In that week between Christmas and New Year’s, I spent nearly every morning taking the E train to Times Square to go to the TKTS booth for discounted Broadway tickets, then proceeded to whatever other excursion I’d planned, passing a stretch of porn theaters on Eighth Avenue. I didn’t have the gumption to enter, even though I’d hooked up with a number of men from online. My devout Catholic upbringing still made it hard for me to accept that I could be the “type” of person who would frequent a porn establishment. It had also become ingrained in me to avoid any risk of doing something illegal, because I only had a green card and could feasibly be deported if I committed a crime. On top of that, seedy cruising spots reminded me of AIDS, which in 1995 still felt like an automatic death sentence, even when there were significant advances in controlling the disease.

Yet as winter break drew to a close, I found myself determined to get over my fears and be the renegade queer that D. A. Miller presented in class as a figure to idolize, a white gay man who used sex as a form of political rebellion in the time of plague. I probably would not have been able to swallow my shame were it not for this impetus, which reminded me of the People Power Revolution in the Philippines, except the rebellion happened in bed instead of in the streets. This fervor boosted my lust, so I was able to gaze into the eyes of an old man behind a booth painted red, who asked me for ID before selling me a ticket for eight dollars and told me with a smirk that I looked about fifteen. The Latino man sitting on a stool by the door also grinned as he tore my ticket in half, which made me aware that my youth might be a prize. I walked fast through the tiny lobby to find the darkness of the theater, determined not to chicken out, so determined that I found myself disoriented when I got to my seat near the front row, because I had not thought this part of the plan through. In a video playing on the screen, all pink skin and no body hair, I watched two men fucking like automated dolls that a precocious, naughty child had set in motion. It was oddly meditative, watching these men, as my mind filtered out sound and only focused on their bodies, so the movie became just a moving abstract painting of flesh, except I got aroused after a while and came out of my trance.