I tumble out of bed in a panic like I do every morning, searching for my phone, which I can’t find, as usual. Its alarm is going off, but it has fallen off the side of my bed and is buried in a sea of books and dirty clothes, so I stumble over to my computer, which I leave on every night because it’s old and takes ten minutes to boot up. I know this is good for neither the environment nor the computer, but when I wake up I know I likely won’t find my phone until I’ve drank some coffee and popped the Xanax the therapist tells me to take. And I can’t do anything until I check my email and the news to make sure everything is okay, knowing full well that the news will assure me that the opposite is true.

But as I run my hand over the touchpad to bring the screen alive, an open miniature paper notebook off to the right of my computer catches my eye. Now I’ve forgotten about my email and phone, even though the alarm is still going off. It’s one of the little journals I bought from Walgreen’s when I didn’t have enough money to buy a nicer one, with that black and white textured school binder cover and binding made of glue that falls apart the second I touch it. I like journals just the size I can fit in my pocket, so I can take them everywhere, even though half the time I forget a pen. They are perfect for lists and stray thoughts. This notepad, I remember, is mostly full of to-do lists from my several jobs, none of which pay me enough to take care of myself.

The notebook is open. On the page it’s open to, there is no to-do list. There, in capital, shaky letters unmistakably written by me, I find the words:

“NOT

UP

TO

THE

CHALLENGE.”

The word CHALLENGE takes up the entire bottom half of the page.

I have no memory of writing these words. I am slightly hung-over, which I could ignore, except that this note is sitting here, reminding me that alcohol is not good for me, that it might have caused a blackout.

But I also know this is wishful thinking. I’d barely drank anything the night before. I’d had a couple glasses of wine, maybe, and I’d chatted online with my friends, because that’s what I do now, now that I’ve moved to Los Angeles: I sit in my room and chat with people on the Internet who live far away, in Oaxaca, in San Francisco, in Denver.

On the opposite side of the notebook, I’ve written something worse, something so whiny and full of angst that I’m ashamed it’s also in my handwriting. It says, “What if I could just disappear? What if I could just make it so I never existed?” This writing is even less clear; it is scratched in letters only I could read, and it is a thought I’ve had many times before.

I loathe suicide. In college, at Santa Cruz, I was playing pool with my friends in the lounge, and I was probably losing, like I always was. I heard a loud crack. Everyone said, “What was that?” But I thought nothing of it. Then someone came in—I can’t remember who—panting, and they said someone had just fallen off a balcony and died. We all sat there, stunned, not sure how to react. Eventually, the woman I was dating asked if I wanted to go with her to her kitchen to get something to eat.

We thought the body would have been removed by then, but we were wrong. Most of it was covered with a sheet, but the top of the head was not. The body—a man—had his head blown out. The crack I’d heard, it turned out, was a shotgun blast from a fourth floor balcony. I later learned he had an American flag tied around his ankles. It was dark or dusk as we walked by, I can’t exactly remember that either. There were little bits of shadow around him, little bits of what I imagine were flesh and brains and blood but could have just as easily been kicked-up dirt. I felt no sadness or shock as I walked by the body. I felt my heart speed up, but besides that, there was nothing.

The woman I was going to the kitchen with said, “Well, I didn’t need to see that.”

“I didn’t either,” I said and excused myself to my room. The school hired therapists outside for us to talk to. I did not talk to them. I hid under my sheets, unable to move until the next day. I don’t think I moved that entire night.

The whole next day, friends of the man who committed suicide played Sinatra’s “That’s Life” on repeat at top volume into the quad. It rained even though I couldn’t see the clouds, a strange phenomenon that sometimes happens in Santa Cruz because of where it sits between the mountains and the ocean. I later heard that the night proctor Wayne, a former cop, local legend and friend of every student in the dorms, had been given the task of cleaning the brains off the ground. The next time I saw him he had cut off his trademark long hair.

I still wonder about the man who committed suicide. Was he trying to be cruel? Or was he just trying to make some kind of statement? Was he trying to warn us of something?

To this day, when I think about seeing the body, I feel nothing. But when I think about Wayne scraping up the brains, I feel nothing but rage.

I feel like my mind has been unraveling slowly, and this angers me.

