I get popped out anyway, my nose rubbed in the blinding light, I’m terrified even during my most cheerful chirping.

Otherwise, rocked back on the governing coil, my beak tip rests against two round shut swinging doors, I feel most grateful for usual darkness. They named this whole clock for my carefree two-note song.

But, truth is, I am usually “in.” My tree-house closet is shut. Then I don’t have to think of how I look, or which latent assassin is waiting out there this go-round. I prefer not thinking of it much each day. But, four times hourly, I’m totally and publicly “out,” outed. It feels self-conscious and short-lived as someone sticking his own tongue out. You can’t ever really say much that way, can you?

Even when you hear me sing, tweet-twitty-twit, even when you set your watch by me (and do, by all means, ’cause I’m so reliable), even as you smile over your shoulder on hearing my musical comedy again, even when I seem all charm, pure velvety buttery goodwill—truth is, I’m not singing.

It’s a shaped scream.

Thanks to Dan, I can’t afford ever to comfortably abstain. Not—with a two-hour layover between trains in Milan, and after meeting somebody kind and at least half attractive, someone whispery and nodding, with a borrowed apartment just a three-minute walk from this terminal, some guy so visibly willing—not to let time go, not to let this pleasure pass. I remember Dan. I go with him.

I expect eventual arrest. I am never fully safe in this, my country. Times, I seem to live scot-free, I’m healthy, I’m allowed against all odds to exist in my own way, and to write this toward you, fellow innocent. If I were not gay, I would be supporting Alice and Kyle and meeting at this moment with the Search Committee at the college—afterward, stopping by a busy but dangerous rest area on the interstate—and I would not have written this, and therefore, for whatever it’s worth, you would not be reading it.

XIV. Last

Coming out I managed. Staying out is hard.

A day in the life?

I came out at 7 a.m. today—I did so just by tucking one cream-colored silk hanky in my blazer pocket. To me, it didn’t look fey, it just looked right, manly, necessary. By three this afternoon, I was having a late lunch with two co-workers. Who told a gay-bashing “Hear about the pitbull with AIDS?” joke, one I really might’ve/should’ve protested. The lunch had been so heavy, and I’m getting over a hellacious summer cold, and I just couldn’t find the energy to make a scene, to force the point again, to act so nunnishly doctrinaire. Didn’t want to make another dreary plea for tolerance, yet again, Killjoy.

Walking back to work alone, I saw a truly great-looking boy. And—before I quite censored myself properly—I’d tossed an appreciative stare at this blond, aproned clerk. He stood spraying down the eggplants displayed before our corner greengrocer. And he offered me some visual encouragement—top lip curling back, a toughening of his flippant stance—but then, three seconds later, reverse, he flipped me the finger and muttered, “You fuckin’ wish.”