At the time, though, I relished the escape Mark Morford provided. Each week, Mark dedicated his column to skewering the war hawks and Bible thumpers that I had come to feel surrounded by—even if wrongly. Despite Mark’s probable veganism, he was one of the few American writers my dad loved, and one of the few interests he and I shared. Mark was unlike anyone I knew: He hated homophobes; he loved yoga. He is how I first learned about soy milk. I was amazed that he inhabited the same physical world that I did, yet he could voice these incendiary opinions, which almost everyone I knew opposed. He was like a portal to a parallel universe, one where weirdos ruled.

I developed something between a crush and a cult member’s devotion to him, which was only consummated by a long email of appreciation I drafted circa 2004, but never sent. I must have gushed extensively about Mark around my dad, because one day he tried to temper my expectations.

“He look gayish,” he warned.

All of this did little to prepare me for college at American University, an East Coast school that was approximately 110 percent Jewish and liberal. After a lifetime of having maybe three friends, I was to live in a dorm room with another girl—one who had, no less, premarital sex.

In the first few weeks at AU, we had a very different type of sex ed class—one that didn’t make me any more comfortable than the Texan one did. We gathered in a small study room and were told to write down as many synonyms for penises and vaginas as we could think of. By the time someone shouted “cum bucket,” I was rending my garments. Then they showed us dental dams, and I did not know what they were for, and someone saying “oral sex” did not get me any closer to figuring it out. A few years prior, at my high school, a girl had gotten in trouble for acting “unladylike.”

That first year of college was so disorienting. At one point, a guy friend of mine opened his mail to find The New Yorker—a gift subscription from a doting, learned aunt. Someone joked that the articles are so long he’d probably never get through an issue, and everyone laughed and said that was sooo true. I laughed too because it seemed better than admitting I had never heard of The New Yorker.

I had also never met so many male Democrats, which thank goodness, because if I had I might have tied a lasso and roped them, just like they taught us they do with errant calves back in grade school. It wasn’t so much their views on NAFTA or solar panels that I craved as the fact that Democrats, in my mind, meant different. A different guy, I thought, would understand me.