IN THE SUMMER OF 2001, my dad had a brainstorm: I needed to listen to music. When he embarks on a project—and he always has a project—his enthusiasm knows no bounds. We weren’t just going to start listening to top forty stations on the car radio every once in awhile. We were going to master the whole pop culture thing that very afternoon! He hit on this while we were visiting his mother, and I was all for anything that would get me out of the house. Twenty minutes later we were driving to the mall. This was back when every mall still had a record store, and he marched into one, headed over to the top-ten rack, and started pulling down CDs. My father had never heard of any of this stuff, either. “What are teenagers listening to?” he asked a clerk. This was the heyday of Destiny’s Child and Britney Spears, so my dad clarified: we wanted stuff that guys were listening to. We left the store with a bulging sack of CDs. Blink 182, Dave Matthews Band, Creed, and Sum 41 had all made the cut.
Back at my grandma’s house I popped the Creed CD into my brand new Discman, listened to the first three tracks and knew it wasn’t for me. Next up, Blink 182. I picked a random track and suddenly my headphones were filled with punk rock and a male voice singing what sure sounded like “ejaculate into a sock.” That got my attention. The track “Happy Holidays, You Bastard” was very short and as soon as it was over, I listened to it again. Yes, I’d heard right, and the second time around I picked up quite a few more words and images, none of them gentlemanly. I realized I was turned on by the lyrics even though I couldn’t quite figure out why. I sure wasn’t going to ask my dad. Later, when he wanted to know how the music project was going, I just told him that some of the CDs he got me were pretty good.
This was the summer before high school, and he must have been thinking about how to help me get ready for the leap. It was going to be bigger for me than for most kids because we were moving again—clear across the continent this time, to Vancouver. My parents had told me they thought it would be a good idea to enroll in a martial arts class once we got there. Maybe this idea had been floated in the past and I’d rejected it, but after the incident in the stairwell, I was all for it. I wanted to be able to defend myself at my new school. I assumed there would be bullies. There always had been everywhere else.
That prospect didn’t dampen my enthusiasm about the move, though. It was another chance to reinvent myself, and after seven years in New Jersey, I was ready. When my parents took us to Vancouver early that summer to introduce us to the city, I got even more excited. It was both more urban and more scenic than Summit, with forests, mountains, ocean and gleaming skyscrapers. There were ski hills. Beaches. A laid-back vibe. We were moving to paradise, apparently.
I thought the rest of my family felt the way I did—that we were on the verge of an especially shiny new adventure—but one afternoon while we were house hunting, my dad had a meltdown in the car. Crying. Actually, crying isn’t the right word, because he didn’t seem sad. He seemed to be fearful and in pain, sick with worry that we wouldn’t find a house. He thought he was failing us in some monumental way that went way beyond real estate. Erica and I had never seen him like that before and we both froze in the back seat, unsure what to do. We’d seen him stressed out and sad and angry but we’d never seen him fearful, weak or at a loss. It was a little scary. He was supposed to be in charge—if he didn’t know what to do, we were all screwed.
I had no idea why my father was distressed. It didn’t seem like he had anything to be upset about, frankly. He’d jumped from one success to the next, and now he had this amazing opportunity to create and anchor an evening news broadcast in a ridiculously beautiful place. What could possibly be wrong? My mom calmed him down and later in the day he apologized, saying he’d been overwhelmed by needing to find a house quickly. But the incident has stuck in my mind all these years because I’d never seen my father emotionally naked before. For the first time, I realized he had depths and cares I was completely unaware of, and a side I knew nothing about.
Two days before we left Summit my dad did the kind of awesome thing you always hope your parents will do: he took me and my band of misfit friends to the same Pennsylvania water park we’d visited as a family, for a going-away party. We had an amazing time, though toward the end of the day, when we were all sunburned and waterlogged, adolescent solemnity set in and promises to stay in touch ensued. I couldn’t hold on to the mood for more than a few minutes, though. I was focused on the future, not the past. The next day, while movers bustled around loading our belongings into the moving truck, I sat across the street, under a tree in Kim’s yard. She was weeping, and I’m afraid I didn’t exactly rise to the occasion. My attitude was, “See ya! Have a nice life.” It was my ninth move in fourteen years.
