I knew I had done nothing wrong. In fact, I had done nothing at all. Without consulting me, the Great Cosmos had made me gay. And with my pre-teenage intuition, I apparently realized what I know explicitly now: that no theory of accountability, no morality, could judge me for something that was beyond my control. I was not shit.

"Thou, Nature, art my goddess, to thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me..." King Lear

I am a gay man.

The fact that I can make that simple statement of fact reflects how much I have grown during my four years at Harvard. It was not always that easy.

I have been homosexual as long as I have been sexual, that is, since I was 11 years old. The stereotype of the confused youth--in doubt of his sexual identity, trying girls, being dissatisfied, trying boys, feeling guilty, struggling--does not apply. I knew from my first adolescent fantasy that I liked boys' bodies, not girls'. I accepted it as inevitable. I did not feel anything that can really be called guilt. My parents did not teach me sexual guilt. My mother, especially, had successfully indoctrinated me with a healthy belief that sex is natural and good.

Although I never felt guilty about my sexual orientation, I hardly accepted it. I thought it was a flaw in my character, a dreadfully grotesque abnormality. I felt that it was a terrible thing to happen to me--especially me, because, by the standards I had been taught, it was my only flaw: I was the smartest in my class, reasonably popular, good in sports, mature.

Yet within this feeling of having been wronged was a huge blessing; because I realized that I had been made homosexual, that it had happened to me, I realized also that I had not chosen to be homosexual. And if I had not chosen to be homosexual, I could not choose to change. I did not like being gay, but I knew there was nothing I could do about it. In this realization lay the seeds of self-acceptance and gay pride. Fortunately, the seeds were well enough planted that I grew strong enough to reject the belief society wanted me to hold: that I was shit.

I knew I had done nothing wrong. In fact, I had done nothing at all. Without consulting me, the Great Cosmos had made me gay. And with my preteenage intuition. I apparently realized what I know explicitly now: that no theory of accountability, no morality, could judge me for something that was beyond my control. I was not shit.

At the same time, I was aware that my homosexuality had to remain secret. Although I can not remember what I expected to happen. I can remember feeling certain that the most terrible of all possibilities would be for someone to find out I was gay. Thus eight years would pass before anyone else would know I was homosexual.

I came to Harvard mortally afraid of being discovered. I worked very hard at adopting masculine mannerisms, eliminating anything I though was effeminate. I was exploiting a nearly universal prejudice; the belief that only effeminate men are gay. I figured that no one would ever know, as long as I didn't "look gay." As far as I know, I was right. No one--straight or gay--ever knew I was gay before I told them.

I also came to Harvard with a fledgling sense of injustice, an awareness that my need to hide was brought on by a defect in society, not in me. It was society that was at fault and to blame for my unhappiness.

I hoped I was leaving anti-gay paranoia behind me when I moved from my intensely conservative and moralistic home town to liberal, enlightened Harvard. But with a cynicism about Harvard one would be more likely to expect from a jaded senior, I asked my journal just before freshman week, "Did I graduate into a more mature world, or just a smarter one?"

Although it was smarter than my high school, Harvard, as regards homosexually, was in fact no more mature. The only difference was that the viciousness of homophobic Harvard was disguised by the niceties of academe, the legitimacy of Intellectual Argument. Only at Harvard, for instance, could a man (who was otherwise almost totally non-religious) present in all seriousness--over pizza at Harvard Pizza--an argument for "Why Homosexuals Should Go To Hell."

Many of my friends freshman year, including a roommate, submitted me, in their unjustified assumption that I was straight (it never occurs to straights that their friends might be gay), to endless pretentious justifications for beliefs in the inferiority of homosexuality. And, of course, there were the hundreds of fag jokes. [All the evidence necessary to demonstrate the astonishing and brutally insensitive ignorance of straight Harvard is that, although most people at Harvard would become hysterical upon hearing a "kike" joke or a "nigger" joke, a "fag" joke rarely elicits a single protest.]

I became aware of the Harvard-Radcliffe Gay Students Association (HRGSA) during the fall of freshman year. Signs appeared one week announcing that the following Wednesday would be Gay Wednesday. Gay people should wear jeans, and straight people should wear "something else," the signs said. The ostensible purpose was to make gay people visible or detectable to enable them to meet each other. In fact, Gay Wednesday was a neat ploy to parody the notion that "you can tell" who's gay. The event tried to get straights to think about their prejudices for a day by making them sweat about whether people would think they were gay, and wonder why that should make them sweat.