I didn’t consider myself to be different, as I heard my mom speaking about other kids in the neighborhood she heard rumors about.

I liked girls. I liked kissing them. Dating them.

I just also happened to like boys. Boys like James, with clean-cut looks, and smiles that stopped my heart. Unlike my mother, I didn’t think anything about me was off.

Eventually the summer ended, and James went back to college, and the memories of my first love faded away. But the feelings of what it would be like to have more never changed. They never left. As I took my first serious girlfriend to the movie, scenarios played in the back of my mind.

What if she sat on my left, and my boyfriend sat on my right?

I should’ve been drafted for the war, but being legally blind in my left eye meant I couldn’t serve my country. Another flaw in the eyes of “normal” society. Instead, I started college, and found myself checking out the football team–and their cheerleader girlfriends.

Who would be better kissers?

College ended, and I began to attend the weddings of my classmates and friends who had found love while at university. As usual, I was still alone, unable to hold down a girlfriend for longer than a few months. I was still looking for more, longing for something I was beginning to feel was impossible.

In 1952, fresh out of school, I moved back to my hometown, and landed a job as an accountant. It wasn’t a special job by any means, but I had long given up on special. It paid the bills, and that was the important part. Special was a dream, nothing more. I began dating a girl, a “nice” girl by my mother’s standards–Carol. And if I couldn’t be happy, at least she could be. There was absolutely no chemistry between us, and we had gone no further than a chaste kiss on the lips in the movies. But it was safe, and it would be a practical, reliable marriage. A proposal was imminent, a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, and 1.5 perfect children. My future spread out before me, successful, bland, and absolutely nothing I wanted.

My father took me out for drinks one evening, “man to man.” He passed me my pint of beer, grinning at me like he had never done so before. I thought he was going to talk to me about my job, about how proud he was of me for my recent promotion. Instead he started talking about Carol.