I had placed an ad in the gay newspaper: “19, blond/blue, 135 lbs, 5’6”, Harvard student looking for an intelligent man, 18–35.” I didn’t have the money for more words. They assigned each ad a voicemail extension, and Thomas’s was the first of more than a dozen voices, men in their mid-twenties to over forty. I picked him because he sounded smart if scared, and I decided to go out with the ones I liked in the order they left me messages.

So there he was, voice made flesh. It didn’t take us long to kiss on that bench, hungry in public, surprised at our own audacity. As our mouths opened, tongues searching, the kiss became a dangerous adventure when we started to grope each other. His breath was faintly acrid, his skin papery as though about to tear, but none of that mattered, or maybe it did, because with my newfound confidence, I could tell that he wanted me more than the other way around, that he was immediately sure of me, that I was someone he could love.

Thomas and I started going out every weekend and sometimes during the week, me sleeping over in his apartment across the Mass Ave bridge. When he began to call me his boyfriend, I started keeping a journal because I’d read a diary of gay life at the turn of the century and felt inspired. But almost as soon as I began to write my diary in a Keith Haring notebook, bodies outlined in red on a black background, I found myself expressing hesitation about Thomas. “My heart isn’t skipping the way it’s supposed to or is that just an annoying romantic notion? This is becoming really confusing,” I wrote, and maybe that should have been a cue for me to slow things down. But how could I stop when I had a boyfriend, and a boyfriend had been what I’d been wanting for so long? Having someone who wasn’t exactly right seemed better than having no one at all.

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