From my parents’ perspective we were going home, but I didn’t feel that way because I didn’t really feel Canadian. My main attachment to Canada was to my grandmothers, especially Gallo, and to our cottage in Ontario, which we had bought in 1999. That summer we’d been eating at a little sandwich place near my grandfather’s cottage when Erica and I noticed a bulletin board with property listings. We ran over to look at them, and then our parents were reading over our shoulders, and next thing we knew, the purpose of our trip wasn’t seeing Grandpa but finding a cottage for ourselves. It was almost unbelievable that my parents indulged this whim my sister and I had had, and wound up buying a place. When we walked into the fourth cottage, all of us were just, “This is the one.” It was big, at least twice the size of our house, with a huge stone fireplace, endless windows overlooking the lake and a cozy rustic feeling. As it was set partway up a densely wooded hill, you couldn’t see the cottages on either side until you were out on the dock. It was perfect. It didn’t seem weird to me that we were buying property in Ontario though we lived in New Jersey. Nor did it occur to me until right this minute that perhaps Erica and I didn’t really drive the purchase—more likely, it was part of a larger plan our parents had about moving back to Canada. It’s funny how your own childhood narrative solidifies into fact, sometimes so quickly that you never sense there might be another side to the story.
To me the cottage was yet another wonderful thing we got out of Good Morning America. Thanks to my father’s stint on that show, I’d been able to hold a baby lion and go to a shuttle launch, we’d taken family trips to Europe and, best of all, we’d wound up with a place on the same clear northern lake as my grandfather. His cottage was two bays over, though, so the lake felt both familiar and new to me. I had a lot of independence there because my parents trusted me to be sensible (one upside of nerdiness). There was a little Zodiac I was allowed to zip around in, plus a real motorboat my dad said I’d be able to drive someday.
My dad loved the lake as much as I did, and it was the one place where he truly unwound. Though he always had some kind of cottage improvement project going, he slowed down, stopped checking his watch and phone, and relaxed. For those few weeks every summer, it was easy to get his attention and hold it. Erica and I made sure that we monopolized his time, clamouring for boat rides and trips to town for frozen yogurt, and insisting that he jump off the dock with us and swim out to our raft, anchored in the lake.
The summer before we moved to Vancouver, though, I was more wary of his attention. I didn’t want him studying me too closely, because I wasn’t sure what he would see. That year I’d become more interested in art, and sketching was starting to become a compulsion, the way Lego had been for years. I drew a lot of things, from spaceships to people, sometimes even nudes. Then a lot of nudes. Male nudes. Afterwards, alarmed and ashamed about what someone else would think if they saw them, I’d rip my drawings into tiny pieces. I was confused about why I was drawing naked men, just as I was confused by my reaction to the Blink 182 CD. The impulse was sexual, obviously, but I didn’t know what it meant.
My parents and especially my mother had always talked openly with me about sex. Shortly after we got to Summit, I’d helpfully explained to all the other kids on the street how babies are made, and when they went home and shared this fascinating news with their own families, my parents received a number of angry calls. Compared to my friends’ parents, who tended to be conservative and über-Christian, mine were progressive. They weren’t telling either me or Erica to save ourselves for marriage (though I do think my dad, who is more traditional than my mom, was secretly in favour of that option). And they didn’t present sex as some super-serious, potentially scary act. They told us it could be beautiful and fun so long as you were with someone you really cared about, and they couldn’t say enough good things about condoms. In any discussions about the mechanics of sex, though, they always described it as something that happened between a man and a woman. I have memories of my mom telling my sister and me when we were pretty little that it was okay to be gay, and if we were, she’d love us just the same. But no one ever explained how a gay person would have sex, nor did I wonder about that.
I didn’t know any actual gay people. Insofar as I ever thought about homosexuality, I thought entirely in terms of stereotypes: drag queens or limp-wristed guys. I didn’t relate to or identify with those stereotypes at all, therefore I knew I wasn’t gay. Sex ed in grade eight confirmed it. There were just a few vague paragraphs about homosexuality in our textbook, but one phrase made an indelible impression: “Men are attracted to the musky smell of other men’s rear ends.” All right, I’m likely misremembering “rear ends,” but I know for sure “musky smell” was in there because it grossed me out. Odour, dirt, germs—I’m my mother’s child. None of that appealed to me in the slightest. Therefore, I couldn’t possibly be gay.
In retrospect, certain incidents stand out to me as indicators of my sexual identity, but at the time, they were not aha moments. They were just stray threads in the fabric of my childhood, which acquired a discernible pattern only after the fact. The first occurred in grade six on a school field trip to Washington, DC. My trip “buddy” and I talked and laughed on the bus, shared a snack or two, and then as we approached Capitol Hill, I put on my baseball hat—the wrong way, he told me, casually reaching over to adjust the bill, tucking my hair behind my ear. For him, I’m sure the moment had no relevance: just a bro helping a bro. But no boy had ever touched me in a caring way before and his touch was electric, though I had no idea why. I wasn’t actually attracted to him, then or later.
