The year I turned 20 was the year I became the sum of a thousand small brown boxes and sleek gray envelopes. Neat, tiny packages of boyshorts in every color with athletic waistbands arrived at my door. A vintage brown leather jacket made its way to me from the 1980s, so authentic I had to cut the shoulder pads out. The used brown leather lace-up boots I would wear for the next three years before they fell apart again and again and again arrived last, in a small box at the end of winter. They were a perfect fit.



The shopping was a ritual. Each time, it went the same way: I ripped open boxes and plastic shipping envelopes and peeled back stickers and seals and marveled at things that felt like the limbs I didn’t realize I’d lost in the war. I tried them on alone and then put them away, pristine and almost untouched, tiny reminders of who I might be — if I could ever decide who that was.

I was the girl who wore a string of oversize pearls with patterned rompers, camisoles and tunics, big floral purses, sundresses, and sweaters. But that year, I put on men’s V-necks and boyshorts and leather jackets and walked over to the bathroom mirror to see if I looked or felt different. I did.

These were the things all the gay girls I was friends with were wearing, as casually and quietly as their own skins. These were the things that separated me from them. These were the things that felt like a secret handshake they used to communicate with one another, or like badges they put on to proclaim who they were to the world. I wanted to feel at home in these things just as easily as I felt at home inside the person I’d been for two decades without ever really thinking about it.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t be gay or queer or confused in my dresses and my pearls, and it wasn’t that I’d never wear them again — because I would. Right then, I needed to be reborn someone else. I needed to be more different than I was alike to that person I’d been for two decades without ever really thinking about it.

So I bought clothes. I tried on being gay, or what felt, at the time, like one of the most surefire ways to look like who I might be. It was dizzying. It was electrifying. Each time I stared at one of the little gifts I’d sent myself, I felt like I was getting closer to finally figuring me out — until a little while later a shadow of doubt would pass over the entire room, and I would feel sick, and pack up my new person, and lie on my bed with my eyes closed questioning everything, especially myself.

Why didn’t I know? How did I wander through deserts of emotion for two decades without ever considering this was my truth? How did I never harbor a secret? How did I never feel a nagging difference within myself?

That year I wished more than anything for a secret. I wished more than anything for a hidden truth inside of me. I wished more than anything that I had always known.

Instead, I had a budding addiction to eBay auctions and a receipt for one set of seven pairs of bright Fruit of the Loom boyshorts, each one rolled up in my underwear cubby just like they were when they arrived.