Three of my parents are psychologists, and one is a psychiatrist. Yes, all four: my dad, my mom, my stepdad, and my stepmom. I love each of them. Still, I feel like having any form of mental illness means they somehow won, that they had been right every time they were “worried about me,” that they had used their science to understand me better than I understood myself, that I had been wrong to resist their worldview because I resented so much feeling like a specimen. At one point, I was literally a subject in something called “The Nice-Mean Study,” which is about what it sounds like. I’m angry about this, but I don’t blame them; I think they thought of it as a kindness, that I could be a part of their lives that they cared about so much. And, of course, they believed their professions were beneficial.

At Santa Cruz, one of my parents sometimes sent me care packages full of SSRI antidepressants in the mail. I never took them. I held on to them, though, and at the end of college, I threw a party where I put all the pills in candy bowls. I did not encourage people to take them. I was just making a statement. One guy did take a few of them. Nothing happened.

It was a good thing I didn’t take them, my therapist later told me, because the antidepressants would have made me the kind of crazy where I wouldn’t have been able to stop laughing, where I wouldn’t have needed sleep, where I would have woken up on the other side of the world not knowing why I had a bucket of gold Krugerrands. SSRI’s are harmless to most people, but in the wrong hands, they can ruin lives.

If the wrong person had taken those pills, I could have destroyed someone, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about. I was thinking about making a statement. I wish I could say it was a remotely intelligent statement. Maybe something about the overuse of antidepressants, the fact that we use so many they are ending up in our water supply, or that we as a society need to learn to deal with our problems without making everything into a disease. I knew about those arguments, sure, but what I really wanted to say was something much simpler: I didn’t need any help. I could do this on my own.

Upon moving to LA, I was greeted by this city like—as my friend put it—a proctologist greets his patients. The day I arrived at the place where I’d be housesitting (which was, to its credit, beautiful, and a kindness on its own), a woman I liked showed up with a six pack of beer to tell me she not only had a boyfriend but also had fucked another good friend, someone from whom I’d been getting advice about her. My situation did not improve from there. Soon, I found myself unemployed, moving from couch to couch, and eventually, I had to rent from someone I had just started dating, which worked out about as well as you might think it would.

Desperate not to have to move home, desperate for anything to work, I swallowed my pride and scrounged up money to see a shrink. She told me that I was severely depressed and suspected I had bipolar II, which is like bipolar light, except it makes me more likely to kill myself. She gave me pills, ones that made the people I was sleeping with think I was having nightmares about wrestling lions. The pills were originally meant to stop epilepsy, but it seemed they were giving me seizures. When I told my shrink about this, she suggested the pediatric dose. The pharmacist looked at me, concerned, and said, “I hope these help your little one.” They were chewable and tasted like Flintstones vitamins.

The pediatric dose did not stop the fits.

Finally, she gave me a not-dangerous kind of antidepressant and some Xanax. I was able to get my shit together, moderately, at least, until not remembering writing that damn note.

The day before the not remembering, my therapist mentioned four letters in passing: PTSD. I was talking about my struggles writing, about how I just had too many things coming up, that I felt like every time I wrote I was just listing shitty things that happened to me, that I wanted nothing more than to write a funny essay about farts. My writing was becoming lists. Just lists of horrors I’d lived through. Lists like this, lists that are hopelessly incomplete, lists that (I’ve counted) go on for twelve handwritten pages, lists that, on top of that suicide, include:

1)   One of the first women I ever kissed—I was thirteen and the only boy in a game of spin-the-bottle—was stabbed 31 times and strangled with a belt by her boyfriend. This was 13 years later. It was broadcast in the papers because he was in the country illegally. No one called to invite me to the memorial because I hadn’t told any of my high school friends I was in town.

2)   My childhood best friend had his life altered terribly by a car accident caused by black ice and a sociopathic passenger. I went to visit him in the hospital, and saw part of his skull plate missing, which meant at one point I actually saw his brain. Even though he was nonresponsive, I looked at his brain and talked to him for a long time, because the doctors said hearing friends’ voices might help. Try as I might, I can’t remember what color the brain was, but I do know that he survived, even though they all said he would die.

3)   My neo-Nazi cousin nearly killed a man with a bow and arrow right in front of me, just because that man was black. But he did not let go of the arrow, thank God, and now that man is still alive. I can’t stop thinking about it, even now, even thirteen years later.

None of these things actually happened to me. They happened near me. Shouldn’t I be tougher than this?

My first reaction to my shrink mentioning PTSD was that I hoped my insurance company wouldn’t find out. Then I thought of worse things that have happened to people I’ve known or loved, that my list didn’t count because it’s not as horrible, because there is always something more horrible.

