Status Updates From A Boy's Own Story (The Edmu...

Nothing I did or said among the other boys came to me naturally. As a result, in every encounter, even the most glancing, I had to be a performer, for at all times I was aware I was impersonating a human being.

I didn’t want him to like men, just me, not even as a man but me as a discarnate ardor, pure willingness in his naïve, manly, exquisitely untested arms.

I’d decided to take the very futility I so often felt, the vacant hum, the sense of subsisting outside whatever was vibrant and to equate precisely this secular emptiness with the sacred void, to make of my shame a jewel, to call my poverty wealth.