The following summer there’d been another moment. All the kids at the cottage were playing a nighttime variation of hide-and-seek: half of us hid in the forest surrounding the lake while everyone else tried to find us, armed with flashlights. It was thrilling and terrifying, crashing through the dark woods looking for a good hiding place while a pack of hunters pounded along not far behind. When one guy flung himself into a narrow ditch and motioned for me to follow, I jumped right in. It was a tight fit. I had to lie down beside him and press up against his back—and suddenly, I lost all interest in getting back to home base safely. I didn’t want to leave. But the thought that went through my mind wasn’t “Oh my God, I must be homosexual!” It was “This feels great!” I didn’t question the feeling or what it signified.
I didn’t think it signified a thing. Until grade six, I hadn’t even liked boys enough to want to be friends with them. My crushes were on girls, always had been. Along with her sketchbooks of family cartoons, my mother kept a journal where she wrote down funny things all of us said, which is how I know that in kindergarten I came home one day and said, “I made a new friend today and guess what? I’m in love. Don’t tell anyone! She’s beautiful. She has blonde hair, teddy bear earrings and a nice mouth … I just looked at her in circle time and winked at her. She winked back. That’s when I fell in love with her. It’s crazy. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but when I’m with her … I don’t love Erica anymore.” (My mother may have embroidered this quote to make it more adorable, but I did not.)
So why, in the summer after grade eight, was I compulsively drawing pictures of naked men? I had no idea, but I didn’t want anyone, especially my father, to find out.
Several times during those first few months in Vancouver my parents mentioned how good it felt not to have to pretend to fit in anymore. I’d picked up on it only once when we lived in Summit: my dad, who’d never had any interest in televised sports, had bought a big-screen TV and invited all the dads in the neighbourhood over to watch football. I’d thought that was phony, and had judged him as charitably as teenagers usually judge their parents. But now it came out that both my parents had been faking stuff in Summit. I was floored. I thought I was the only person in my family who’d ever felt like an outsider, but apparently not. It turned out that Mom and Dad had only made us go to church because everyone else in Summit did. Now that we were in Vancouver and neighbourhood busybodies weren’t keeping tabs, they said Erica and I could decide for ourselves how to explore and express our spirituality. Church attendance was, in other words, optional. Let’s just say that I started sleeping in a lot more often on Sundays.
Unlike my parents, I’d never pretended in order to try to fit in anywhere. In Summit, I’d known it wouldn’t work, so why bother? In Vancouver, however, I did want to fit in, and decided my best shot was to act as if I’d always been accepted. No one had to know that I’d been at the bottom of the food chain at my old school, and they wouldn’t, so long as I acted “as if.” In Summit, most kids thought they were just as awesome and gifted as their parents had always told them they were, and I tried to project some of that same brash confidence at my new school. The more American I acted, the more confident I seemed, and the more forceful and outspoken I actually became. It was incredible, really, how wrapping myself in the US flag seemed to make my shyness and weakness invisible.
I played up the fact that I’d lived close to New York, which helped make me intriguing for the first time in my life; a lot of the kids at school were obsessed with hip hop and New York ghetto culture. This was West Vancouver though, a community not known for its racial diversity, and it was comical watching these privileged white kids climbing out of their mom’s and dad’s Porsches with their jeans hanging off their butts, trying to look and sound gangsta. In the US I’d gone to school with a lot of black and Hispanic kids, including some tough ones who’d shove you down a flight of stairs for wearing jeans they considered “black only.” They’d have made mincemeat out of these west coast posers. I was tougher than they were, for goodness’ sake.
No one in the school intimidated me, and for the first few months, I ping-ponged between cliques at will. Ignorance of the social pecking order helped. I didn’t know the unwritten rules about who was allowed to talk to whom, the way I had in Summit, so I talked to everybody, including the popular kids. It turned out to be easier than I’d ever imagined. All you needed to do was act as if you had the right.
I made friends easily, like Buzz, who had a houseful of little brothers obsessed with Lego the way I’d been. We’d play Halo on his Xbox for hours, taking breaks only to torment his siblings or prowl around the neighbourhood on our bikes. I made friends with some of the kids who lived in palatial houses with maids, hot tubs and ocean views. There were pool parties, sometimes catered, and a mind-numbing level of wealth. One kid had a basement entirely devoted to miniature trains, like something out of a movie. Another had his own assistant, and a two-storey bedroom that was easily as big as our whole house in Summit. I seemed to be the only person in the school who wasn’t going to be getting a car for his sixteenth birthday.
