IN THE SUMMER BEFORE WE LEFT for college, Clark and I went to work for the North Carolina Civil War Centennial Commission. The job was a perfect way to keep on romancing the Confederacy, since we helped preserve artifacts from a blockade runner that had been sunk in the ocean off the coast of Fort Fisher. These were war provisions that never made it to the Confederacy from England: muskets and fancy-handled knives and brass tourniquet screws that had been salvaged from the deep exactly a hundred years after they went under. Our task was to lower them into ditches filled with formaldehyde in the mosquito-ruled woods of Fort Fisher. This was half a century ago, I have to remind myself, a time so removed from the present that a team of zealous young volunteers recently returned to the site for a new act of earnest archaeology: excavating the very ditch Clark and I had eventually abandoned.

We lived with the Navy diving team in a shabby apartment house in the coastal town of Kure Beach. Our room was so sparsely furnished that we made shelves from wooden fish crates we found discarded at a dock. We gave them a good scrubbing and were proud of their rustic, maritime appearance until their scent reasserted itself. Clark, typically, refused to be discouraged and sprayed the crates with an aerosol deodorizer he found on top of the toilet. The end result was pine-scented fish guts, so we were forced to discard our only effort at decorating.

That was the summer that Clark drove the pickup into the surf. The rest of the time we used it to travel between our apartment and the preservation site, or sometimes to pick up provisions for the diving team in some rusty inferno of a shipyard on the Cape Fear River. I think of Clark in that truck, singing exuberantly, even though (or maybe because) we didn’t have a radio. Sometimes we would sing together. Clark never showed the slightest embarrassment about sentimentality. He could sing “Twilight Time” as we drove home through the moonlit salt marshes and not have to joke about it. He held no attraction for me, nor I for him. I just loved his company. He made me think how nice it would be to live with a boy forever.

I can see us there in that ditch of formaldehyde, holding the ends of a heavy block of rust that had once been a case of rifles. The metal was brittle, so we had to lower it slowly to keep from breaking it. The mosquitoes, meanwhile, were bellying up to the bar. Clark had chosen this moment to challenge, once again, my virginity.

“I just don’t get it.”

“I told you. I’m saving it.”

“For what?”

“Marriage.”

A mosquito buzzed around my ear, looking for a meaty spot.

“You’re crazy, man. We’re in our sexual prime.”

“Some things are better, you know, when you restrain yourself.”

Oh, what a prissy Aunt Pittypat I was. Clark’s mud-spattered shoulders were bending under the weight of the rifle case, making him more sunken-chested than usual. He was no better at this than I was, but he managed to throw me a look.

“No way I’m gonna restrain myself from pussy.”

A mosquito drilled into my arm. I held the rifle case in one hand, so I could use the other to swat the invader. Skeeter blood exploded lavishly across my arm. Clark barely took notice as I finally regained control of the case with both hands.

All he says is: “I hope you’re at least eatin’ some.”

“Eatin’ what?”

“Pussy!”

We lowered the rifle case together until it disappeared into the orange muck. I hoped this would finally bring an end to Clark’s campaign, but no such luck.

“You know what I always say: Show me a man who doesn’t eat out his wife, and I’ll show you a wife I can steal from that man.”

I couldn’t picture skinny geeky Clark stealing anyone’s wife. I couldn’t picture pussy, for that matter, but I was fairly certain I didn’t want to eat any.

My focus that summer was on the youngest Navy diver on the team, a smooth-chested blond who gave off the same heat as that guy on the cover of Demigods. When he hosed off his goggles and wetsuit outside the apartment house, I would find ways to talk to him—small talk about our tinny-tasting tap water, or the sword he’d just recovered from the ocean—and I would say “Oh, man!” more than I ever had, because I thought it might make me sound like a real guy, and I could buy more time with him. I hoped, too, that it would keep him from noticing how often I glanced at the glinting golden hairs on his arms and the peninsular bulge in his cotton shorts—shorts that were once red but had faded to pink from the sun.

