I woke up in my old room several days later, Christmas Eve, after once again traveling back to Bulacan late at night to avoid traffic. The combination of jet lag and the constant din of Manila—from barking dogs to school kids on vacation singing karaoke through the night—meant that I hadn’t been sleeping well in my aunt’s house, so I was pleased to find my mind clear, after sleeping for most of the four-hour car ride and another several hours after that.

Staring at the white ceiling of my old room—stained slightly brown like a faint Rorschach test, probably from a roof leak—I thought about how I’d picked up a prepaid calling card and called Ralph from my aunt’s house the night before, stretching the cord of her kitchen rotary phone into the bathroom for privacy. He was in England with his family, seven hours behind me. I told him about the conversation in the car with my grandmother and how she told me to bring him the next time I came.

“Sounds wonderful,” he said. I thought it was wonderful too, except it also wasn’t.

A memory emerged out of that faint blotch on the ceiling, the sight of water while I crossed the Charles River by train on my way to work the previous fall. I was unusually happy on that particular ride. At twenty-three, I had found the love of my life, my soul mate, who wrested me from poverty and gave me a comfortable life. I’d also graduated from the best school and had a promising future ahead of me. I asked myself how I could possibly be any happier, when a voice inside of me said: You might be happier as a woman.

It had been two years since I declared to packed audiences that I belonged to both genders, yet I had spent those years as a white gay man. This wasn’t something I had intended, more a product of me falling into Ralph’s world than anything else. His friends became my friends, and even though Ralph got close to all kinds of people, the fact that our close friends tended to be educated and wealthy meant they were predominantly white, especially the gay men—Chris and Joe, Charles and Bob, David, Tom, and any number of guys with one- or two-syllable Anglo names.