In the world of paper, we were everywhere, and sometimes gods. In the world of flesh, gay people were few, sad, and hidden. Rogers-esque asexuality did nothing to end the rumors that dogged him in our high school. D, the sweater vest wearing English teacher, whose commitment to a kind of Mr. T, the middle-school science nerd and buttoned-up Mr. G, the elementary school gym teacher androgynous Ms. Of course I knew queer people – cousins who lived with their “good friends” for years my butch, unmarried Aunt Alice and one (1!) closeted teacher in each K-12 school I attended: sporty Ms. I’d never met an out gay person would not, in fact, meet any until college. Every journey starts somewhere, and I can’t help but feel a rush of love for that fey child, groping towards something he’d only glimpsed in dreams. Instead, in a sort of limited way, I began to love history, or at least to see its potential to be something other than the rote memorization of names and dates and kings and wars. That I didn’t end up with a fetish for gleaming white marble or bone-dry paper is a small miracle. In reality, I was at best a tenderqueer Narcissus, as of yet deaf to the polyphonic echoes of history. And yet, in that moment, that mirage was my salvation. In other words: I let what I was looking for obscure what I was seeing. They were windows, but I had not yet learned to see beyond the seductive ghost-self the glass offered me. Those pages? They were no more mirrors than I was a god. I can’t help but feel a rush of love for that fey child, groping towards something he’d only glimpsed in dreams. In those classical myths I saw myself, a modern homosexual, rendered fetchingly in period drag. I lived a hundred lives, one minute transforming into a bull, the next kissing a boy – equidistant fantasies, equally unreachable from where I stood. I was Zeus, Elagabalus, Kalamos, and Karpos. In the shadowy library stacks, I searched for myself, and those books were transmuted into mirrors by the dim slanting light of the early evening sun. It was nineteen-ninety-one or two or three, and I was trying to prove I existed. History, constrained safely in the pages of old and untouched books, went there to be forgotten-as did I, hiding there during my shifts as a library page, trying to eke out a vague eroticism from primers on Greco-Roman art, the only books I could find that listed “homosexuality” in the index.
#Band in a box manual cracked
The old reading room in Irvington, New York was a glorious Gilded Age folly, filled with heavy wooden furniture cracked by decades of use, opalescent turtleback Tiffany lamps, a card catalog the size of a small car, and piles upon piles of dust. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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