Then I thought about how everything seemed to touch me somehow, just a little bit, about how I used to film lacrosse games for extra money, sometimes at Columbine, which was just a few miles from my school. The massacre happened one year after I graduated high school. I walked into my dorm room where my roommate was watching it on TV and saw a bloody body fall out of a building I used to see all the time. A distant acquaintance, I later learned, was among the dead. I remember the mass depression that overtook the country, but especially my family and friends in Colorado, just by virtue of proximity.

Then I thought about the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, which also happened when I was a student in Santa Cruz. A family friend had been in the first plane, though I had only met him once, and I’m not even sure if it was him that I met. But I do know that my family was very shaken up by it. I told my professor—who was angry at imperialism instead of the terrorists—that talking about imperialism wouldn’t bring him back. She bought me more drinks and said she was worried about me, that she thought it wasn’t really him I was upset about.

That night, I walked to my girlfriend’s house, tearing down every miniature American flag I saw—probably about two dozen of them—including one where I accidentally ripped off a car antenna along with the flag (I left a note of apology for the antenna and a ten dollar bill—it was all I had) until I got to the full-sized flag at the entrance to the Motel 6 by the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. I started tearing it down, and the Pakistani woman who worked there ran out and looked at me.

She said, “What are you doing?”

I had no answer, so I left the flag hanging there all limp on its now-bent pole. I went to the beach and slept there for about an hour. But it was very cold, so I went to my girlfriend’s apartment—where she literally slept in a closet. She woke up to open the door, said nothing and let me cuddle up next to her, no questions asked, sand in my hair and all over my clothes.

And now here it is, twelve years later, and I’m spending days in bed, even though I can’t, even though I am working 50 to 80 hours a week, doing a damn good job when I’m there. But still, somehow, I manage to spend entire days in bed, in silence, staring at the ceiling, not listening to music, not cruising the Internet, just staring, cursing every time the ice cream truck drives by my window because of that God damned song. It’s not even that it drives by; it actually parks in front of my fucking house just to make me crazy. My therapist calls what I’m doing “dissociating.” I want to pour a coke in the engine of the ice cream truck. I want to take a sledgehammer to its speakers. For a moment, I want to be cruel. It is ruining everything. I don’t know what this is. I just know I can’t control it.

That’s the thing I hate. I can’t control it. I can’t control that I can do nothing but sit inside in that goddamned room and stare at the ceiling. I have no idea who wrote that note, even though I know it was me.

So now what? I wish I could write: “Oh, wow, those times were hard, but now that I’ve finally gotten on the right medication, and now that I’m well-adjusted and my skin is shining the sheen of the healthy and I never forget to take my omega-3, and I’ve popped out three kids with a beautiful partner and am drinking carrot juice and ginger smoothies in Park Slope, Brooklyn, now I can tell you this story and laugh and explain everything.”

But this is not me yet, if it ever will be, because right now, I am the definition of “mentally ill.” If I write this essay, I have to ask: Will I survive? Will my twenty different bosses fire me? Will whatever “respectability” I have as a writer or adjunct or teacher or tutor or nonprofit professional go to shit? Will my health insurance find the article and raise my rates? What’s worse, will I turn into a social leper? Will people be afraid of me? Will anyone ever want to sleep with me again?

Will anybody read it?

Lately, for unspeakable reasons, everyone has been talking about how everything in the world is terribly wrong. People are blaming guns and poor mental health services, but I get the sense that these are not the only things wrong, that there is something more.

It goes beyond this problem of “the stigmatization of mental illness.” Sure, that scares me, but there’s a thing that runs deeper. I can’t name it, exactly, and I certainly don’t know what to do about it, but I think it has to do with how we think about compassion and empathy and cruelty and survival.

I see it in the bloody newscasts of school shootings and disasters with special graphics and Hollywood effects for ratings. I see it when I donate money to a President who kills innocent children with drones. I see it as I take money from people I shouldn’t be taking money from because I have to pay rent. I saw this in my cousin’s swastika tattoos, in his pulling out his bow in arrow, in his not letting go. I saw this in the way I and so many of my high school alumni rallied around my friend after his accident, and in the way we turned away from him in the years after because we “had to move forward.” I saw this in the cruelty of the newspaper articles when one of the first girls I kissed was murdered, in the way the reporters would not leave her mother alone, in the way I am now writing about it still.

