Making out with a good looking person is fairly do-able whether they are a guy or a girl, and Danny was pretty hot. But I kind of wanted to be her more than I wanted to fuck her.

The one thing about a gay man’s life that gives him both an undeletable scar and the privilege of having observed the world from different vantage points is the fact that we all have, at some point, “been” straight. Or, at least, tried to.

We all had to go through the years of identity travestying, in which, like actors doing very serious, method-acting type of laboratory work, we pretended to be “other.” Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Except during masturbation — that was our homo break.

While the constant attempt to a methodic, neurotic and pathologic imitation of an identity that isn’t yours can’t be that good for you, it does force you to realize the plurality of human race, and brush up your acting skills.

But, it occurs to me, that if straight people could only fathom how cruel it is to have to make out with a gender you do not lust for and to have to police yourself at every second of the day to make sure you are not coming off as who you are, they may actually feel bad. Maybe even apologize. And, who knows, by 2047, maybe we will get some sort of post-traumatic pension from the state, too.

While coming out of the closet seems to partially erase recollections of the burden of having a self-constructed pseudo-replica for an identity, I do remember tales of back when I was straight.

I was 16 and wearing a button-up shirt. My buddy (gay people have friends; straight people have buddies, apparently) Matt and I went to a homecoming dance with a girl named Danny (that should have been a sign) and her cousin, Teresa.

It was somehow assumed that I was to hook up with Danny, the girl, and Matt with Teresa, the cousin.

When you are representing a role, any criticism can throw you off.

So when I first get in the car, Matt asks me, “Why are you wearing two jackets?”

All I can think of is “Sorry, I am trying my best here. But you can only do so much when there isn’t a manual.”

“Did you bring paper?” he asks me. “You need to bring little pieces of paper so when you meet a chick you can write her number down, dude.”

Obviously this was before cell phones. And, obviously, I had missed out on that rule too. My character was starting to come off as unconvincing, it seemed. So I cut out little pieces of paper from my notebook and put them in my pockets.

“Yeah, dude, let’s bang some chicks!”

Ouch. Yeah, let’s bang some chicks. Dude.

The awful thing was, as idiotically hetero as Matt sounded, he was about the hottest guy on the planet. Toned body, inhumanly blond hair, cinematically blue eyes, an incomprehensible urge to go to boot camp and “blow shit up,” a forearm tattoo and an overflowing sense of self-assurance that produced its own gravity field.

So while he described what he wanted to do to “chicks,” I imagined the scene inside my head, slapping white-out on the image of the “chick” and replacing myself in it.

We picked Danny (whose brother’s name was Lindsey, WTF?) and Teresa up and headed to the dance.

“Do you guys like to get high?” asked Danny, the feisty, Lolita-esque type.

Matt, whose over-masculinity must also have been a travesty for something, said nothing. He tended to keep quiet when he felt he’d fallen short of “cool.”

So we just parked the car in the middle of Nowhere, Minn., listened to No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” and ate Rollo’s.

When Teresa starts making out with Matt in the front, Danny starts touching my thigh in the back of the car. Now, making out with a good looking person is fairly do-able whether they are a guy or a girl, and Danny was pretty hot. But I kind of wanted to be her more than I wanted to fuck her. And, maybe, if I were her, then it could have been me making out with Matt in the front seat.

But, no. I was me. Or something like me. Some sort of put-together bundle of borrowed social scraps hoping to look like a verisimilar whole.

Danny and I make out. Fine. Danny licks my neck. Alright. Danny grabs my junk. Starting to get uncomfortable. Danny takes off her bra. Uh. Danny straddles me. Yeah. Danny says: “I bet you think I’m a virgin, don’t you?”

So with this 15-year-old slut on top of me, I become pathetically speechless, like, like I’m a faggot or something.

I look at her hair, her lightly made-up skin, her fierce eyes that seem to want to make up for years of repressed female sexuality all at once. All on me.

I listen to Matt and Teresa in the front. Mutually agreeing on giving continuity to this prosaic thing we call normal — blindingly. Their Columbia winter jackets chafing each other like Eskimos making love, their act so mute, so unthought of, so deliciously effortless, invisibly conditioned. Ours, so clumsily performatic.

I look at Danny. I see beauty. Impenetrable and unseizable. And I think, “Maybe when I’m 20 it won’t be this hard.”

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