I might have jerked off to the thought of those shorts at bedtime had I been home in Raleigh. There the only danger would be that my mother would enter my room in the morning and tell me, as she once had done, that it smelled like a tomcat in there. But Clark and I shared a room at Kure Beach, so I kept my hands off myself that summer. I was worried that he would hear the springs creaking and tease me about it and, even worse, bring up pussy again. Most nights we just drifted off in our fish crate–stinking quarters to one of two albums I had brought from Raleigh: the soundtrack of Houseboat, starring Sophia Loren and Cary Grant, and a selection of performances at the Monterey Folk Festival, including Leadbelly and Joan Baez. Strange, I know, that I would be grooving to lefty movement songs, but art was already seeping into my consciousness in a way that rational thought could not.

There would be no demigods on the menu that summer. A big evening on the town was a movie in a dinky theater smelling of Coppertone and carpet mold. Clark and I saw Summer and Smoke there, buzzed on Busch Bavarians from the diner next door, and right there in the cool, mildewed dark, Tennessee Williams crept into my tight-assed teenaged heart. This was an unexpected thing. A few months earlier I had written an essay for English class that railed against Williams and Faulkner and other Southern writers who, in my learned teenaged estimation, had maligned and misrepresented our beloved homeland. Mrs. Peacock said I made “an interesting case” and sent it to an English teachers’ magazine, where it won an award and appeared in actual print. I had officially disapproved of Tennessee Williams, yet here I sat, giving it up to him completely—stunned by the realization that I was not Laurence Harvey in this film; I was Geraldine Page. I was the lonely spinster, Miss Alma, whose yearning for love would always destroy the chance of it; and I was headed off to college in the fall.

I felt so old that summer. Older, maybe, than I would ever feel again. I know high school seems like the end of everything for some kids, certainly the ones who’ve left their glory days on the gridiron or under a crepe-paper bower at the Queen of Hearts Ball. That’s not how it was for me. I felt old because I had strangled my youth, and I could not for the life of me imagine what lay ahead.

I certainly could not have imagined that I would one day meet Tennessee Williams in the flesh. It happened in San Francisco in 1977, when he was working on a soon-to-be-panned play called This Is (An Entertainment) at the American Conservatory Theater. I was beginning to become known locally and so had been invited to an opening at a small South of Market art gallery. I don’t remember the artwork, but it had a wannabe transgressive flavor, leaning toward leather, and there, under brutal white lights, I spotted the playwright in a crowd of shiny-faced people, all scrambling to be photographed with him. He had plastered a smile on his face, but he looked bereft and empty. Trapped. It was the most chilling image of fame I had ever seen thus far. I left the gallery and leaned against a car in the parking lot to smoke a joint. Williams made his escape a few minutes later. When he saw what I was doing he approached and inquired in the softest of tones:

“Would you mind terribly?”

I told him not at all, so we shared the joint for several minutes, talking about nothing more than the moon in the sky. I did not try to introduce myself or be one of those fans he had fled. I knew he would prefer the kindness of a stranger.

DURING MY COLLEGE days at Chapel Hill I dated two girls who both bore the middle name of Armistead. We weren’t directly related, though the two of them were related to each other; they were sisters. (Armistead was a distinguished old family name in Virginia, so their parents couldn’t resist the urge to use it twice.) I didn’t date these sisters at the same time; I waited a respectful interval between them. They were both blond and Candice Bergen–y. I took one of them—I forget which—on a walk through the snowy woods of Battle Park and kissed her on a bridge above a creek, where our breaths mingled like ghosts in the air. I wanted this to be a love scene out of All That Heaven Allows, which it sort of was, come to think of it, since Rock Hudson and the first Mrs. Ronald Reagan had about as much sexual chemistry in that movie as me and the lovely Miss Somebody Armistead Somebody.

I wonder sometimes if these sisters ever swapped notes and discovered that these romantic fizzles had been my fault entirely. I hope so. They deserved more than a guy who got off on the incestuousness of our names and wondered if passion could be summoned on the spot by the manipulation of pretty winter scenery.

I was just as chaste with the one other girl I remember dating in college, and my motives were just as dubious. Kim was the daughter of a famous forties bandleader who lived with his wife, the beautiful girl singer in his band, in a big antebellum house on East Franklin Street. I was too young to remember their heyday, but I still found it glamorous to go to their house. Sometimes, when picking up their daughter, I lingered longer than most boys would, making conversation. They were Christian Scientists and a little dowdy by then, but I found glamor in the fact that they both had been in the movies, however briefly. I was dating them, in effect; their daughter was entirely secondary.

