“What are we doing, exactly?” I asked, his nudity suddenly absurd to me, his large hairy body and his erection. He put on his white briefs, but this didn’t lessen the absurdity of him, his penis still erect, the briefs too tight so his hairy belly flowed over them as he leaned on my dresser.

“Well this is over,” he said, then began to put on his shirt and jeans. “You know what we call you? Fresh meat.” He told me he only came to the first couple of BGLSA meetings every year to check out the new boys, and how much of a waste of time I turned out to be, as the cruelty I realized I’d always known he was capable of oozed out of him. He didn’t come back for another meeting, nor did I encounter him again.

Matt was the first of several men I slept with my first year at Harvard, none of whom wanted to stick around for long. At first I expected to go out on dates with those men, who I met at queer events around town or in chat rooms on the internet, and followed up our trysts with enthusiastic invitations to hang out. But over time, I learned that this wasn’t what those men were looking for, at least not from me, and I thought to myself that a guy like Gavin probably didn’t have this problem, that there was a line of men who wanted to be his boyfriend all the time while he remained aloof and unattainable. But because I was new to America, new to Harvard and this sophisticated world, no one wanted me to stay with them beyond one or a few lays, because I was a novelty and not much else.

8.

Amid my sexual turmoil and failed attempts at social adjustment were my classes, which I tackled with the same gusto I’d always had, though my efforts didn’t yield the same positive results. The administration liked to promote the idea that each of its students was more or less equally capable, so the college didn’t acknowledge the gap between those who’d gone to private schools versus someone like me, who was the first kid from my working-class public school to go to Harvard, and was one of the least-prepared students there. Most of my peers also had people around who’d finished college to advise them that it probably wasn’t a good idea to take an upper-level English seminar my first semester, one that assigned hundreds of pages of reading every week, many of which were abstract theoretical texts that other students in the class had already been exposed to. When I got my first paper back, on a Roland Barthes theory of photography book called Camera Lucida, I was horrified to discover that my last-minute spellcheck had replaced “Lucida” with “Lucinda” throughout the whole paper.