriends and plenty of out guys without boyfriends. The latter must just be the weird ones. Everybody knows you come out of the closet and you get a boyfriend. Right? Wasn’t that the whole point? Wasn’t that why I decided to take the bold step, the struggle, the parental anger, the sleepless nights and the stomach in knots and the words weaving back upon themselves in my journal like Mobius strips? Wasn’t that the carrot at the end of the stick?

Instead I just got beat with a stick. The stick of singularity. Singlehood. Single guys! When I was a kid I thought the only people who were single were the ones on “Three’s Company.” Look! “Father Knows Best.” “Leave it to Beaver.” This isn’t one of those baby boomer coming-of-age stories, though. When I mention those classic TV sitcoms, I mean that I first encountered them in reruns. But in the early 80s, they could screw a kid up just as much as they could in the 50s. Their power to warp the human concept of a good society is timeless, eternal. Kids will still be watching these shows in the 23rd century and then turning off the TV and crying themselves to sleep in their Martian space pods because their families aren’t black-and-white and happy. Forever this will happen.

I was warped by them too. Those were the married shows. You go to college, you finish college. Once you finish college, you getajobandgetmarriedandhavekids. No breathing room. No daylight at all. After all, my parents were like that, right? They were alwaysmarriedwithkids. They’d never been anything else. From before the time my DNA was my own, back when it still belonged to my mom, my parents were married and potential child-owners. Nothing else.

And then I saw “Three’s Company.”

The Regal Beagle! Swingin’! Mr. Furley with his ascots! What a happenin’ guy! The seventies! Los Angeles! Short shorts! The actress who played Terri, the nurse, doing the flamingo step with her long naked legs! Jack Tripper playing a farce! Hairy chests! Larry, the loungey happenin’ guy! Singlehood. This was new to me. I hadn’t known such a stage of life existed. You mean there’s something called your 20s?

So that was what single people did. They got into Strange Misunderstandings and lied and went to bars and lived with two women and hung around with hairy-chested guys named Larry and tried to get chicks. Nothing stable. That was what single people did.

And then one day, like in the last episode, you get married or you move in with your Committed Girlfriend.

And that’s the end of that series. “Three’s a Crowd” totally tanked afterwards.

But that’s what singlehood seemed to be, to me. This evil, lecherous, unkempt, dangerous stage of life. Was it real? My parents never did it. They got married at 21 and had me at 24. They never lived the Three’s Company life. Thank god.

And I wasn’t going to do it either, was I? No. I was the perfect kid, and I was going to turn into the Perfect Adult one day. One day soon. I’d go to college, finish, and enter the world of working and wives and wee little kids. Right? If I didn’t, that would mean that something was horribly wrong with me.

Once upon a time I met a prince and we had mad passionate sex and he carried me away with him to his secret lair in the sky, and we lived happily ever after. After what? Was there a what to be after? It was just a dream in the clouds. Nothing real. Prince Charming was a cartoon character, after all. Grotesque in his elegant golden-haired beauty. You don’t want reality when you’re a kid. You don’t even know what reality is.

Thank God.

It was a long time before the princes came. For so long it was just imagination. Imaginary friends. Eventually I would meet someone who’d straddle the boundaries between the real and imaginary. He was larger than life. Kirk. To me he was a god.

But before that time, long before, there were the stuffed animals.

I had a stuffed blue seal when I was a kid. I’m not even sure where it came from. All I know is that I had this baby seal and I’d sleep with it. The fur was particularly nice and soft, and one night I learned to rub myself against it and make myself feel good. It wasn’t just my bedtime companion; it was my bedtime companion.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized I’d been looking at the seal the wrong way.

The seal was curved, as are seals’ wont. It was concave. Held properly, there was a dip in the middle, rising at one end to the head with whiskers and eyes, and rising at the other end to the tail, with tufts of blue and white yarn at the end. That was how it was supposed to be held.

I hadn’t held it like that. I held the seal upright, standing on its tail, its head up top. Instead of curving downward to a valley in the middle, the valley was toward the side, sticking out, sticking back in the middle — curving forward up top to the head and curving downward to the tail at the bottom. Held this way — turned around and upright — the whiskers, which were supposed to be below the eyes, wound up on top of the head, like tufts of hair. I hadn’t known. To me, that’s the way it was supposed to be. It was still my seal. It didn’t matter that it didn’t look like a seal — that never even entered my mind. It was still my seal.

Then one evening my parents had some friends over, the Goldbergs. Their sons were upstairs with my brother and me. One of them picked up the seal and held it the correct way — head in front, tail in back, valley in the middle — and it was a revelation for me. Suddenly it looked like a seal. It really looked like a seal. Oh! So that’s why it was a seal! I’d never thought about it before. I’d just assumed it was my seal. Not any old seal. My seal.

I lost something that evening. Now it just looked like a run-of-the-mill seal like any other. It no longer seemed special. Held my way, the seal looked like an alien. My own private alien with velvety fur against which I could rub my little penis.

But now, thanks to Jeremy Goldberg, it was just a seal.