I failed my first semester of high school English. I’ve told this story before: there were extenuating circumstances—I had been outed at home (my stepmother opened a letter), my father had kicked me out—but mainly I was just a terrible student, utterly without interest in school or much of anything else. Because I was at a magnet school, where we all had “majors,” and because I couldn’t graduate on time as a “communications” major (whatever that meant) with that missed credit, I found myself crossing the street from the main school to a building devoted to the performing arts departments, where I sat for a couple of hours a day in choir as a newly minted voice major. The building housed the Youth Performing Arts School, part of duPont Manual High but in many ways its own world. (We loved saying the unfortunate, delightful acronym YPAS: Wipe Ass, Why Pass?). I have such a clear memory of how I made the decision to switch majors, sitting in a guidance counselor’s office with the brochure she had given me, thinking of how I had sung in church choir back in the day, and deciding that surely voice would be the easiest of the options on offer.
I loved telling this story to struggling tenth graders when I was a high school teacher—tenth grade is the year when all students seemed to struggle—both because I wanted them to know that however they might try they couldn’t hold a candle to my own teenage dysfunction, and also as an example of how life seldom goes according to plan. The choir director was a man named David Brown, a serious, glorious singer—the first time he let his tenor loose in class it was like a blade of gold scything us down—and a miraculously gifted, generous teacher. He heard something in my voice, and he started giving me lessons after school, for free, out of the goodness of his heart, as my mother would say; it would be almost fifteen years before, having started teaching myself, in much gentler conditions than a Kentucky public school, I realized what a sacrifice this meant for him. Those afternoons changed everything, not least because they were the first time an adult had treated me as though my life might have value. Mr. Brown gave me cassette tapes of great singers, he introduced me to opera. A year later, knowing how crazy things were for me at home, knowing a little of my dangerous, self-destructive pursuits outside school, he brought me an application to the Interlochen Arts Academy and helped me fill it out.
But a musical education, and a ticket out of Kentucky, wasn’t all I got from YPAS. I also met, for the first time, other out queer kids. I had started coming out to friends the semester before, slowly, I thought, quietly; but the news spread, as it tends to do. Things didn’t go well. The guy with the locker next to mine covered the inside of his door with stickers that read AIDS KILLS FAGS DEAD; a football jock who sat behind me in math spent the whole hour muttering faggot, faggot, faggot, just loud enough for me to hear. (I didn’t do well in that class; he couldn’t have, either.) There was no gay-straight alliance, no teachers with safe space stickers on their doors, no internet to look to for affirmation. By comparison, YPAS felt like paradise, with queeny gays dancing in the halls. I’m exaggerating—it was still Kentucky, it was still 1992—but actually I do remember it like that, though those moments only came at night, after musical rehearsal, when the less artistically committed, less socially tolerant kids were long gone.
The school had a theater, a good one, with its own lobby and bathrooms. The bathrooms weren’t accessible during the school day: the doors opened out, and had no exterior handles; during evening performances the maintenance staff propped them open. But the doors weren’t locked either, and you could just wedge the tips of your fingers underneath them and pull them open. It was the perfect place for trysts, and almost every day during lunch I hooked up there with a boy I knew from the spring musical, a theater major a couple of years ahead of me. During my lunch, I should say; there were three staggered lunch periods, and one semester sophomore year ours didn’t align, which meant he was in class when I was free. He skipped that class so often I’m shocked he didn’t fail out. He wasn’t my boyfriend, exactly, but he wasn’t exactly not my boyfriend, either; we never went on a date, we almost never met up outside of school. But one semester he was cast in a semi-professional theater production, which felt terribly glamorous, and I went to see him perform. I wish I could remember what play it was, or much of anything else about it; all I can recall is that the set comprised two stories of a house, and the production’s conceit was that all the actors stayed on stage through the whole show. When he wasn’t in a scene this boy was still visible in his darkened bedroom upstairs, sitting at his desk or lying on his bed. I didn’t think of myself as being in love with him—I had already been in love once, it had been disastrous, to my dramatic doomed fifteen-year-old mind all that was over forever—but maybe I was a little in love, since I never took my eyes from him, even when he was doing nothing I ate him up with my eyes. I remember hugging him after the show—one of the only times I hugged him, I think, hugging wasn’t how we passed the time those afternoons in the bathroom; I remember my surprise that his clothes were soaked through with sweat.
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