Dedication

for Josh

Epigraphs

Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan, hindi makakarating sa paroroonan.

One who does not look back at their origin will never arrive at their destination.

—Tagalog proverb

There are some who, should we intrude upon them in the morning, still in bed, will present to our gaze an admirable female head, so generalised and typical of the entire sex is the expression of the face; the hair itself affirms it, so feminine is its ripple; unbrushed, it falls so naturally in long curls over the cheek that one marvels how the young woman, the girl, the Galatea barely awakened to life in the conscious mass of this male body in which she is imprisoned has contrived so ingeniously, by herself, without instruction from anyone else, to take advantage of the narrowest aperture in her prison wall to find what was necessary to her existence.

—Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

Beauty is power; longing a disease.

—Stephen Sondheim, Passion

AUTHOR’S NOTE

If you may pardon the faults of memory and the bias of personal perspective, this work is otherwise both truthful and factual, except that some names have been changed out of respect for privacy.

Prologue

BRIDGES OF LIGHT

Red brick; white tent; green grass. The outlines of prestige at an inner courtyard on a drizzly day. That was what I saw, the same as what I remembered, the specifics fuzzy from afar, my albino eyes only able to render life in scant detail unless I held it close. But I couldn’t well squat down to examine those blades of grass under my feet as I entered the cover of that tent, not at a reunion reception for queer students at Harvard, whether at that moment in 2017, or when I graduated in 1997. I couldn’t reveal myself a freak, especially not in this crowd, which would damn me for my failure of sight.

I arrived at this reception from New York, passing several bodies of water by train, but somehow the Charles still stood out to me when I took the T from South Station, the vast expanse of it, the first substantial body of water I crossed after the Pacific Ocean, when I left the pain of my childhood and hurtled to a future of great promise. This was a memory I could only vaguely make out from that distance of time, though I was used to the feeling, since my physical vision could never represent anything far except as blurs. My way of seeing had advantages though. Since I couldn’t perceive detail from far away, I could more easily associate what I saw with my past, like how those language philosophers say that when a person hears the word “chair,” they picture an idealized chair in their mind, drawn from an amalgam of memories. My vision was like that all the time, except it absorbed the few details I could actually see and integrated them with the objects I imagined.