I never had the “AHA” moment you hear about in more dramatic gay people’s books, where I’m awkwardly unclasping some poor girl’s bra and then, like a bolt of lightning hitting the gay part of the brain, I suddenly realize I’d rather be in a bathhouse with Ryan Gosling. I mean, sure, I’ve had moments like that. Everybody has moments like that. You can’t watch The Notebook and not have involuntary sexual visions of Ryan Gosling dropping soap in a gym shower. It’s part of life. But a thought like that was never the epiphany for me, because there never was some Big Moment of Gay Clarity. It was more like a thousand tiny “MM-HMM” moments that piled up to confirm a nagging suspicion, a buried inkling that I was craving a different cut of beef.

When I was ten, I had my first real hunch when I discovered my brother’s poorly hidden adult magazines for heterosexuals. (Apologies to my brother, if he’s reading this, but I found your straight porn. You should’ve gotten a lockbox or something that tripped a silent alarm.) This was before we had a computer, of course, which means he had no choice but to buy disgusting nudie magazines instead of digital porn, and I had no choice but to spend my free time rifling under his mattress instead of, I don’t know, doing whatever kids do on the Internet these days (Buy meth?). I remember turning those crinkly pages like a scientist looking through lab samples, taking in those appallingly hairy pictures and running them against a mental database of things that triggered an exciting emotional response. Nothing. When I got to the last page, I remember thinking, out loud, with a clarity I’d never experienced before, “Where the fuck are all the dicks?” It felt like a gross oversight on the part of such an esteemed publication to just forget to feature a whole half of the population. Even then my brain knew one basic fact: everything is better with more penis.