Bill was still the same boy his parents had raised him to be, for the life they had raised him to expect—a good job, a nice house, and someone he loved, and who loved him, waiting for him at the end of the day. He didn’t sleep around, or drink or take drugs. He worked and went to school and came home. Straight lines on narrow paths while he waited, as Waldo once said, impatiently, for his prince to come. As time passed, he began to wonder if all he was saving himself for was, paradoxically, the same lonely life he had feared when he lay alone at night in his bedroom in Eden Plains. There, he really had been alone but here, in San Francisco, he was surrounded by other gay men. What was it his grandmother liked to say when some little plan was foiled by circumstances beyond her control? Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink! That was how he felt, parched in an oasis because the water on offer seemed tainted to him.

Maybe the problem was not with the water, but his attitude. Maybe he was holding on to his virtue not because he was virtuous but because it made him feel superior to the men around him. Made him feel, I’m not like those other—Other what? he asked himself. Other faggots? Queers? Maybe it all came down to his need to believe that, after all, in some fundamental way he was not gay. But he knew he was. Was gay. Was like other gay men. That, when catching the lust in a stranger’s eyes as they passed on Polk Street, he felt an answering heat. That his most thrilling sexual fantasies were coarse and hot and anonymous. There were places all over the city where he knew he could act them out. Water, water, everywhere—maybe it was time to take the plunge and overcome that last resistance he felt within himself to being who he was.