The remaining six of us stood around the bonfire, trying to warm ourselves from the dying embers. We were the last six guys awake. It was our annual gay chorus retreat, at a lodge 90 minutes north of Manhattan; the weather had been beautiful all weekend, bright orange leaves contrasting against the bright blue sky. (One reason a sunny fall day is so beautiful is because orange and blue are complementary colors.)

The retreat began Friday night, when most of us arrived. We spent much of Saturday rehearsing, and after dinner and the final rehearsal of the retreat, it was time for the bonfire. The annual Saturday night bonfire is always the culmination of the retreat before we all head back to the city on Sunday.

Last year I drank too much at the bonfire and wound up feeling depressed and alone all night, so this year I decided I was going to limit the drinking. I was glad I did. At the bonfire, I had one beer and one Captain Morgan’s with Mountain Dew, and that’s it. (The latter drink might sound gross, but it’s actually tasty. A friend of mine introduced me to it in college.) Being clear-headed was much better, I was finding.

There were eight of us remaining, and then two guys went to bed, leaving six. Eventually the conversation took a turn, as conversations do, and we wound up going around the circle, each of us describing our first time with a guy.

The other guys’ stories involved sex with a friend, or sex with an acquaintance, or sex with a romantic interest.

I’ve always felt sad that I don’t really have a story. Not including childhood experimentation, which was with two different friends in first and second grade (both of whom I lost touch with years ago, and I’m pretty sure they’re both straight and married now), my first adult encounters were with strangers. I never had that experience where you’re friends with someone and you both turn out to be gay and you wind up fooling around together. I wish I’d had that.

It was the night of August 14, 1994, at the end of the summer before my last year of college. I was 20. I’d been living in the Glee Club house that summer, having sublet the summer portion of a fellow singer’s year-long lease. The turnover date was August 15, and some of the house’s new residents had already begun moving in and were painting their rooms. I was going to be driving home to New Jersey the next morning, where I would spend a couple of weeks at my parents’ house before returning to the dorms for my final year of college. There was beer, and I had a few of them and got a little drunk.

I had come out to my parents about a year earlier, at the end of the previous summer, and I’d been completely unprepared for their negative reaction: anger, disbelief, non-acceptance. “I cannot accept this,” my mom actually said to me the next day. Terrified at making my parents angry, worried about what they might do, I’d responded by going back in the closet. That was easy, since I hadn’t told very many people about my sexual confusion anyway; the few who knew, I lost touch with on UVA’s big campus – except for my bisexual friend, who soon realized that I no longer wanted to talk about anything sexual with him. I became, for all intents and purposes, asexual.

A year later I was sitting in my room the Clubhouse drinking beer. I was packing the last of my boxes.

At around 1:00 in the morning, I stood up and my legs began walking.

They were taking me out of the Clubhouse, across a nearby parking lot, and up to Cabell Hall, where, it was rumored, guys could find other guys for sex in the restrooms. My brain wasn’t involved in this. I wasn’t even thinking. I was just… walking.

I went into the building and up to the men’s room. There was a guy in one of the stalls. I went into the next stall and his penis appeared underneath the divider. I was soon in his stall. He was an overweight black man and appeared too old to be a student. He didn’t smell very good. I kneeled down and sucked him for a little bit — not very long at all; I didn’t really feel like it. Then he sucked me until I came.

As I pulled up my shorts, he asked me what year I was. I lied to him. Then he asked me my major and I lied again and I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

As I went up the stairs to the main floor, I passed two university cops chatting with each other. I walked past them, nonchalantly but quickly, and then left the building.

My heart raced in the humid summer nighttime air.

When I got back to the Clubhouse everyone else was asleep. I went into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, stripped down, and took a long, steaming hot shower, trying to wash the filth away, wishing I could have taken back the events of the past hour.

The next day I packed up my car and drove back to New Jersey, worried that I might have gotten AIDS. After a few days, I forgot about it, and then I was absorbed in the new school year and it left my mind completely. The fear reemerged over Christmas break, disappeared, and then reappeared the following year, after I’d graduated. It wasn’t until April 1996 that I finally got tested and found out that I was negative.

A few months later, during the fall of my first year of law school, I visited the restrooms again. This time I met a white guy. Not bad looking. He might have been a grad student, maybe around 30. We went to a separate building and fooled around for barely a minute before I came. I just couldn’t last.

And that, as they say, is that. The following year I occasionally went to the restrooms in a different building, the main library building, and someone and I might watch each other through a small hole in the wall between stalls. But nothing actually happened with anyone else until the summer of 1998, when I finally decided I was gay and started meeting people online.

I wish I had a heartwarming, funny, or romantic story that I could look back on fondly. But I don’t.

Last week my therapist told me that I don’t express enough anger about how I was treated growing up. This was coincidentally a couple of days after I read Joel’s entry about anger and therapy.

My therapist has often returned to the theme of actions versus feelings. The two are separable, she says. You don’t have full control over what you feel, but you do have full control over your actions. Once you realize this, it’s apparently easier to acknowledge your feelings, because you can own them without worrying that they’ll cause you to do something stupid. You are in charge of your actions.

I tend to repress most of the anger I feel toward my parents, because I haven’t found that anger productive. My parents weren’t being evil – they were just being themselves, trying to do what they thought was best for me. And they’ve changed greatly for the better, so there would be no point in getting mad at them today.

But it’s there.

And it goes beyond the gay thing. It goes to the core of my identity. No matter how well I did in school, nothing was ever good enough for them. It was expected that I’d do well, so when I did, I didn’t get much praise, but when I underperformed, I got blame. During my junior year of high school, I got second place in a multi-school pre-calculus contest, a written test that was given to math students in several different high schools. Second place – out of everyone who took the test! I got mentioned over the PA system during the morning announcements at school. I was so happy. But when I told my parents about it that night, they were angry. They told me it was typical for me to get second place and not first. They told me I’d sabotaged myself because I didn’t want to succeed.

When I received the last of my college rejection forms, meaning that I hadn’t gotten into Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown or Amherst, my mom went into her bedroom, slammed the door behind her and cried — when I was the one who needed consoling.

Yeah, I’m fucking angry at them.

It doesn’t feel right to be. It doesn’t feel useful.

But my therapist says that I need to acknowledge those feelings and express them to her, because they’re getting in the way.

The night after that therapy session, I went up to the chorus retreat. And on Saturday night the six of us stood around the bonfire and I told the bare bones of my story – in nothing like the detail above — and someone said my story was depressing.

The evening went on a little longer and the six of us stood around and talked and laughed. And then it was 3:00 in the morning and we all went to bed.

I climbed into my bunk. It was late but I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay there thinking about my story. I lay there thinking about my parents and about how much they’d fucked me up. If they hadn’t tried to make me so perfect, if they hadn’t tried to live through me, if my dad hadn’t verbally abused me as a kid, if my parents had just let me be who I was, if they’d butted out of my goddamn life – then maybe I wouldn’t have wasted the years from age 19 to 24. Maybe I would have had sex and dated guys. And maybe I wouldn’t be such a perfectionist. Maybe I would actually be able to accomplish something in my life, instead of thinking that everything is pointless because I’ll never be good enough at something to justify trying it. And maybe I’d like myself more.

My parents fucked me up. I don’t care if there’s more to the story, I don’t care if they were just doing their best, I don’t care if it’s unproductive to dwell on the past. It’s true. They fucked me up.

There’s more work to do. But this is a start.