So college was a sexless curriculum for me. The lust that crept in around the edges of my consciousness was purely accidental. One afternoon, looking for a place to pee on campus, I discovered a toilet in the basement of Bingham Hall, the English building. I was the only person there, but the stalls were lacquered with yellowing semen and graffiti samizdats so vividly detailed that they could qualify as novellas. As it happened, I was majoring in English, so I returned to this funky-smelling glade more than once, though I never met another person there, just the latest installment of the serials on the walls. I would move from stall to stall, catching up on things, wondering about the men who so brazenly created this literature.

Luckily, my friend Clark was a fellow freshman at Chapel Hill, so I wasn’t a total loner. It soon became patently clear that neither of us was cool enough to pledge a fraternity, so we joined forces with our friend Jim, who was equally ineligible, to form a merry band of three. We called ourselves The Cabal, since we had just learned that exotic-sounding word, and we thought it would fit us perfectly as bold conservative freedom fighters. I was the most vocal of the three, so it was decided, mostly by Clark, that I would run as the candidate from Grimes Dormitory for the Student Legislature. We printed black-and-white posters that advertised me as “A Representative Who’ll Represent.” I still have no idea what that meant. Mostly it afforded an opportunity for my detractors to add the word Fascists to the end of the slogan. That’s how ruthless they were, those liberal, Commie-loving bastards.

My Modern Civilization professor, Bill Geer, was a firebrand leftist whose classroom theatrics were widely known across the campus. It was easy to think of him as a Marxist, since he looked like Karl Marx, with his bald pate and frizzy white beard and deceptively twinkly eyes. I sparred with him in class on a regular basis and eventually came to look forward to that, since it gave me a sense of identity. One day, to my complete amazement, he invited me to lunch at the faculty dining hall, where we continued to spar, but on a more personal level.

“Did your father warn you about me?”

This threw me, of course. “You, specifically?”

He smiled. Just in the abstract. “All us pinkos in Chapel Hill.”

I shrugged. It was embarrassing to be asked this directly, since it was true.

“I’m a lot more like you than you know. I’m from Jonesville, South Carolina.” Mr. Geer drawled out the name of his pissant country town to emphasize his point. “My daddy sent me to The Citadel.”

I told him my father had briefly considered that hard-assed military college in Charleston for me. My brother, Tony, an athletic mesomorph who was much more of a team player, would enroll at The Citadel a few years later.

“You’re better off here. They don’t let you sass your teachers there. They make you drop and do push-ups.”

Mr. Geer was smiling at me with wry affection. I realized that he actually liked me, and, even more amazingly, that I liked him. This man thrived on open combat, the vigorous clash of ideas. That’s what he believed a university was all about. He loved the fact that we could challenge each other and still be friends.

There was something more to it than that, but I would not figure that out until fifteen years later, when Mr. Geer looked me up in San Francisco. His wife of thirty years had died two years earlier, and he had since made a practice of flying to California for occasional fortnights at Esalen, the loosey-goosy New Age spa retreat above the cliffs at Big Sur. “I can finally be myself there,” he told me. “It’s a great relief.”

We were drinking wine on the deck of my rooftop studio on Russian Hill. Below us, in the amber light of evening, there were cargo ships gliding out to sea through the Golden Gate. I was proud of my little home—a place so miniscule that I called it a “pentshack”—and I was thrilled when I realized why Mr. Geer had sought me out again. He was in his early sixties, I in my early thirties. I had been an openly gay writer long enough for the gossip to circulate widely in North Carolina.

“I’m proud of you,” he said, lifting his glass.

I thanked him with a smile. “Took me long enough, didn’t it?”

“You and me both,” he said.

And, just like that, he came out to me. It occurred to me then that we had both found it easier to camouflage our queerness on the fringes of academia—he on the left, I on the right. Our constant political grandstanding had been a distraction from a deeper, more difficult truth, the one that had to be hidden at any cost.

