That being said, I have finally landed on what I consider a basic daily costume, a look that’s normally reserved for divorced dads but somehow works for me. It’s comforting not to think about what I wear every day. All I have to do is pick a shirt from the pile on the ground and hope that the Starbucks barista doesn’t notice the multiple yogurt stains on the front before I return to my apartment, take the shirt off, and toss it back onto the pile. It’s a system that works. And it only took me three decades to figure out.

ON BEING IN THE CLOSET, OR WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR STRAIGHT BEST FRIEND

I discovered I was gay like most young boys in America: by dry-heaving through the men’s underwear aisle at JCPenney. That’s right, conservatives. Capitalism made me gay. If the ad executives at Hanes weren’t so worried about selling insecure guys tighty whities by modeling them on oiled, headless hunks, then maybe I’d be married to someone named Beth right now and we’d have two and a half children in Bible school and also Mitt Romney would be president. But you just had to go and show my impressionable, pubescent brain ten-foot-tall posters of bare abs and vague, shapeless bulges, and now I’m a full-blown homosexual who reads the New Yorker and drinks iced green tea. You have nobody but yourselves to blame. Though, to be fair, it was the nineties, and men’s underwear back then covered the belly button and most of the nipple. But the important thing here is that my brain took the signal and raised the rainbow flags.

I should clarify, of course, for the Texans reading this, that an underwear ad did not actually turn me gay. Nothing can turn you gay, no matter what those TV preachers say, not even the seductive stare of an amorphous penis on a package of boxer briefs. I was just plain old born gay, probably because my mother watched too many daytime soap operas while she was pregnant with me, and then, bit by bit, the gayness grew inside me until it finally started seeping from my glands sometime in the late 2000s.