Of course, that was only a hunch. I assumed everybody came to this conclusion at the end of their straight porn perusal. A few years later, I got full confirmation while searching online for posters to hang on my bedroom wall. This was a big moment in its own right, since I was finally replacing one of the many bedroom themes I’d had through adolescence (first “Pokémon,” then “Nautica,” then “Rainforest Cafe”). I was ready for the more sophisticated, undefined aesthetic of a trendy college dorm, like the kids on Boy Meets World. This was the 2000s after all, I’d survived Y2K, and it was time to enhance my bedroom game with a few posters that said, “Hey, if you think this is a kid’s room, you can go fuck yourself. Because an Adult Man lives here now, one who likes Lizzie McGuire and NSYNC and American Idol, like all grown heterosexuals do.” I clicked on a section called “College,” obviously, because that’s the category all mature men shop for their bedroom posters in. I scrolled through endless images of Pink Floyd covers and Bob Marley heads and that one dumb picture of John Belushi from Animal House where he’s just standing there with a stupid look on his face, until finally I noticed a subcategory called “Hot Girls” looming in the corner of the screen and, just beneath it, like the shiny clasp of a treasure chest poking through the surface of a dirty beach, waiting for some lucky explorer to catch its seductive glance, “Hot Guys.”

I hovered over that link for a good five minutes. I knew full well that the one above it was what other boys, like my older brother, who already had a poster of a woman in some gaudy animal-print bikini hanging on his own wall, would eagerly click without hesitation. But that wasn’t what gave me pause. What gave me pause was the gurgling well of Catholic guilt that had been filling my stomach since baptism.