SOMEWHERE IN THE middle of my freshman year, I launched a column in The Daily Tar Heel called “A View from the Hill.” It was meant to be funny, but, like most comedic efforts created by conservatives, it wasn’t. I didn’t know that at the time. I thought I had created a side-splitting hybrid of Art Buchwald and William F. Buckley. Of course I didn’t jump into serious right-wingery right away. I needed to feel out my audience first, test the waters. The early columns were mostly satiric parables about campus life. In the very first one I lampooned the dean of men, calling him Batdean in homage to the new TV show that was all the rage in the dorms.

Later, I expanded my impertinence to the dean of women, Kitty Carmichael (whom I dubbed Kitty Galore in a naughty nod to James Bond), because of her rigid enforcement of the university’s Carolina Code. The Carolina Code required students to be “Carolina ladies and gentlemen at all times.” For the boys, that meant blue jeans were never worn on campus. The girls, poor things, could never be seen in shorts, even when leaving gym class; so they had to wear their London Fogs (they all had London Fogs) when crossing the quads. With their pale calves winking below their pale raincoats (yes, they all had pale calves), they looked like a flock of flashers. In that heyday of panty raids, hordes of slobbering men could descend on the women’s dorms, demanding that panties be thrown out the window, and the administration would look the other way. That was just boys being boys. But gym shorts? No way.

I found this absurd, and said so in “A View from the Hill,” where I invented a coed who had been charged, posthumously, with unCarolinaladylike behavior when she fell to her death from her third-floor dorm window . . . in a pair of gym shorts! She had been attending to a plant in her window box—“mulching her nandina”—when she lost her balance. You would think that such a fearless defender of women’s rights would be progressive in other regards, but you would be so wrong.

My conservatism found its most strident voice in Student Legislature, where I railed against Socialists and peaceniks in the Students for a Democratic Society and the National Student Association. When the Student Legislature called for a boycott of local segregated restaurants and motels, I sponsored a counterresolution defending such establishments on the grounds that the concept of free enterprise entitled them to run their businesses as they saw fit. It was very much the same argument you hear today from bakers who refuse to bake cakes for same-sex weddings. I didn’t stoop so low as to quote the Bible, but plenty of people did in those days, citing religious reasons for the races to remain apart. My “brave stance” against these “radical social agitators” even won the praise of a television commentator in Raleigh, an outspoken archconservative who was fond of saying, on his nightly broadcast, that nowadays UNC stood for the University of Negroes and Communists.

So who was this Armistead Maupin, Jr.? It’s easy enough to say that he was still angling for the love of his father, because, obviously, he was. But he was twenty years old and out in the world, and he should have known better. I have a hard time liking him now, though I do remember as senior-class vice president, he worked to have a bronze statue erected on campus to his hero Thomas Wolfe, another restless underclassman who had grown up to write novels, and who, incidentally, had lived in Asheville when my mother lived there as a girl. And I still relate to a sentimental young Armistead who greeted the arrival of spring on campus with a sappy song called “Today” by The New Christy Minstrels, or that song from The Fantasticks about being “a tender and callow fellow.” He was callow all right, but his heart was still closed to the possibility of real tenderness. The lid was locked down for fear of what might escape.

Or so it seemed, until someone named Roger Davis came along in my senior year.

Roger was a fellow student legislator who lived in one of the big new high-rise dormitories on the edge of campus. He had discovered that such places were dehumanizing, so he had renamed his dorm “Maverick House” and ordered Carolina-blue cowboy hats for the residents to wear at ball games and pep rallies, turning them into a fraternity of sorts, and becoming, in the process, a charismatic leader. His smooth Frankie Avalon hair and soulful, deep-set eyes enchanted everyone, male or female, who ever spent time in his presence. He seemed to like me, too. Sometimes, after legislative sessions, we would deliberately walk together across campus, talking about everything and nothing, until I headed off to my apartment and he returned to his brothers at Maverick House. I was in love with him, I suppose, in my own crippled way, but I never dared tell him how I felt.

News traveled slowly in those days, so I didn’t hear about the accident until the morning after it happened. The Daily Tar Heel posted photos of the charred carcass of the “death car” on the front page. The car had leapt the median strip near the Glen-Lennox Shopping Center, rolled over several times, torn through a four-by-four signpost, and, finally, struck a massive concrete abutment. Roger was still alive when they got him out, but not for long. This had been a “one-car accident,” the paper said tellingly, and the speedometer had been stuck at ninety miles per hour. That made no sense at all, since, despite his affection for cowboy hats, Roger wasn’t some car-crazy country boy. He was from Fort Lauderdale, the cosmopolitan beach town from Where the Boys Are.

