The origins of sexual feeling don’t interest me much; they seem permanently shrouded anyway, as resistant to explanation as any form of desire: why, exactly, do you like strawberries? From whence springs your affection for the cello, your attraction to blue? I don’t mean to be facetious; it’s merely that by the time desire manifests itself it is there, a fact of the self, one of our well-springs. Genetics, hypothalamus, environment, chance, some inscription encoded in the DNA or the soul: your choice. Or no choice; doesn’t the need to understand the origins of desire arise from the impetus to control it?

A far more productive field of inquiry is the way in which sexual feeling makes itself known, and how we negotiate with our sense of desire, and with the dawning awareness of difference.

Here’s a story told to me by Warren, a participant in a writing workshop I taught in Astoria, Queens, in a church basement called the SAGE Clubhouse—“SAGE” stands for Senior Action in a Gay Environment—where gay and lesbian senior citizens gather for meals and classes. We sat in a circle of folding chairs in a corner, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups and eating the cookies Rudy and Frank had baked while everyone told wonderful stories: Harlem rent parties in the forties, meeting a first boyfriend in the trenches during the Second World War, and long, tender couplings of decades.

Sixty years before, as a second-or third-grader, Warren sat beside a boy whom he admired, a popular and handsome kid, and one day Warren noticed something he had never before observed. When the handsome boy wore a polo shirt, his arm filled the sleeve, so that the fabric stretched a little. Warren’s arms did not fill a sleeve in this way; it had never occurred to him that an arm could fill a sleeve, and in observing this characteristic of the boy’s body Warren realized that he found it remarkable; the muscle, in its taut encasement of cloth, was a beautiful thing.

Struck by what he had seen, Warren told another boy, a friend, and was startled by his friend’s indifference to this matter: no response. After school, puzzled, he also told his mother about the beautiful arm, and she responded with a discussion of the variations in human body types, how some are naturally more muscled than others. Her intention was to reassure Warren that his body was acceptable, which was not what he was after. He knew what he felt, in the thrall of the swell of that boy’s bicep. He understood, through some echo beneath her speech, unstated but perfectly clear, that he’d apprehended beauty in a location she did not approve.

Message: there are private forms of loveliness, there are things about you no one should know. Should you be ashamed, to see what others cannot? Does the delight—your new, secret possession—outweigh your sense of singularity?