Although my social prospects were considerably brighter than they had been in Summit, I proceeded with my parents’ martial arts plan. I wanted to become a guy no one would dream of messing with. Thai kickboxing and judo turned out to be among the rare physical activities I was actually good at. I could kick higher than most kids, and I was faster and more flexible. I’d train and spar until I was so tired that I barely had the energy to bike home, and got in the habit of biking on the railway tracks, where it was flatter. It was one of the first times I purposely and repeatedly broke one of my parents’ rules, and I’m sure they would have grounded me for life had they found out. But I no longer felt like a kid bad things happened to as a matter of course. The world no longer seemed so dangerous to me.
We’d been living in Vancouver for six months, long enough that the novelty had worn off, when I woke one morning to the sound of knocking on my bedroom door. The door opened slowly, and my father softly called my name then came and sat on the edge of my bed. “You’re not going to school today,” was his opening line. “Gallo passed away in her sleep.” I heard the words but didn’t process them. Gently, he told me what he knew: Esmond, Gallo’s partner, had come to her apartment and found her in her bed. She had died peacefully.
Several months earlier, Gallo had come to Vancouver. After a blissful week of introducing her to our new house and neighbourhood, I’d hugged her goodbye on our driveway. She was the person in the world who saw me most clearly yet still believed I could do no wrong, and I loved her fiercely. She’d held on to me tightly for an extra few seconds, and as I’d breathed in her perfume I’d had a strange thought: I might never see her again. I’d brushed it off. Ridiculous. Gallo had recently retired and was bursting with optimism about the future, all the amazing things she was going to do, all the places she’d go. She gave me a little wave out the car window, then was off to the airport.
Now, in the living room, my sister and mother were hugging each other on the couch, and my mother’s face was puffy from crying. She’d adored her mother. We all had. I sat down beside them but I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. I just kept telling myself, stupidly, “She wasn’t even that old.” I couldn’t access my emotions, much less express them. A few days later my father asked me whether I’d cried, and I shook my head. No. I’m sure he was concerned that I was internalizing her death, but there was nothing I could do. My feelings would not come out.
The subsequent days were a blur. My mother went to Montreal ahead of the rest of us to begin sorting through Gallo’s apartment, which was piled to the ceiling with stuff. She was a bit of a hoarder. When we got there, my mother was working away in the guest room, and I wandered into the kitchen. There on the table was a blister pack of Gravol and Gallo’s reading glasses. Apparently the onset of a heart attack sometimes involves nausea. I could picture her final hours, reading a book at the table, then putting it face down, pages spread, and reaching for the Gravol, thinking she’d feel better if she lay down. Later, for years, I had nightmares about this scene; in my dreams, I was helpless, unable to call out, unable to warn her.
My mother said we could take something small from Gallo’s apartment to remember her by, and I searched for something that embodied her spirit. In the medicine cabinet, I found it. Her perfume bottle. I carefully dripped perfume into the small porcelain container shaped like an apple that had always sat on my grandmother’s bedside table. I still have that apple, though it lost its scent long ago, likely because in the months and years following my grandmother’s death, I opened it, carefully, many times, to feel she was near me again. I can’t say that I’ve ever gotten over the loss.
Shortly after moving to Vancouver my dad took all of us to see the Global National studio, which was in Burnaby, about forty minutes from our house. I was surprised by how long the drive was, but he just shrugged. He wanted Erica and me to go to good schools. Commuting wasn’t that big a deal.
TV studios didn’t impress me, generally. I’d seen too many of them. But there was one impressive novelty at Global National: my dad was clearly the boss, in control of everything. Before he came back to Canada, the network hadn’t even existed, nor had the studio, or the evening news broadcast itself. He’d had to build from the ground up, and he seemed rejuvenated by the effort. I still didn’t know why he felt he needed to reinvent himself, but I knew that being an anchor was considered a step up from being a reporter, and for the first time, he wasn’t sharing the stage with a co-anchor. He was on his own, in charge of a team of reporters, and clearly loving it.
He seemed absolutely sure of himself, the commander of an empire, which is what I wanted to be when I grew up, too. To me, that was the distilled essence of manhood: you owned your life and were completely in control of it. The paragon of masculinity, as far as I was concerned, was my dad’s friend Mike Bronco, who ran a gym in New Jersey and was the most self-sufficient person I’d ever met. He’d taught me how to fire a rifle, write with a quill pen and navigate with a compass. He was unacquainted with self-doubt and didn’t yearn for anything he couldn’t make or build himself. My dad was very different but he was also a survivor; you could drop him down in the middle of a war zone and in two hours he’d have found a cold beer and lined up an interview with a rebel leader. Like Mike, he spoke with conviction and projected unshakeable confidence. Each of them seemed at home in a world he’d created for himself. I wanted to feel that way, too, and I began thinking consciously about how to toughen myself up, get stronger.
