In One Person

More surprising, Mrs. Delacorte was no less candid about the prevailing cause of her separation and divorce from young Carlton’s father; her husband had been a raving homo-hater. The man had called Carlton a fairy and a little fag; he’d berated Mrs. Delacorte for allowing the effeminate boy to dress up in his mother’s clothes and paint his lips with her lipstick.
“Of course I knew—probably long before Carlton did,” Mrs. Delacorte told me. She seemed to be favoring her right buttock; such a deep intramuscular injection had to hurt. “Mothers know,” she said, unconsciously limping a little. “You can’t force children to become something they’re not. You can’t simply tell a boy not to play with dolls.”

“I’ll tell you when I might take seriously the idea of service to my country,” I began. “When local, state, and federal legislation, which currently criminalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults, is repealed; when the country’s archaic anti-sodomy laws are overturned; when psychiatrists stop diagnosing me and my friends as clinically abnormal, medically incompetent freaks in need of ‘rehabilitation’; when the media stops representing us as sissy, pansy, fairy, child-molesting perverts! I would actually like to have children one day,” I said, pausing to look at Alice

“Ah, well—there’s people you meet, Bill,” Grandpa Harry said. “Some of ’em are merely encounters, nothin’ more, but occasionally there’s a love-of-your-life meetin’, and that’s different—you know?”

We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost—not necessarily in that order.