CREATIVE NONFICTION 23
should be “accepted with respect, compassion,
and sensitivity.” It is under this guise of tolerance
that the Catechism condemns queer people to a life
without sex, claiming that “homosexual persons
are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-
mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times
by the support of disinterested friendship ... they
can and should gradually and resolutely approach
Christian perfection.”
My high school taught its students this very les-
son: being gay wasn’t morally wrong, but acting
on it was. The nuance was lost on my classmates.
Every day, stomach churning, bile sour in the back
of my throat, I listened as they called one another
homo and faggot. Friendship with them—disin-
terested or otherwise—seemed impossible. I told
myself it didn’t matter, I didn’t care, but some-
times I’d see a group of them laughing together
after class—relaxed, easy, casual—and something
would throb inside me. It was desire, but not the
kind that made it so hard for me to keep my eyes
on the floor when we changed in the locker room.
It was a longing for something else.
While the Catechism equates pornography with
the destruction of intimacy, the opposite seemed
true at my high school. Like most teenage boys,
my classmates enjoyed talking about sex, and
sometimes, when the mood was right, they
swapped the names of their favorite porn stars. In
those moments, their voices lowered and became
almost reverent, hushed with a pleasurable sense
of conspiracy. Dude, you’ve seen Jenna Jameson,
right? What about Tera Patrick?
I never joined these conversations, just sat silent
at their edges, but that was enough—enough to
show me how trading secrets could turn a group
of boys into a closed circuit, humming with
shared energy. The word intimacy, it turns out,
derives from the Latin intimus, meaning “inmost,
deepest, profound, or close in friendship,” and it
was that last part—the friendship—that pornog-
raphy, of all things, somehow revealed.
despite everything I learned in my religion
classes, I kept downloading more videos as high
school ended and college began. It was also in
college that I stopped simply listening to straight
guys talk about porn; it was in college that—
driven by curiosity, and by those four years of
longing—I began to initiate the conversations.
The first one must have been with my freshman-
year roommate, a solidly built, mildly cute guy,
who later joined the campus’s Young Republi-
cans Club. (Mr. C. would have liked him.) One
humid night very early in the semester, bored of
our homework and flushed with the new free-
dom of dorm life, we started talking about porn.
I avoided giving any details about what I’d seen,
letting him do most of the talking.
“I think it’s bad,” he told me, brown eyes wide
and serious. “I think I was almost, like, addicted
to it.”
“Really?” I asked, trying to keep my voice
low and appropriately masculine. Excitement
was clawing in my stomach, thrumming in my
throat.
“Yeah,” he said, “I was really into this one
thing, called titty hard-on. It’s girls with, like,
really hard nipples. Here, I’ll show you.”
He turned to his laptop and began searching—
our dorm’s Ethernet racing way faster than either
of our dumpy dial-up connections at home—and,
sitting across the room from him at my own
computer, terrified and titillated, I blushed. Titty
hard-on: it was such a bizarre-sounding phrase,
alien and obscene. Later, the words would make
a certain kind of sense to me (how else, after all,
would teenage boys imagine female arousal except
from their own experiences?), but at the time, all I
could think was I never would have guessed.
A few months later, my roommate and I
stopped talking to one another, more or less
completely—when he figured out I was gay, he
was quietly horrified, and in return, I was cold
and bitchy—but I didn’t forget the feeling of that
late August night, of the weird, giddy intimacy
that we’d briefly shared. The following year, I
transferred to a much more liberal college; as
I filled out the application, I told myself a new
school would let me be completely out, would
let me do more than simply look at men as they
touched each other on screen.
But that’s not what ended up happening. I
was openly queer at my new school, yes, but I
remained practically as chaste as I’d been in high
school. Instead of dates or drunken hookups, I
found more straight guys to quiz about porn.
“Pretty sure the last vid I watched was called