Lifting weights would help, but there was no way I was going to start doing it in a gym. I didn’t want anyone to see me struggling. So my dad, who’d always worked out, took me to a fitness supply store and got me a bench and a set of weights, and set me up in our garage. At first, I was very secretive. My body didn’t reflect who I wanted to be, and if I saw anyone peeking in the little window in the door between the kitchen and the garage, I’d freak out. Eventually I got smart and taped a piece of paper over the window, and eventually, too, picking up heavy dumbbells then putting them down again started to have a noticeable effect on my arms. My father bought me the first of many protein shakes, and after a year in the garage, when I finally had the confidence to let him see me in action, he gave me some pointers. It was the first time we’d bonded over something physical, and though not a sport like basketball, lifting weights was still masculine. Eventually we even went to the gym together sometimes. I liked that, liked knowing what to do and liked feeling that my father was proud of me, proud enough to be seen working out with me.
As soon as I started to look more muscular, people treated me differently—or maybe I carried myself with more confidence, and that’s what they responded to, I’m not sure. Looking the part, however, didn’t mean I felt tough. I never progressed past a brown belt in judo because, near the end of one sparring match in my second year, I got over-confident and wound up getting punched in the head by a black belt. I knew it was the purpose of the exercise, but I just felt, “Why did someone do this to me?” My lower lip started to quiver and I had to walk away for a moment because I was afraid I was going to cry. I loved the principles and the movements of judo, but I wasn’t into the idea of inflicting harm and was even less enthusiastic about being harmed. So I quit, though I didn’t tell my parents why. I had the perfect excuse: signs had recently been posted in the martial arts studio asking us to kindly refrain from vomiting on the exercise mats—kids had apparently started doing this after exercising too intensely, and the proprietors wanted us to vomit in the bathroom in the future. My parents were all too aware of my phobia, and bought my argument that I couldn’t work out in a place where I’d have to bear witness to ritual vomiting.
Besides, if I cut out judo, I’d have more time to study math. It was clear to me that unless I got a whole lot better at it, I’d never make it as a nuclear physicist. I was fascinated by atoms and the mysteries of quantum physics, and when I was fifteen and sixteen, spent hours hunting down scientific information on the internet and reading books by people like Stephen Hawking. I liked teaching myself new things and found I retained information better than I did in the classroom, but the more I learned about science, the more obvious it became that my lack of mathematical aptitude was a serious problem. Inspired by my dad’s self-discipline and determination, I kept at it, toiling away with the help of a math tutor who had mind-blowingly bad breath. Whatever. I had a dream. I tried not to inhale when he exhaled.
Aside from science, my favourite class was Japanese. It’s a really difficult language but I wanted to learn it because I was drawn to the culture, especially the aesthetic. I’d been watching anime for years, starting with Pokémon, and I admired the tidy beauty and intricate graphics of Japanese cartoons. A little later, when my school offered an elective in animation, I signed up for it immediately and discovered that I was good at it, good enough that I fell in with the artsy crowd and became known for art at high school in the same way that I’d been known for trading Pokémon cards in middle school. I created a little character called Page Alien, and drew comic book after comic book of his adventures. In grade eleven, my friend Carrie and I made an animated short together that won a provincial prize, and my dad encouraged me to think about animation as a career. My mom told me dreamily that she could see me falling in love with a nice Japanese girl and becoming a famous animator in Tokyo.
I hoped she was right, especially about falling in love with a girl. I was really starting to worry about myself. One day when I was in grade ten my dad had come home from work and proceeded directly to my bedroom, which was a little unusual. Without much preamble he passed me a paper bag with a magazine inside. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, but he didn’t sound as though he were proudly ushering me into the inner sanctum of maledom. He was grinning sheepishly and seemed embarrassed. My father never objectified women. He’d never ogle a busty woman or make an off-colour remark, and he certainly didn’t have a hidden stash of porno mags, like my friends’ dads. Buying the SI swimsuit issue was completely out of character, so much so that I wondered if he was giving it to me because he was worried that I wasn’t interested enough in girls. I thanked him, and tried to look excited. Then I did what any teenager does with contraband: I hid it. I wasn’t particularly interested, was the truth.