It all makes me want to make a statement. I want to write the world off as brutish and cruel, to go all Gordon Gecko, or maybe Don Draper, to stop worrying about the people around me and start looking out for number one, maybe learn Parkour, or at the very least learn to throw a punch. At first, the world seems a lot less maddening when I start to think this way because I think it gives me some control.

In parts of academia, in a staggering act of linguistic defeatism, social scientists call those who believe that people are inherently self-serving “realists.”

Fuck them. I’d rather go mad than be a “realist.” There is something I can control.

I know for a fact it’s more complicated than that.

Once, I saw a woman with her left eyeball popped out of her head at a concert, dangling from its socket, with surprisingly little blood on her face. Whenever I think of it, I can’t forget her look, the shock of having her body altered permanently, that one of the most important parts of her had just been removed and would never work the same again.

I hope they found a way to reattach her eye. I hope she can see perfectly now. All of her friends had abandoned her. People were walking on the other side of the hall, as far from her as possible, including me. Except for the bouncer, she was completely alone, and what scared her most, I think, was the fear in my eyes, in the eyes of the people walking near me.

The bouncer stood there next to her, smiling, telling her she’d be okay, that help was on its way, massaging her shoulders, dabbing as much of the blood away as he could.

Maybe that’s what it means to be up to the challenge.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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“When a door opens and you can’t see who’s coming, it’s almost always a cat that would like to be your lover.” — At BLIP MAGAZINE, “The Cat Lover” by Thaisa Frank. 

“We sweet-lipped drag queens for clean sheets.” — At The Collagist, “And Then We Were Happy” by T Kira Madden. 

“She shakes her head and says, “I don’t drink.” She did years ago. I haven’t seen my grandmother in a long time. I live five states away and I don’t like to fly.” — At Used Furniture Review, “Wind Chime” by Shellie Zacharia. 

“They lived beside the great river, closer to animals than men; they sinned without knowledge of having sinned, without shame or honor.” At Matter Press, “Serpent” by Steve Almond. 

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• Boston Marathon Roundup

“It’s not that we wouldn’t be able to lay our hands on bodily fluids via some other avenue, says Stephen, it’s just that prohibiting their sale on eBay is an egregious encroachment of our rights as Americans.” At Necessary Fiction, ”Things We Have Tried Unsuccessfully To Purchase On eBay” by Andreas Trolf. 

“When Crawford brought back Gabby from the Philippines, he asked what we thought of some green eyed Asian children running around the farm one day,” Granny said in a low aside.” — At The Dead Mule of Southern Literature, “The Acceptance Speech” by Hope Denney.

“Why don’t YOU have cancer seems to be a more logical thing to ask, more logical than why do I have cancer.” — At Requited, “Real, Not Fake” by Ben Slotky. (via)

“I tried to empathize with the driver, but I kept coming back to the girl. I traced her face with my finger until it came away smudged with ink.” At jmww, “Couvade Syndrom” by Jamey Davidsmeyer.

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• unicorn rocky mountain oyster

“When we reach the street, the houses are dark, except for one—the grey one with the white trim, chain link fence, black oak tree.” — At Waccamaw, “A House Made of Stars” by Tawnysha Greene.  

“On the street the air is fifty knives of cold.  This is not Alaska.  Why did we move here?” — At Fiction Southeast, “Winter” by Aimee Bender. (via)

“Throw your ego off the bus and let it get trampled in mud.” — At Blip, “Two Stories” by Frances Lefkowitz. 

“Flood’s over, Noah! Time to dock the ark.” — At Abjective, “Hebe at the Bar” by Diana Pollin. 

And if you want more and/or are very bored at work, Dan Chaon and Ravi Mangla have a list of the 2012 top fifty flash stories at Wigleaf. This is really a spectacular list.

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Also, in a side note, I’m very sad to learn that > kill author will be closing down, but I’m excited to read the last issue on Wednesday.

“My husband’s camera is capturing every angeled grave for later manipulation. Not your grieving, he says.” — In > kill author, “Paganini” by Terese Svoboda. 

“He hugs me and kisses the spot where my chin meets my ear, like he likes the taste of my sweat.” — In Monkeybicycle, “Boys Who Spell Jizz with a G Are Not The Boys for Me” by Alex Koplow.

“When I tell them that straightening up, just a little, would make the job a lot easier, they scoff. It hurts their spines.” — In Used Furniture Review, “Evolution” by Bryan Furuness. 

“It seemed like guys in my generation were losing their hair faster. Wasn’t that unfair?” —In Bartleby Snopes, “Hair Club for Men and the Peacock Lady” by Kristen Forbes. 