The whole campus was rocked by the news. I attended a memorial service during which a toothy coed with a histrionic streak recited the famous lines from Romeo and Juliet: “and, when he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night . . .” It was a beautiful sentiment, and a lot of people cried, but I resented the way she milked it so shamelessly. She sounded like a Miss America contestant performing in the Talent Competition, and I was sure she had come nowhere close to being Roger’s Juliet.

Afterward, I wandered aimlessly through the crunching brown leaves of late October as I tried to sort it out. The whole episode might have remained cloaked in official discretion had I not run across Chief Arthur J. Beaumont, the campus security officer, in my grief-addled ramble. Chief Beaumont was a stubby fire hydrant of a man who spewed blunt talk as freely as a hydrant spews water. He had been one of the first responders at the scene of the accident, he said, and it wasn’t an accident at all—it was suicide. “The kid was queer,” he added, as if that naturally explained it.

The awful part is: I wanted it to be true. I wanted Roger to have been like me. There were too many questions I could have asked but didn’t. Had Roger been caught in the act with someone? Had he left a note? Had he been tormented by an unspoken love for another man? I wasn’t deluded enough to think that I might be that man, but I wondered if someone out there was mourning him as intensely as I was, or at least in the same secret way. And what if I had told Roger how I felt about him? Could I have saved his life with my love? Could that moment have been the start of something unimaginably wonderful? Our own place in Fort Lauderdale after college, a life of manly tenderness in the ocean air?

In a daze, I left Chief Beaumont and went back to my apartment on Gimghoul Road, where I escaped into the welcome amnesia of an afternoon nap. The place was in the basement of an old townie couple’s bungalow, so there was plumbing that crisscrossed the ceiling, gurgling away whenever it pleased. I had embraced this design challenge by making a rustic wooden sign that said PIPE DREAM that I hung on the ivied wall outside the door. I never really called it that, though. The place had a typical apartment address—the house number paired with the letter “A”—so I dubbed it the A-Hole early on, and it stuck with all my friends.

It must have been a toilet flushing that stirred me. I lay there in bed, staring at the ceiling, until I heard footsteps on the path outside my little high-up window. Then the footsteps stopped for a moment as my visitor perused the PIPE DREAM sign. He issued a boyish chuckle before he rapped on the door.

I recognized that chuckle, so I hurried to the living room to open the door.

“Nice place,” said Roger, grinning at me as he gazed into the room. “Gee. See what you mean about those pipes.”

It took me a while to state the obvious. “I thought you were dead.”

“Stupid Tar Heel,” he said with a shrug. “They mixed me up with another Roger Davis. Guy over in Old East. I figured you’d want to know right away.”

He opened his arms to give me the hug I needed so badly. We stayed there for a long time, breathing in unison, chest to chest. I even dared to stroke the back of his head as I told him how glad I was to see him again, how I thought for sure I’d lost him forever, how I wanted to tell him, right now, what his friendship meant to me, because life could be short and cruel and love should never be left unspoken.

I held on to him until the sheer perfection of the moment compelled me, as it almost always does, to wake up.

I RECOUNTED THE story of this dream later that year, in an empty classroom where a panel of three professors sat solemnly behind a long desk. I came unprepared with notes of any kind. I just stood at a podium and spilled it all out as candidly as possible. I named Roger, of course, since everyone knew about his death, but I left out the part about Chief Beaumont and Roger’s possible suicide, and the part about me loving Roger and hoping against hope that he loved me back. I made it a story about unexpressed friendship and cruel fate and the redemptive power of dreams when all else fails. Without telling them the whole truth, I tapped into my wounded heart and let them see it for a full ten minutes, exactly.

That’s how I won the Mangum Medal for Oratory, the university’s oldest student award and the one of which I remain most proud to this day. It was my first real lesson in storytelling, in connecting intimately with an audience.

Let them see enough of the truth to make them believe you.