At the same time, Miss Saigon reminded me of a kind of love I would always be drawn to, even if I felt destined never to find it because I was the wrong gender: the ardent, protective love of a man for a woman. I had not been intimate with anyone the last time I listened to that show, and now that I had, I recognized how distant my relationship was from the love I felt vicariously, over the sacrifices Chris and Kim were willing to make for each other, him to protect her and her to be loyal to him. It wasn’t even that I couldn’t find that kind of love in another man, but that the man I was couldn’t open himself up to the protection of another man the way I imagined I could had I been a woman. I couldn’t help but express my masculinity for others like the way I hid my flower-print sheets, the way I could only wear women’s clothes when the occasion allowed, at Drag Night or going out to clubs. I’d read Montaigne’s famous essay, “Of Friendship,” for one of my classes, where he claims that male friendship is superior to marriage because it is a meeting of equal minds, but it seemed to me that the union between a man and a woman could be equal in the same way, while a union between men, at least one where I was involved, couldn’t have that dynamic where one person heroically protects the other. So the woman who gets carried into bed or lifted to safety was destined only to exist in “The Movie in My Mind,” the title of a song from Miss Saigon that expresses a Vietnamese bar girl’s impossible fantasy of coming to America, but for me transmuted into the fantasy of being that woman who a man would move heaven and earth to protect.