I don’t suppose that when my parents sent me off to the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop they imagined I’d return, a few weeks later, both gay and an objectivist. Fortunately they were wise enough to understand the former as something indelible and the latter as a phase, which they amusedly tolerated. In fact, my mother had given me a copy of The Fountainhead the year before; like any wishfully pubescent teenage loser, I devoured it in a couple of sittings, but if I ascertained in its pages some proof of my own self-evident heroic genius, the notion that the novel represented a Weltanschauung escaped me.

The Young Writers Workshop took place over three summer weeks on the outskirts of the UVA campus, far beyond the neoclassical charm of Thomas Jefferson’s academical village where the practical necessities of dorm tower blocks and cafeterias dictated a more stolid, if still leafy, environment. On weekends, the Workshop made efforts to get its religiously inclined attendees to churches and prayer meetings and so forth. I considered myself an atheist, so I wandered into a meeting held by a couple of our counselors that was billed as Atheist-Objectivist.

The second word meant nothing to me; I found myself at once aghast and fascinated as both the counselors and the other teenage non-believers quoted giddily from Ayn Rand’s vast body of work. For a bunch of godless heathens, they seemed oddly reverential, but every weird teenager secretly desires a gang of fellow iconoclasts: It’s much easier to be different together. I also met a cute boy that summer, who happened to live not very far from me on the other side of Pittsburgh, but the man who really changed my life was a fellow you may already have heard of. His name was John Galt.

Ahem. Who is John Galt? Galt is the mashiach of the Randian cosmos, the savior-judge whose incarnation marks the inflection of one era to the next. But unlike Jesus, say, who sacrificed himself that you might live, Galt, the hero-manqué of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s immense magnum opus, simply absents himself that the rest of us might burn, reappearing to claim the pile of ashes. I had never heard of John Galt, or Atlas Shrugged for that matter, but I was quickly disabused of my ignorance. The Fountainhead was a fable for children; Atlas was the Word. And though I didn’t actually read it until the following school year, I found it, even in the abstract, immensely appealing. Galt—like the boy heroes of the science fiction that I also loved—was the perfect adolescent savior, a comic-book supervillain cast as a superhero. “I will stop the engine of the world,” he bragged. Like so many conversions, mine required less theology than brief flash of grace. In a student lounge in a vaguely Soviet dorm on the expensive campus of a fancy college, I was converted.

Over the next school year, I used a fair portion of my slim earnings as an office assistant at the State Theatre Center for the Arts, the “Grand Old Lady of Main Street” in Uniontown, PA, to purchase a full paperback library of Rand’s novels and non-fiction. Their covers all featured heroically angular illustrations that—an irony I didn’t quite detect at the time—looked like pastiches of WPA murals, Soviet propaganda posters, and the architectural imagination of Albert Speer.

