Gays and lesbians must make themselves. None of us are brought up prepared to be gay. What did I know of homosexuality before I met Jo Davison and read The Front Runner?

My first big trip out West. I'm twelve and ready to accompany Nanny and Poppy out to Grand Junction, Colorado, to visit Nanny's brother Harry. My mother sees fit to warn me about certain men who might get fresh with me in public restrooms. (That would be one desperate man, to hungrily approach the acne-stippled, pudgy adolescent I was.) "Just knee them in the groin," she advises, "and then run."

My father is listening to my grandmother play piano in the living room.

"I used to play piano pretty well," he muses, "before the war. My first piano teacher made a pass at me. I never went back."

Someone in junior high tells me that Rock Hudson and Jim Nabors are getting married. "That can't be," I think, thoroughly confused. "Two men can't get married."

Playground gossip has it that the slender and effeminate son of a certain teacher has been caught in a compromising position in the movie house restroom with a fat, retarded kid who's the regular brunt of high school mockery. I have no idea what shameful things two boys could do together. I am very young and have been carefully sheltered. My imagination is very, very limited.

An ecology club cookout at the roadside park, just the other side of the Bluestone River Bridge. Too much lemonade, so I head for the bathroom. There, scrawled on the walls, Summers County gay history. Invitations, certain measurements, a sketch or two. A phone number, a suggested date and time to meet. Desperate attempts at connection in a wasteland, made sordid by secrecy. "FAG!" someone else has inked into the wood as critical commentary.

---

The late eighties. This winter afternoon my college friend Cindy has joined me in Hinton for a visit, and she and I are walking past the Summers County Courthouse, a huge red-brick turreted structure. I look like I usually do: beard, jeans, lumberjack boots, black leather jacket. She is more anomalous in this context, for she is dressed pretty much the same as I, with the addition of one of those short haircuts the lesbian community favors. Women in Summers County do not dress like this.

A pickup truck passes us. A guy yells, "Go back where you came from!"

I am no longer that defenseless pacifist from high school. I am a pissed-off queer. Without missing a beat, I shout "Fuck you!!" and flip them the accompanying gesture. Cindy and I are ready to tear off some body parts. However, unlike that night years ago when I got my face punched, the truck does not stop and eject pissed-off rednecks. Instead, it continues on down the street.

I turn to Cindy, laugh, then, with mock-pathos, wail, "I am where I came from!"

Excerpted by permission of the author and publisher.