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“Doesn’t it make you feel like an old-timey big-city career girl, carrying parcels up your stoop, struggling to unlock your door, when a handsome stranger in a suit comes up outta nowhere and offers to lend a hand…” At Anderbo, “My Sister Bags Groceries,” nonfiction by Alexandra Tanner.

“Other times Ma said she had seven brothers, said they lived with Snow White. She never claimed any sisters.” At fwrfiction: review, “Haunt,” fiction by Ethel Rohan.”

“The new doctor loved his patients—the patients who didn’t bleed. They were gushing with infection, full of pus.” At SmokeLong Quarterly, “The New Doctor,” fiction by Abe Gaustad.

And finally, “I told her to feel my inverted penis husk.” At Identity Theory, “Please Note That I Am Not Burt Renolds,” fiction by Sarah Sorenson.

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So now, Monday mornings, I’ll be here with excerpts from and links to very short fiction and essays I liked that hopefully you’ll like too.

“Do not watch the man seed or it will not grow.” At > kill author, “Instructions for Growing Men,” fiction by Margaret Patton Chapman. 

“More and more, people were looking young. Maybe this had to do with the chemicals in the water.” At Bartleby Snopes, “Amy in Twenty Chapters,” fiction by Nick Sansone. 

“At least that’s how your gym teacher makes it sound, like your tunnel down there is studded with gems so precious you need an armored car in order to make your way safely through the world.” At Brevity, “A Brief Natural History of an Eight Grade Girl,” nonfiction by Sarah Freligh.

“She pretended for a second that the grains of salt were not grains at all. That they were blades instead. But blades took courage, and courage was just another word in a long list of things that she lacked.” — At PANK, “Salted Wounds,” fiction by Ashley Bethard.  

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Mark hit on me the way gay men hit on straight men they’re already comfortable with, the way straight women hit on gay men. He’d go “mmmmm” when I walked by and say, “Why are you straight again?” He could tell it made me a little uncomfortable but not too uncomfortable. He could tell I liked it a little. He was tall and good looking and rich, and he’d tell me all about his trips giving road head to hot flight attendants in the Florida Keys. He might have been telling me the plot of a porn he’d watched or it might have been the truth, but I was enthralled and jealous and disgusted and turned on.

One night, the four of us went out together for drinks. Across from our dorms was a place called The Fox and The Hound where we smoked cigarette after cigarette. For three bucks, you could order a whiskey and Coke, which meant they’d bring you a bucket glass full of well whiskey and a tiny bottle of soda. We drank and gossiped. Mark’s foot brushed my leg. I don’t know if it was on purpose or if he thought it was a table leg, but I let his foot keep brushing mine, over and over, and I lost my breath for a second. He was looking at Corey Feldman, talking about some date he’d just been on. He hated straight places. “I’m bored I’m bored I’m bored,” he said, jumping out of his seat, trying to talk us into going to a gay bar. Corey Feldman wasn’t having it. “Fuck,” I said finally, “Let’s just go back up to the room.”

We stumbled across the street, made it to the apartment and sat down in the living room, all of us on the couch but Mark, who was standing. He still wanted to leave. Someone plopped on CNN.

It had been eating at me. He’d been flirting with me since I moved in. I hadn’t told many people, but this was different. He had to know, or if he found out later, he’d have a right to resent me. I didn’t want that.

“Mark,” I said, and then I mumbled at him for a bit until he rolled his eyes at me.

“Spit it out.”

“You should know that I’m bi.”

This was the part where in my imagination he smiled, maybe gave me a hug, and welcomed me to his club, where the streamers came from the ceiling and the music started blaring. Instead, he took a seat on a chair near the couch. His smile disappeared. Everyone was sober all the sudden. Corey Feldman, who was sitting next to me, said something like, “That’s my cue, bro” and went to bed. James stayed put, his eyes glued to the TV, but not a peep came from him, either.

I sighed and fell back further into the couch.

Mark looked down at the ground for a minute and shook his head. He wanted to say something and stopped himself. He picked his head up and looked me right in the eyes.

“You like men and women?”

“Yep,” I said. I hadn’t told many people yet, but I’d done it enough. I knew that the questions were coming.

“I don’t believe in that.”

I flipped him off, smiling. “I’m sitting right here.”

He recoiled a little and rubbed his hands through his hair. “No no, sorry. What I meant is, well, do you prefer one or the other?”

