Last year, I found myself the utterly stupefied recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for my novel Less. I suppose another way to put it is I dressed like a virgin. I would like to say I dressed like a penniless middle-class kid. I returned with a red acrylic knit I found on discount the expression on his face was one I will never forget. I recall making a friend from Puerto Rico, who, when I told him I was from suburban Maryland, nodded and said, “Now I understand your clothes.” Everyone seemed so worldly and sophisticated why couldn’t I seem that way too? Another memory: A friend sent me out with the express command that I come back with a reasonably tasteful V-neck sweater. I had never seen a woman in a black leather skirt I had never seen a man in a neck scarf. Bush years-I encountered a different set: foreigners, New Yorkers, boarding school kids. When I attended college-this was during the George H.W. Mom and I marched together through suburban life in the uniform of blandness, trying not to be seen, back when the Gap sold Levi’s and Banana Republic sold safari shirts (it was not until years later that she and I came out to each other, on the very same night-a story for another time). She turned out to be gay herself, and her jewelry box held only ERA medallions, her closet only flats.
Usually a gay boy can count on a mother or a mother figure to have a jewelry box of treasures to try on in secret moments, or a closet of high heels, but my own dear mother was no help. Style is supposed to come prepackaged with gayness, like a charger for your phone, but mine came without. I was a suffering teen whose gayness, unacknowledged even to himself, expressed itself through ill-advised (and quite ordinary) fashion choices: giant sweatshirts, acid-washed jeans, Beach Boys T-shirts. If style is how you tell your story to the world before it tells it for you, I had no idea what my story was I didn’t even know I wasn’t Jewish. My point is: I was an awkward outsider in many ways. Their view of the world was so restrained that once, when I asked my mother why the sky was blue, she replied, “Dear, that’s not my field.” I was the only Gentile kid in a Jewish neighborhood, and felt so left out that when I turned thirteen I insisted my parents throw me a “faux mitzvah” so I could have a party like all my friends.
I was raised by scientists, by which I don’t mean secret military operatives who could replace my bones with titanium I mean my dad was a theoretical chemist and my mother an experimental chemist. I have no real excuse for this, but here is me trying: I grew up in the wilderness of suburban Maryland, a state so bland that its official song sounds like a Christmas carol.
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