As I grew up and realized attempting to be like my sister and to copy the way straight boys walked, talked and punched was useless, I discovered the bathroom stall as the perfect shield for social animosity.

School for me always felt like I was in a dungeon full of hungry lions in which my parents had thrown me. I never understood how man was intelligent enough to take Americans to the moon, but hadn’t come up with a way to educate children without having to separate them from their mothers.

I don’t remember exactly my first day of school; all I recall is that from the beginning, it felt like I was an unwanted presence in a space full of wanted people.

And the more I grew up, the more people stared at me — the kind of stare so devoid of lust you know they would just kill you were it legal.

But they did what they could to attack me without getting their hands guiltily dirty. They would prohibit me from joining their groups or teams or would call me names, the least offensive of which might have been “sissy” or its racial remix “sissy cracker.” Something one may expect from straight boys from macho-obsessed Brazil.

But it was when this one girl, Sabrina, a disgustingly wealthy neighbor with a huge mole on her upper lip, called me a “faggotted faggot” that it really hurt. I was cornered. Even the math teacher referred to unwanted algorithms as “little faggots” you had to get rid of.

But in fourth grade a kid named Gerson got transferred to my school. He was the only black kid in this private Catholic scholastic club for the Brazilian bourgeoisie.

The appearance of a black kid in a school full of cruel, homophobic, racist, sexist and violently spoiled white kids was my salvation. Now the bullies got to spend time kicking Gerson in the stomach during lunch break instead of dragging me by the hair for seven minutes and calling me “ugly faggot.”

In a screwed-up way, I loved Gerson, and thanked God every day for his existence. Apparently there was one thing worse than being faggy — being black. Not only was Gerson black, he took the school bus instead of being picked up by car by his parents, like all the other kids.

“I hear Gerson’s parents don’t even own a car.”

And while both Gerson and I served as punching bags for the release of South American overtly aggressive (and ever so encouraged) masculinity, our miseries must have had completely different natures.

While Gerson, theoretically, could have gone home and complained to his parents, also black, about him getting beat up, my despair could not leave my body. Because telling anyone about my own humiliation would mean outing my “fagness” as a truthful possibility.

This was a shame that had to be confined to my own world, safe from parental gaze.

Having an overtly popular sister going to the same school didn’t help. She would get boys’ phone calls and hold the social capital I never dared dream of.

And, by inevitable comparison, I witnessed how all my “handicapped nature” didn’t allow me to be every single day in my own home. She would have several of her friends over and play Monopoly while I locked myself in my room pretending the pictures on the wall were TV cameras, staring at this yet-to-be-discovered superstar as he put on his show.

As I grew up and realized attempting to be like my sister and to copy the way straight boys walked, talked and punched was useless, I discovered the bathroom stall as the perfect shield for social animosity.

And if I hugged my legs on top of the toilet bowl, no one would even be able to tell that it was me who was in the stall. This felt like the only way of completely abstracting exterior gaze.

No one could say I wasn’t beautiful because no one was noticing my existence. For all they knew, I could be smoking cigarettes with my nonexistent clique or playing soccer with my nonexistent buddies.

By the time I moved to America, I had learned to both better negotiate the social eye, my identity and appreciate the more tolerant, forgiving American gaze. Which formed a new problem in its own right: my existence had to be tolerated or forgiven?

The problem with being a gay child is that you assume not only that no one wants to look at you, play with you or kiss you, but that even when you grow up, they will keep on not desiring you. And you will remain a virgin forever.

And that any attempt to become a sexual being will just make you look even more pathetic because you simply weren’t supposed to exist. And beauty is never accidental.

But once you come out of the closet, you develop new eyes. And even if the eyes of the others continue to be the same, it doesn’t matter much, because you learn to select which gaze is worth recognition and which is mere symptom of ignorance.

You look back at your childhood and you see a ball of underdeveloped, underrated, wasted flesh, bleeding so constantly it felt like it was breathing. And you dust off the pain from your shoulder, develop your own sense of aesthetics and start existing from scratch.

Perhaps that is why so many gay men become obsessed with their appearance once they can actually handle being beautiful. Because for too long they had to attempt making their unwanted ugliness invisible.

And when you finally get laid (What? Someone actually wants to fuck me?), you just can’t stop. Which may explain another trend in gay men’s lives. Let me fuck as many guys as possible, perhaps one day I will convince myself that I am beautiful.

But the scar of having had to be an invisible child remains regardless of the amount of fucking. And any gaze feels like a good gaze, simply because they are acknowledging something in you that you thought you would never have.

And humans just don’t know what to do with recently acquired power.

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