Spring fever has hit. I leave my therapist’s office and it’s still light out, chilly but mild. Spring fever. Primordial rhythms take over. We are only animals, we are of the earth. I want to grow a goatee and cruise and fuck on a hot summer night in the city. I want to copulate like rabbits on a picnic blanket in a clearing by a brook. I want to exchange glances of lust with a stranger. Sweat, skin, teeth, eyes, muscles, breathing hard, rushing river, limpid trees, blowing breeze, a cacophony of birds. The weather is warm.

I think back nine summers to July 1992, the first time I ever went into a gay bookstore. A Different Light was still on Hudson Street. I was 18. Hot summer afternoon in Greenwich Village. I open the door, walk in, and enter another world. Gay men everywhere, t-shirts and shorts, browsing quietly, absorbed in their open books. I’m so nervous I don’t even look at anyone except in sidelong glances, my heart beating like crazy, excitement, danger, opportunity, fear, secrecy, disobedience. When I walk back out into the summer sun, I feel branded, and I know that in five minutes, several blocks away, people on the street will look at me and know where I’ve been. They’ll see it in my face. I’ve been in a gay bookstore. I’m gay.