I became one of them. There was a restaurant a few minutes’ walk from our apartment, Club Café, a concrete structure lit in tasteful pale blue neon, where all the affluent gays went for brunch. So that was also where Ralph and I imbibed the surrounding white gay culture as we helped ourselves to pancakes and eggs at the fancy brunch buffet, a mixture of professional gays in button-down shirts, along with the older campy types who looked like they worshipped Maria Callas, and the muscle queens in tight spandex tops, sleeveless in the summer, a gay uniform I learned to adopt.

I may have been a slight, inferior albino creature in college, but I grew to feel prized at Club Café, among strangers who had yet to discover that my blond exotic looks were not Scandinavian or Russian. I was also at my buffest then, working with a personal trainer to develop my naturally slim frame to one that at least approached the muscly twinks from those Eastern European porn videos, so popular in the late ’90s.

“Lucky,” I heard men comment. “Good job.” This was not just at Club Café but at other gay establishments in Boston, at Napoleon’s piano bar, for instance, or even just walking around our neighborhood. At first I thought the comments were meant for me, that they were telling me I snagged myself a good one. Ralph pointed out that he was the one they were congratulating, and I realized the power my blond youth held in that world, even if it came with the assumption that Ralph went for me because of my looks and I because of his money.

I got so used to that lifestyle—condo ownership, dinner parties, frequent trips to Europe—that I didn’t even notice how I slotted into a particular kind of existence, a settled gay coupledom that Ralph sought, and it felt so right being with him that for several years, it didn’t occur to me to ask whether that was what I wanted. Sitting on the train on that mundane fall day, I dismissed the idea of my womanhood as a passing notion too, an absurd thing to want in the midst of my intense happiness, compared to the havoc it would wreak if I even entertained the idea of transition, a word whose meaning I didn’t really have a frame of reference for, never having met an openly trans woman in person. I ejected it from my mind, only for the quotidian memory to be excavated in my teenage bedroom halfway around the world, after my mind once again wandered toward the territory of hesitation, why I still found it hard to see the man I thought of as my soul mate being part of this world I grew up in.