Since I was newly single, it became habit again to go to Liquid every Saturday night and enjoy the freedom from prescribed norms that space had to offer. Though I was content to wear preppy if muscle-flattering clothes in my daily life, Liquid was the place where I didn’t have to worry about looking too garish or feminine, as its name signaled a melting of boundaries that evolved into the event’s unique vibe, goths and kinksters cavorting with the Harvard and MIT crowd, where gender and sexuality were indeterminate. But having shed my ill-advised relationship with Thomas, I still dressed myself in a way that was attractive to gay men. So on one particular night in early November, when I paired a white baby-doll tee with lime-green bell-bottoms, procured for cheap in the women’s section of Urban Outfitters’ basement, it was intentional that the shirt was short enough to reveal a band of my flat stomach, the pants stretchy so they would flatter the butt I’d shaped with thousands of squats.

Both the dance floors—one that played alternative and the other pop—were sparse at ten o’clock, which I enjoyed as much as when it got packed, because I liked dancing where there was space and had come to love getting parties started.

Liquid exposed me to a part of myself I only discovered in college, incongruous even to my own self-understanding, that I was a natural dancer. This certainly wasn’t true when I was a nerdy kid, but after Mama started sending me off to lessons while I was a child star, I found myself really enjoying them and continued to take a mix of ballet, jazz, and modern dance throughout high school and college. I was never the best dancer in class—I always fell behind learning choreography because I couldn’t see well enough—but the practice of constantly having to imagine movement translated to a gift for improvisation, a key component of good club dancing, whether finding syncopations in the subtleties of Duran Duran or moving different parts of my body independently when I danced to one of the Jacksons.

As I strode to the middle of the pop floor when Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much” came on, someone whose choreography I enjoyed riffing to—sexy smoothness punctuated with abrupt stops—I experienced a moment of astonishment over how utterly confident and unselfconscious I’d become, in a space where so many people felt awkward. So much of this had to do with how I molded myself to any environment, but also how my physical being could be perceived in a vast array of ways. In the darkness of this club, it was virtually impossible to perceive me as a poor albino immigrant who’d only been in the country for six years. Rather, what people saw was a young, attractive white man, and this awareness scaffolded my confidence.