CREATIVE NONFICTION 25
remember. A clearing of the history that nev-
ertheless repeated the history embedded in the
word pornography: that same conflicted pattern of
discovery and disavowal.
“Creepster” was the name I gave to the folder
that held these photos on my computer, and, for
a time, being archly self-aware about what I was
doing helped to distract me from really thinking
about it. From admitting that there was a crucial
difference between the men in those long-ago
photo galleries, who had consented to being col-
lected and consumed, and the ones I’d scoured
off social media, who hadn’t.
Eventually, I started saving photos of someone
I had never met, a twenty-year-old I’ll call
N. He was a friend of a friend, and so beauti-
ful—big, dark eyes and messy hair, a daredevil
smirk often on his lips—that I regularly went to
his Facebook profile to look for new photos. At
the time, they seemed like glimpses into another
life, another world. Here is N. skateboard-
ing with his friends after dark, gliding over
the night-black asphalt. Here is N. at a house
party full of young men who look like him, all
skinny jeans and stubble, beanies jammed over
uncombed hair. One of them has his arm slung
around N.’s shoulder, and they are all beam-
ing—casually radiant, oblivious to their own
beauty.
Our mutual friend seemed surprised the first
time I told him that N. was cute. “Seriously?” he
asked. “You like him?” But he remembered what
I said.
A few weeks later, a new photo of N. popped
up in my newsfeed, posted by that mutual friend.
It showed the two of them sitting together at a
table, an open takeout container of fries between
them. N. is looking right at the camera, some-
one’s foot in his lap, everyone sobering up after
a night of drinking but not quite ready to go
home. It fit in perfectly with the other photos I’d
seen of him, and yet something about it made me
look more closely.
That was when, stomach twisting, I noticed
there was writing on the inside of the container’s
lid. Writing that, even in the white glare of the
camera’s flash, looked like a message addressed to
me: the word HI and then my name, spelled out
in capital letters.
Later that day, my friend confirmed that, yes,
it was exactly that. He explained that he’d told
N. about me, and then—after writing on the
inside of the container—they’d taken the photo,
knowing I would see it later on Facebook. I
faked a laugh, but the story left me unsettled,
the knot in my stomach tightening. I couldn’t
stop thinking about the conversation they had
to have had about me, couldn’t stop imagining
how it must have played out. My friend say-
ing something like, Dude, this gay guy I know
thinks you’re hot, and the surprise N. would have
felt, and then the unease, knowing he’d been
watched from a distance, the skin on the back of
his neck prickling, as if he’d been brushed by a
ghost.
It was then, I think, that I started to reconsider
my secret museum. I’d told myself it was a
kind of holding-place for male beauty, a space
where—not coincidentally—I was nowhere to
be found. And yet I was reflected in this museum,
too, the way you can sometimes catch shadowy
glimpses of yourself in display cases. I saw
someone who had chosen looking over touching,
glass over skin, someone who was afraid of the
very intimacy he wanted most. That was what
I thought about, the day I finally dragged the
Creepster file into the Trash. It vanished in an
instant—quicker even than Pompeii—and I felt
both relieved and bereft.
I lost a lot of photos that day, but not the one
of my friend and N., for the simple reason that
I never saved it to the file. The image might
have been taken with me in mind, but it wasn’t
really for me—it was about the two of them and
their bond. I was beginning to understand that
intimacy is sometimes like that: it can benefit
from a third party, an outsider whose presence
highlights the experience of being on the inside.
And yet, more than once, I found myself
going back to my friend’s page so I could see the
photo again. One last time, I would tell myself
as I leaned closer to my laptop screen. One last
time, I would think as I increased the contrast.
And then, hunched over my computer, alone at
my desk, I would try to see if somewhere in that
photo—in that warm circle of light, in the secret
world of real boys—I could find, at last, my own
name.