Like many teenagers in North America, I’d stumbled across internet porn, and I’d been alarmed by my reaction to images of men. I told myself that my hormones were raging, so anything sexual would be a turn-on. Actually, I reasoned, it would be more abnormal if I didn’t respond. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to like looking at naked guys, so I resisted the urge to seek out gay porn. I told myself I was only allowed to look at girls. This had one benefit: unlike most boys my age, I wasn’t a big consumer of porn, period.
Nevertheless, as my hormones kicked into high gear, sexual thoughts about guys popped into my head more and more insistently. Am I gay? At sixteen it was a question, not a conviction. But even thinking it made me feel panicky and ashamed. I couldn’t figure out why, the more masculine I looked, the less masculine I felt. It was like my brain was sabotaging all the hard work I was doing in the garage, and I started to get compulsive, lifting heavier and heavier weights, as though by bulking up I could crowd my thoughts and feelings out of existence.
I’d noticed how my father had winced and changed the channel when, on some TV program we were all watching together, two actors had moved in to kiss one another. The very suggestion of two men touching clearly pained him. And he was a model of tolerance compared to the sixteen-year-olds I knew. Teenage boys police the borders of masculinity vigilantly. “Homo” and “fag” are the insults that trump all other insults and gay is, at that age, the worst thing you can possibly be—even at a relatively enlightened school, even in an era of political correctness.
I wanted to feel the way a guy was supposed to feel. I grew increasingly paranoid that people might somehow figure out that I didn’t. Maybe they already had. As my voice deepened and my body developed, a steady drumbeat of anxiety punctuated my waking thoughts: Am I standing correctly or is my back arched too much? Are my clothes masculine enough? Is this music the kind I should be listening to? Why am I looking at the guy instead of the girl in the Calvin Klein ad? Did anyone notice? I was terrified of doing or saying something that would give me away—and terrified, too, of what I seemed to be becoming. I was afraid there was the equivalent of a light switch in my psyche, one that could instantly transform me into a screaming queen complete with sequins and a pink boa, and I might accidentally flip it if I continued thinking about guys.
Heterosexuality was, to me, the sine qua non of masculinity. I couldn’t see how I’d ever be successful at anything in life if I failed this first, most basic test of manhood.
So I did what anyone who was afraid he might be gay would do. I set out to prove I wasn’t. I hoped that dating a girl would awaken the “right” kinds of feelings. And I had an eye on the PR benefits, too: no one would think I was gay if I had a girlfriend.
It was with this highly romantic mindset that I began seeing Karen in grade eleven. At the beginning, everything was great. The buzz hit the school and if people had been discussing my sexuality, they stopped, or so I thought. I was relieved about that, but, as the relationship proceeded, increasingly apprehensive about my own lack of sexual interest in her. She was smart, easy to talk to, pretty—what the hell was wrong with me? I genuinely liked her. But the fireworks my father had told me about were not happening.
Karen and I would go out to dinner, chat and hang with friends—nothing deeply emotional, except for my feeling of dread as the end of the evening drew nearer. Each time she leaned across the car for a goodnight kiss, I’d tense up, bracing myself for the moment when our lips would lock. Hers were soft and gentle, just as I had imagined a girl’s lips to be. But the hoped-for surge of desire, that natural, instinctive response any seventeen-year-old male is supposed to feel in this situation, never materialized. So before anything more intimate could happen, I’d pull away, invent some excuse to go home and boot her out of the car unceremoniously. Maybe, I told myself lamely, I’m just not into kissing.
I took some solace in the fact that I felt protective of her. I empathized with her in a way I never had with anyone else, and got angry on her behalf, too, the way I’d seen my father get angry on my mother’s behalf. Karen’s family wasn’t always nice to her, in my opinion. The first time I was invited over for dinner there was an array of dishes, including vegetarian options, because Karen had been a vegetarian for many years. In my home, conversation was the focal point of a meal, but in Karen’s home, the silence was punctuated only by the sound of chewing and the occasional rapid-fire exchange of small talk, which died out as quickly as it had started. Towards the end of dinner, Karen turned pale and put down her cutlery. “Mom, was there meat in here?” she asked. Before her mother could answer, Karen’s grandmother embarked on a rant: growing girls need to eat meat, and if sneaking it into their food was the only way, well, she’d just have to keep on doing it. Karen bolted upstairs to be sick and I stayed at the table, hating her grandmother and wondering why her parents hadn’t leapt to Karen’s defence. I never ate dinner at her house again.