His whole body was turned towards me now.

“It’s just … the person. I’m attracted to the person,” I said.

He stared at me. The wrong facial expression, just a little something wrong with the curl of my lips, and he would never believe me. He could mark me off as gay but not ready or just out for attention. I had to be just the right amount of angry and the right amount of confident.

He turned the TV down.

“So why aren’t you out?” he asked.

“I want to work in politics,” I said, enunciating now like Peter fucking Jennings. “I’m lucky enough to be attracted to women, too, you know? This business isn’t easy.”

He looked back at the TV, where I’m guessing something or other was blowing up on the other side of the world, and nodded.

“That’s probably pretty smart,” he said, a little bit of edge in his voice. I took another shot and headed off to bed. James asked me if I was okay before he headed into the shower. I said, “Sure.”

Mark sat in the chair, alone now, flipping through the channels.

***

Author photo by Lydia Hudgens

Two weeks after I came out to Mark, I met a woman named Kate in a course about drug policy we had to take while doing our internships. Our professor ranted every day about the evils of needle exchanges and medical pot. Anytime I disagreed, he’d say, “You must be from Santa Cruz.” He was right. Both Kate and I were students at Santa Cruz, but we hadn’t met until that quarter in DC. After class, I caught her eyes as she was trying to make an exit and asked, “So, do you want to hang out?” She said, “Sure,” and then ran off. But I messed up and forgot to ask for her number. I never ask anyone out, but I couldn’t get her out of my head. I waited for the next week, and then I got in the same elevator she did and asked for her number, in front of everyone, so she had to give it to me. Then—I’d never done this before either—I actually called her. And she said yes. She went out with me on date after date and every fucking second I was around her I wanted to be touching her, somewhere, anywhere, even just her wrist.

After a couple dates, we went to her room. One of her roommates was always out at clubs looking for Navy guys and the other was gone. We had some drinks. I held her hand and said, “Can I kiss you?” like a fucking idiot, because I had no idea how to do this, how to be the one smitten. I kissed her cheek, then her ear, then her mouth, and she kissed back. I started shaking, my back started shaking, and I tried to figure out how to make myself stop, but I couldn’t, so I just went with it. She didn’t say anything, but she moaned back when I kissed her. We eventually made it to her bed, and even though she lived in a crappy dorm, too, it was the coziest place I’d ever been. She told me I smelled bad – getting used to DC’s humidity wasn’t easy after Santa Cruz. Instead of taking it personally and storming off or ignoring her I replaced my deodorant with antiperspirant and started putting it on every single day, which she thought was hilarious. Later, she said, “I like your smell now, but you should keep the antiperspirant on for other people’s sake.” I went around for about a day thinking, “She likes my nasty smell!” and dancing with myself.

A few weeks into it, I told her I was bi—the first time I’d ever told a girlfriend that— and she said, “Does that mean you’ll break up with me for a guy someday?”

“No, of course not,” I said.

I didn’t. Instead, we broke up because I chose to take a job working for a Congresswoman in Palo Alto instead of moving with her to Manhattan.

***

In the few years I spent working in politics pretending I wasn’t bi, I learned a lot of things, but the most disturbing thing I learned was how to win: What you do is find the simplest possible message that resonates with people — and when I say simple, think, “It’s the economy, Stupid” or in local races just, “Bob for State Senate” — and then you repeat it ad nauseam and get other people to repeat it ad nauseam and then ask them to get other people to repeat it until every front lawn and bulletin board and doorhanger and public space in the place you care about is filled with your message.

Somehow, in the last half century, LGBT activists have pulled off one of the biggest public relations coups in history while dealing with one of the most complex issues. It was less than forty years ago that the American Psychological Association agreed to stop saying non-straight people were sick. Today, I work at a school with a program that’s created just to train therapists to be sensitive to the needs of LGBT people. Ten years ago, in Lawrence v Texas, the Supreme Court stopped thirteen states from prosecuting people for sodomy; today, seventeen states allow gay marriage or domestic partnership.

All still isn’t good. Besides ex-gay camps, which have destroyed countless lives, LGBT people are victims of violent hate crimes at six times the overall rate, it’s legal to fire people for being gay in twenty-nine states, and being gay is illegal in seventy-six countries and punishable by execution in five. That’s the short list. I could go on for pages.

But now that we’ve had some success, now that we have a voice and a foothold, gay rights advocates who are fighting for LGBT rights—for my rights—have to choose between two different talking points:

1)    Gays and lesbians are intrinsically attracted to same-sex partners.

