It was fitting that the year I figured out how to be friends with women at Harvard was also the year when I first dressed up as one for Drag Night, an experience that left me intrigued despite its scary conclusion, those men trying to get me in their car and my fear of getting beaten up. Still, I found myself tantalized by the pleasant surprise that I looked better as a woman than I expected. Between study sessions at cafés or on my way to rehearsal, I browsed through the goth nail polish colors at Newbury Comics and came out with a shade called Gangrene, which I wore clubbing at Liquid on weekends and took off when I got home. I also discovered the basement at Urban Outfitters, where I obtained cheap women’s clothes that I was thankfully small enough to fit in.

But even through these mild gender experiments, I continued to maintain as masculine an image as I could muster, aware that my attractiveness depended on it. I was happy to decry the gay community’s overemphasis on desirability in discussions with other queer people, the problem with personal ads where men used “straight-acting” as a point of attractiveness, how terrible it was that “No fats, no femmes, no Asians” often appeared in those ads. But I also made the utmost effort to be as un-fat, un-femme, and un-Asian as possible. Un-fat was easy enough, and over time, un-Asian became habitual too. Un-femme was harder, but I found that my weekly outings at Liquid released my feminine energy and allowed me to be masculine enough the rest of the week without feeling unduly burdened.

These patterns exerted themselves during those weeks after Halloween, in that year when my relationship with Papa continued to mend, maybe out of necessity for both of us since he loved bragging about his son who was at Harvard, and I needed somewhere to go for winter break. Still, I tried to see my family as little as possible while I stayed in Queens, either holed up in the room one of my sisters gave up when I visited or out into the city for as long as possible. I would have skipped the traditional holiday dinner, where Filipinos feasted on Christmas Eve and stayed up until midnight, if I had friends in the city to go out with. Instead, I accepted my presents without much enthusiasm, reminding myself whenever I felt guilty that this was what Papa had been like my entire childhood, barely there even on those rare occasions when he was physically in the house. It felt good to implicitly deny his existence at school, to allow people to think that my father was white, allow them to imagine him as a supportive part of my childhood.