Yet I also didn’t have much to lose. I was already queer, albino, poor. I had no reputation to protect, no parental expectation to live up to. Something told me it was worth the risk, that whatever it was on the other side of Josh’s parted lips would have meaning.

We stood up to begin the kiss-in at the start of the Q&A. I felt Josh tug at my jacket, a gesture that betrayed our lack of intimacy even as we were about to perform an intimate act in public. There was something unremittingly attractive in Josh’s subversion, something that drew me to his face surrounded by cloth, the memory of my years among the nuns. So that by the time Josh’s forehead nearly brushed the rims of my glasses as his lips touched mine, I felt ready.

Am I kissing a man? That was a question I found myself asking in the ensuing confusion like drowning, as my fear merged with the audience’s agitation. Am I even a man? I had never kissed a girl before, and Josh was the closest by far. But the feeling of plugged ears under the sea prevented me from quite understanding what was happening, punctuated by moments when my consciousness bobbed for air even when my lips didn’t catch a breath.

In one of those moments of clarity, Josh’s kiss shook me into the awareness that I was not quite a man. I wanted to be in his nun’s habit and not my suit, because a dress to me meant a release from the shackles of forced masculinity, a giving up that I felt somewhere between and within my heart, my gut, and my groin. It took Josh’s kiss for me to admit to myself that I desired to be taken, not that only men take and women receive but that I could never be just a taker and never be just a taker as a man. I tensed then, gripped his lips with the confident force of learning who I was between tongues.

Even when the guards tried to break us apart, our tensed arms held on to each other. Our legs splayed as those guards pulled our feet from under us, and still we didn’t let go. Those guards had to carry us out of the room, entwined and horizontal. Finally, as I lay on top of him on the pavement outside, Josh opened his oracular eyes and we broke apart. By then, I knew that my fascination with women, from their art to their plight, wasn’t just a part of me I could parcel off, but that womanhood itself might be the vessel that best contained my being.

—