2)    Gays and lesbians do not have a choice about being attracted to same-sex partners. It is intrinsic to who they are. While no one has a choice about their sexual orientation, sometimes, not always, bisexual people are attracted to more than one gender. So those people who are born with a more fluid sexuality can choose who they sleep with, and sometimes they may be choosing between a man and a woman, but that doesn’t mean they have chosen to be attracted to both men and women.

Which talking point would you rather use?

 ***

Bi pride flag

I started jerking off when I was nine. I remember my favorite fantasy. I pictured everyone in my third grade class, standing at their desks. Everyone took off their clothes because they got in trouble for something. It didn’t matter what. My imagination zoomed in on some boy or girl. I wouldn’t think about sex with them, really. My knowledge of sex at that age came from watching Looks Who’s Talking. I thought you’d kiss someone and then have a baby. I’d just think of them naked, boys and girls, and maybe I’d think of kissing them, and sometimes I’d think about their butts. I’d touch myself, and it made me feel good.

It wasn’t until I’d moved in with my dad up in Boston a couple years later that I let it hit me that anything was different. I was running the mile, in gym class, and our teacher brought us over to the high school for that because there wasn’t a track at my school.

It was 1990 or 1991. My mom wanted me to look cool, but she was from LA, not Boston, so she had me dressing like some kind of weird white preppy surfer member of N.W.A, with terrible neon green shorts that went down to my knees and a bright orange hypercolor shirt that got brighter as I sweated on it. No one would talk to me, obviously, but I kept pace with two kids who would at least let me run near them.

One of their uncles had just died. “He was totally a fag,” said the nephew. The other kid said, “But that’s your uncle you’re talking about.” “Yeah, but he was a fag, and that’s what happens to fags, with AIDS, you know?” They weren’t saying it to be cruel to the uncle—there wasn’t an ounce of cruelty in their voice, even though they were saying fag. It was just the word they knew. They used the same tone I’d heard them use when they told me the story about going into that one overgrown house where there’s supposedly a hunchback inside. And it was then that it hit me, as I was jogging, even though I already knew, really, but I hadn’t let myself think about it.

“Fags like boys, so I’m a fag.”

That day after school I ran up straight into my room. My room had always been filthy, but I threw everything off one little section of carpet near my desk and my dresser with the trap door I would always write stories on, and I kneeled there, and said over and over to myself, “Fags like boys, so I’m a fag,” crying and crying, not once thinking about that page from a magazine hidden in my desk, three feet from my head, with the naked women sprawled in impossible positions, the one I’d been beating off to every night for the last week, and not once thinking about the girl I’d kissed on the lips, my first kiss ever, a few weeks before, when my heart went pitter-patter and did all the things hearts are supposed to do during a first kiss, the girl whose heart I later broke because I thought I was a fag. I didn’t want to bring her down with me because being a fag was this cancer that would grow inside me and eat up the straight part of me until I’d die of AIDS and never be able to do anything with my life.

A year later, I sat at my desk with a knife, poking at my wrist. I had an impossible crush on a boy. Frank Martin and I were on the same basketball team. His locker was two over from mine, and I couldn’t help it—I was twelve or thirteen years old. I had twenty boners a day. It’s just the way it was—so when he changed, I kept sneaking a peek because I just wanted to see, because I could smell him, and it was amazing, and was it too much to smell and see?

And he caught me looking. But when he caught me, he wouldn’t look right back at me. Instead, he looked at the locker in front of him, and said, quiet enough so no one would hear, “I don’t give a fuck if you’re gay. I know it’s not your fault, but you better not fucking look at me like that ever again.”

I decided that day that I would choose to grow the part of me that liked women and kill the part that liked men. I poked at little parts of my wrist until they turned bright red, then I pulled the blade up and watched my skin turn back to its normal color, and then I pressed down again harder. But I couldn’t make myself do it hard enough, because I couldn’t stand blood, because I was too afraid to die right then. I tried to spell out words with the little red dots but they disappeared too quickly. I tried to spell out “Frank.” I tried to spell out “tired.” I took out a pack of stolen Kools and snuck outside and smoked cigarette after cigarette after cigarette.