When she came over to my house, we’d draw the blinds and lie on my bed, watching movies. She cuddled up next me, but nothing more happened. She had nice breasts, ones I knew I should want to touch, but they drew my attention only when they obstructed my view of the screen. Karen must have thought I was the most gentlemanly guy on the planet, and actually, I was pretty square compared to a lot of our friends. I was always the designated driver at a party, for instance, because I didn’t drink or smoke pot. Some of our friends got plastered every weekend, chugging Kahlúa and anything else they could find in their parents’ liquor cabinets, but the notion of losing control or getting sick was a total turnoff for me. So I was always the one taking care of the girl who’d smoked too much weed or urging water on the guy who was bombed out of his mind. Maybe Karen figured that I was far too chivalrous to make a move on her.
But a girl on the periphery of our group thought differently. Rachel’s disdain for me reminded me of my old nemesis Neil, and on the few occasions when she deigned to speak to me, she was cutting and sarcastic. One day at lunch, Karen stepped away from the table and Rachel looked me right in the eye and said, her voice dripping with disgust, “You aren’t fooling anyone. It’s obvious you’re gay.” The blood probably drained from my face. How had she seen through my cover? “It’s the way you hold your glass,” she smirked. “You put your pinky underneath the base. So gay.” When Karen returned to the table I clung to her, even made a show of kissing her neck, hoping that a little PDA might affirm my masculinity for anyone who was watching.
Sometimes a group of us would go to the park near Karen’s house late at night and play Truth or Dare. We were sixteen and seventeen, far from childhood innocence, and as the game progressed it always got more overtly sexual. After a certain point, I’d only choose Dare, and I wound up doing some really stupid things, like marching across the freeway in my boxers. But that was better than choosing Truth, and having to answer the questions I feared: Do you want to have sex with Karen? Do you ever think about sex with guys? Are you gay?
In 2004, my dad took me to Japan for spring break. I was excited to go to this place I’d been learning so much about, and I appreciated the fact that he was trying to cater to my interests. But I was in a bad mood almost the whole time we were there. My normal morning crankiness was multiplied exponentially by jet lag and by the fact that my dad’s snoring kept me up at night. He’d wake up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, flatly denying that he’d made a peep all night long. Finally one night when the familiar freight train-like rumbling started up on his side of the tiny room, I got out my video recorder and filmed him. End of debate.
I’d never been alone with my father for a whole week, and it was also the first time we were going somewhere he’d never been. He was clearly trying to pass the baton and let me be the tour guide, but I was horribly shy and unsure of myself, and afraid of making a mistake in front of him. My Japanese was pretty basic, and at one point we were in a tech store and I hit a language barrier there was no climbing over. I needed to find someone who spoke English, but I didn’t want my father to witness this ignominy so I banished him to the hallway then timidly asked whether anyone in the store could speak English.
My dad is a good traveller, upbeat and positive even in a country he’s too tall for, where he bashes his head on every doorway. A lot of my friends were embarrassed to be seen in public with their parents and would scurry ahead or lag behind, praying no one noticed the family resemblance. I never felt that way about either of my parents, but in Tokyo, I didn’t feel particularly connected to my father and I felt bad about it, especially because he’d clearly gone out of his way to make the trip special. Through a colleague he’d arranged for me to tour Studio Ghibli, one of Japan’s leading animation companies, where I got to flip through the head animator’s book and see all the work he’d done on films I admired. It was a dream come true for anyone who wanted to be an animator, which I did by this point (my math marks were so abysmal that science was officially out of the question). It seemed like my dad was courting me, almost, trying to impress me, and he’d arranged one surprise after another: taking the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto, visiting amazing parks and temples he’d researched.
I think he’d hoped it would be a bonding experience, but maybe there was just too much distance between us to cover. The closest we came was the night in Tokyo when my father suggested having a drink in the hotel bar where Bill Murray’s character spends most of his time in Lost in Translation. We walked over to the Park Hyatt, took the elevator up to the 52nd floor, and when the doors opened you had this incredible panoramic view of the city through the windows. I walked out, mesmerized, then realized I was on my own. My dad was still in the elevator, looking a little queasy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do it.” I’d forgotten he was afraid of heights, and I guess he’d tried to forget, too, hoping to pull off a big cinematic moment for my benefit. We went back down the elevator and had tea in an interior arboretum where, instead of windows, there were all kinds of flowers. I felt close to him then, having seen his momentary vulnerability and how he’d been unable to master it.
But it didn’t inspire me to talk about my own feelings of vulnerability. There was no way I could tell my father I was afraid of something so much worse than heights: my own thoughts and feelings, my sexuality. He’d be disgusted. Once I’d heard him talk about being on a business trip somewhere, sitting in a hotel hot tub minding his own business, when another guy had tried to grope him. My father had felt violated and outraged, but mostly insulted that anyone could have mistaken him for that kind of man. I wanted my father to be proud of me. I wanted to be a man in his eyes, and there was only one way. I had to be sure he didn’t see the real me.
