But childhood ends, and it ended for me abruptly with the hurt look on my uncle’s face when I told a homophobic story I’d heard in school one day in late October. I was a ninth grader at the local Catholic boys school, where my mother later hoped I’d one day return to teach, buying a home down the road from their house, just like some of her sibling’s children did to stay close to their parents. The health teacher had told us about a friend of his who worked in the emergency room of a local hospital, about the faggots who would come in at night, having stuck things up their asses. Once, as the teacher’s friend probed a guy’s rectum, he saw a light looking back at him, a flashlight that the queer had stuck up his rear to pleasure himself. We boys laughed, squirming in our hard seats with titillated horror. I shared the story, and my uncle flew into a rage as he sewed our Halloween costumes that year. Already dying of cancer (he’d be dead within a half year), he rightly shouted that he didn’t need to know about other people’s problems, having enough of his own. My mother took me aside later and said, “Don’t you know he’s one of them?” I knew immediately what she was talking about. I’d had no idea, consciously.

Part of me wants to feel shame about this story, to feel that I hurt a fellow traveler, my own uncle. But, at thirteen, I was starting to figure out how to pleasure myself but hadn’t yet connected the varieties of pleasure to particular identities. The story about the flashlight seemed, well, funny. A guy sticking a flashlight up his ass. That’s funny to a thirteen-year-old boy. Not sexual, at least it wasn’t to me at the time. But the teacher (may he rot in hell, I still tell myself) was old enough to link the practice with an identity. I see now that he was training us. You do shit like this and you’re an object of scorn, deserving humiliating laughter at best, or even disciplining violence.

I lost something that day—an innocence, surely, and began feeling the workings of social power in my own body, vectoring through the joke and rebounding on me in self-doubt and anxiety. I had offended, but my uncle was already himself, in his sexuality, offensive. I just hadn't known it. Now I did, and I realized that I might be an offender as well, if I didn’t watch out.