Without History

Ten years ago today I was living in limbo. After graduating from the American School in Japan in June 1991, I’d spent the summer working at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. On August 9, I left Tokyo for good after living there for almost three years. I was off to college in Virginia. That summer we’d found out that my dad’s company was shrinking its Tokyo office and sending my family back home; my parents weren’t moving until October, but for me, this was goodbye. My 13-year-old brother was already back in the States in summer camp, and he didn’t yet know that he wasn’t going to get a chance to come back to Japan and say goodbye to his friends. My parents and I were flying east to Hawaii, and he was flying out from the East Coast to meet up with us for a week’s vacation.

Three years — in retrospect, three years doesn’t seem like a long time, but it was. Fourteen to seventeen years old. My freshman year of high school in northern New Jersey had sucked, absolutely sucked. My parents had made me skip seventh grade, and I’d never fit in very well with the people in my new class. And since I lost touch with my friends from my old grade, I had practically no social life. During my freshman year I’d have lunch every day in the amphitheater with this random guy from my geometry class. He was the only guy I ever really talked to that year. I wonder if he turned out to be gay. Of course he might have been merely a geek.

My only school activity was the chess club. I’d never been a fan of chess. As a club member I never won a game, either in a competition or during practice sessions. I don’t know why I joined. It’s almost as if I were stepping into some role I’d assigned myself. Before high school I’d done lots of acting in school plays, but for some reason I didn’t bother with it during my freshman year.

I spent most of my free time after school absorbed in comic books and soap operas. I was a big fan of both DC Comics and “Days of our Lives” and “Santa Barbara,” which I set the VCR to tape every day and watched every afternoon. I loved “Days” — I made family trees and cast lists and everything. I even wrote my own soap opera. Most of my reading consisted of Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels.

At the end of my first year of high school I didn’t really look forward to going back. There wasn’t much that got me excited at all. My life was stagnant.

And then, during the summer of 1988, my dad’s company offered him a position in Tokyo. After talking it over, we decided (my parents decided) to do it. We moved to Tokyo.

My life changed. I was thrilled to get away from the old school, away from all the people who already had opinions of me. Here in Tokyo, at the American School in Japan, nobody knew me. I could start with a blank slate. No baggage. No anticipated reactions. A brand-new kid. I decided this was my chance to start over.

But starting over wasn’t actually something I decided. It was something that happened to me. I was disoriented, living 14 time zones away from my old home, living in a foreign country in a strange apartment in a futuristic ultramodern city where I couldn’t speak the language and knew nobody except my family.

I didn’t choose to be a new person. I was a new person. All of my old fears and hang-ups about myself — I was too busy and dizzy and overwhelmed to feel them. They were gone. I felt effervescent, free of the burdens of any personal history. I had none.

During the first week of school I saw a poster announcing auditions for the fall play, M*A*S*H. In my effervescent carefree optimism (which was something new to me) I decided to try out. I got the part of Radar. And that set the tone for my three-year stint at the American School in Japan.

I met wonderful people through that show. I made friends. Real friends! Fun people! Cool people! Interesting people! Friends and freedom. In Tokyo we had complete mobility — we could take the trains anywhere we wanted, all around the huge, safe, modern city. We could go anywhere, with anyone.

After that show, I did others. Acting became my main high school activity. People knew me as the actor. (It wasn’t a very big high school, only 400 students.) I met more people. Then I tried out for the school chorus and met others. For the first time in my life I was part of a close-knit circle of friends. The students at this school were much more interesting than the boring, provincial New Jersey teenagers back home, who probably thought a trip to Florida was exciting. Hah! We were going on vacations to Hong Kong. Australia. Thailand.

During the summers we’d come back home. We still owned our house in New Jersey, but it was being rented out to another family, so we stayed with my aunt and uncle and cousin. One of those summers I spent travelling around the UK. At the end of the summer we’d fly the long flight back to Tokyo. Sitting in the airplane seat, I’d imagine the year ahead, thinking about the new people I’d meet (because there were always new arrivals), wondering what the fall play and the spring musical were going to be.

They were three of the best years of my life.

And then, on August 9, 1991, I said goodbye to it all. I remember riding with my parents to the airport, looking out the windows as the streets of Tokyo passed by, knowing I wasn’t coming back. It felt surreal. This was my home. I couldn’t believe I was leaving.

My parents and I flew to Hawaii and met up with my brother. Had a nice vacation. I tried not to think about the past, which I pined for (Tokyo), or the future, which scared me (college, Virginia).

After a week — August 16 or 17, 1991 — we all flew to the East Coast. We were going to spend a week living in a corporate apartment in Manhattan. I had six or seven days left before the trip down to UVa with my parents.

I felt homeless again, historyless. Limbo. Tokyo — which for three years had been as comfortable and familiar as an old blanket — now felt like a dream. I’d imagined it all — my school, my close group of friends, my plays. And in several days I’d be off to college, which I dreaded. UVa was my last-choice school, I wasn’t going to know anyone, I was a northerner, I was going to be separated from my family.

I was perched on the head of a pin — the beautiful past receding into a mist, a scary future looming up ahead.

I’d ended one thing but hadn’t yet begun another. I was in limbo. I had a past and a future but no present. I was disoriented again.

One night, sitting up in a bed in the unfamiliar apartment, I wrote the words for the very first time. I wrote them in the pages of my dear, dear, diary, in which I’d recorded the past three years of my life. I wrote them with my own hand, with a pen. I wrote:

I’m gay.