——
As usual, the summer before my senior year, we left Vancouver to spend a few months at the cottage. When Karen and I said our goodbyes, she gave me a photo of herself with a love note on the back, to remind me of her until the fall. I told her I’d be busy, wouldn’t have much time to write, and that wasn’t entirely untrue. I’d lined up a job for myself at the local golf course, with the intention of earning as much money as I could because I wanted to buy a car. Most kids worked at the general store and my dad had helped line up a job for me there, but then, without his help, I’d landed the golf course gig. For whatever reason, it was considered more prestigious, a fact I reminded myself of a thousand times the day the septic tank exploded and I was instructed to clean it up. Alone. I knew my dad was proud of me for finding a job on my own, and I wanted to show him that working hard, just like he always had, was something I could definitely do.
Cleaning golf clubs and docking boats wasn’t mentally stimulating, but it did keep my mind off thoughts of my girlfriend back home—or, to be more accurate, it kept my mind off thoughts of not thinking the right way about my girlfriend back home. Karen was the person I liked best in the world. And I was hoping I’d never have to have sex with her.
I worked as many extra shifts as I could that summer, not least because it was harder to distract myself when I wasn’t working. Trying to suppress sexual thoughts about guys was enough to make me go mad. I’d equate the feeling to being at the bottom of a deep tank filled with water. You hold your breath for as long as possible, but at some point you begin to lose control. Air is running out. You need to find a way to get some oxygen in your lungs or you’re going to drown. The idea that I was gay went against everything I wanted to believe about myself—and yet I felt like I was suffocating when I tried not to think gay thoughts.
I’m sure if our cottage had had internet access I would have logged countless furtive hours online, exploring gay sites. But this was in the days before wireless, so I went back to sketching, male nudes, all different scenarios. Any exhilaration and relief I felt while freely expressing my curiosity was followed by near hysteria. What could I do with the evidence? Where the hell could I hide it? I retrofitted my nightstand with a lock, and shoved my drawings in there.
One rainy day, alone in the living room, I was flipping through a poor selection of satellite TV channels when suddenly a gay sex scene flashed on the screen. It was Queer as Folk, a Showtime program I’d never seen before. I instantly changed the channel, worried that my parents might have heard the moaning in the next room. Then, heart racing, I cranked down the volume, checked over my shoulder about ten times and flipped back to the show. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The scene was intensely graphic—I’d had no idea that watching two guys do this stuff was allowed on TV, cable channel or not. I watched for a few minutes, entranced, then lost my nerve and turned off the TV. The thought of my father catching me watching that show was sickening.
All that summer, I hardly slept. The sexual divide in society is clearly delineated: blue/pink, prince/princess. Just imagining crossing it stirred up a mental storm that kept me tossing and turning most nights, writhing in pain. I didn’t want to be gay. I didn’t want to be an outcast from mainstream society. The experience of being bullied had taught me what that felt like, and I wanted no part of it, ever again. I just wanted to be normal.
I couldn’t risk telling anyone else what I was feeling, or asking for help or guidance. If I couldn’t accept the possibility of being gay, how could anyone else possibly accept it?
Questions chased each other through my brain all night long. Who am I? What is my purpose on earth? If it’s to procreate, and I’m gay, then what’s the point of living? During that summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about killing myself. What would the best method be? Pills? No, I probably couldn’t keep them down. Drowning, I finally decided, was the ticket. It was a sure thing, and there was a deep, dark lake right outside the door. I could just tie an anchor around my leg and jump off the dock. No, the boat would be better. Take it out to the middle of the lake, where I couldn’t chicken out. I’d be deep in thought, considering which knot would work best, then I’d snap out of it, telling myself, No. I’m not going to kill myself because I am not gay. That’s not my plan, it’s not the vision I have for myself.
It took everything in my power to hide this emotional turbulence from my family, and it probably leaked through in ways that confused them. I was confused, too, still hoping, despite all the evidence, that perhaps I wasn’t really gay after all. If I were, surely I’d no longer be questioning my sexuality. I’d just know. I remember wishing for a wet dream as though it were the ultimate polygraph: if I dreamed about Karen or some other girl, then I couldn’t be gay. My subconscious would have settled the question once and for all.
I needed irrefutable proof. It didn’t feel as though the answer resided within me, or I’d already have it. The answer, I became convinced, was something I needed to seek out and uncover.