Then and there I began to be sure that my feelings weren’t like anyone else’s: I existed in a special zone, no one felt what I did. Held at a distance from others: that was both the price and the reward. And it seemed unbridgeable, the gap between that private richness inside and the hopeless, hapless way I was seen. “Between us and you,” the Bible says, “there is a great gulf fixed.” To this day I catch myself feeling startled sometimes when someone expresses a feeling or impression just like mine; I expect to be the only one of my kind, alien passing through, guest from nowhere.

For Christmas I wanted a basketball. This was an accommodation on my part; I didn’t really care for sports, but basketball didn’t seem overwhelmingly physical, and it was something you could play by yourself, and I was tall, and maybe…. There were other boys who’d walk to the playground after school, alone, and shoot baskets. When I unwrapped the gift, it was what I’d asked for, but my parents had chosen a basketball of a special sort, a marbleized sphere swirled in green and purple. It was pretty, in truth, but my heart sagged; I’d envisioned a real boy’s ball, plain orange, defined by mysterious black lines, and the soap-bubble swirl of my new ball reinforced what I already knew, really, that the regulation equipment of the game wasn’t to be my lot.

Well, all right then—if I can’t fit, I’ll be an ozone boy, more rarefied, more peculiar. I’ll breathe the atmosphere of my own elevation; I will be doggedly devoted to my own peculiarity. I’ll show you how to be alone!

That’s the queer boy’s dynamic, simultaneously debased and elevated. Even if no one but you—especially when no one but you—is witness to your triumph, still, you can embrace your own difference. Inside the rejected boy, inside the unloved body, reigns the sissy triumphant, enraged, jeweled by an elegant crown of his own devising.