Thirteen years later, right after quitting the job with the Congresswoman, I was in the shower, jerking off, thinking about women—I’d mostly thought about women, really, since Frank, except for all the men—and then, out of nowhere, I thought about this guy I knew who hit on me all the time. I imagined going up to him and wrapping my arms around his huge bear chest and kissing his ear, nibbling and then blowing a bit on his neck. My breath came quick and fast, and my legs gave out, and I had to lay down in the shower and let the water pass over me, and I wasn’t even jerking off anymore, it was more powerful than that. I was thinking about him and floating and it wasn’t until the water got so cold I couldn’t stand it that I got up and dried off and slept better than I’d slept in thirteen years.

Soon after, I came out on Myspace. There was no coming back from that.

***

Here’s the thing I want to tell Human Rights Campaign and Equality California and all the gay rights groups who have done such incredible work, who now have their own buildings in Washington and are thinking in terms of talking points and “ramifications” and focus groups and public polling:

The gay rights movement has been so successful because activists like Harvey Milk encouraged people to come out and tell the truth to their families, to their friends, and to their coworkers, to be everything they were, to say “We’re here, we’re queer,” yes, but also, implicitly, to say, “We’re here, it’s complicated, and probably it’d be good if we talked about this over tea.”

 ***

Recently, on OKCupid, a woman messaged me: “Are you truly into ladies, and if so, what type? Finding a truly bi man is like finding a unicorn.”

If I’m a unicorn where I live now, in L.A., then I was a unicorn rocky mountain oyster when I moved to the old rustbelt city of Syracuse, New York to go to grad school and live for the first time as a fully out bi man. There was one other mythical bi man in the entire city, but try as I might, I never found him. At the gay bar, I sometimes got called a “half-breeder.” Straight people treated me just as shittily as they treat gay people. Three times, gay men hit me in the back of the head when they saw my head turn for a women. For the most part, straight women wouldn’t date me because, as one said, “You’re just gonna leave me to go suck a dick.” For the first time in my life, frat boys called me fag. My professor said, “The world just isn’t ready for gay marriage.” I emailed him “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Then I went out with friends and my gay friends didn’t know what to do because I got drunk and flirted with a lesbian. A friend said she thought bi people didn’t exist. I said, “I’m sitting right here,” because that was my answer, but I was starting to believe her. I stopped telling people what I was. I let people think what they wanted, which was usually that I was like them.

About a year into being there, I thought, “Why don’t I just call myself gay?” I would see if I could do it before I told people, I thought. I mean, except for the occasional straight porn, and that one girl, and maybe that other one, I was only dating men. I made it a point. No more straight porn. No more thinking of women. No more dating women.

A few months later, I found myself in bed with a guy. I’d been doing well making up for lost time. No women, no women at all, except for a tiny bit of porn. I was almost ready to just say, “I’m gay. You guys were right. That bi thing was bullshit.” I was getting better at the whole blowjob thing. I was tied to the bed because I love being tied to the bed. I couldn’t move. I moaned and screamed and made all the right noises, but then it was time, and he started to expect an end because it was getting late—dogs needed to be fed and teeth brushed and homework finished—but I just couldn’t come. I just couldn’t. He was getting tired and starting to look around but he didn’t stop, thank god, because it would have ruined it, because I was right on the edge. Right there. So I did what no one admits to their lovers they do but that everyone does: I closed my eyes and let my mind wander to other people. I thought about men. I was sitting there forcing myself to think about men, only men, men men men men men men, and then it slipped in there, like when someone says don’t think about rhubarb pie and you think about rhubarb pie. I thought, for a second, about Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because I’d watched an episode earlier that day. Then I fucking erupted. I came so hard I was worried about getting enough air. I hope Alyson Hannigan doesn’t take out a restraining order on me for admitting that, but it’s important. Not because I came like that, and not because it’s ridiculous, which it totally is, but because I’d tried to make a choice to be straight but it wouldn’t work and now I’d tried to be gay and it wouldn’t work.

I wanted to join a team so I wouldn’t have to answer any more questions, so I wouldn’t have to say that I preferred one or the other or whether I exist or if I’m a unicorn or how I can ever hope to be monogamous if I’m attracted to more than one gender. But I failed to choose a side, so now, for once, I’m going to answer all of these questions honestly:

I don’t know. I can’t speak for other bi people, but only for myself. I just don’t know.

I don’t know because I can’t get all the voices out of my head, the ones that ask all the wrong questions. The ones that tell me I must be one thing or the other—for whom, or why, I don’t know. The voices want a neat fit, but I can’t accommodate them. I’ve tried, and I can’t, and I shouldn’t.

No one will ever make this go away. No one will ever make it simple.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s how I win.

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