Party of One Read Online Free PDF

maybe just a little bit better.
    You for sure do not want to be what I was starting to figure out I was.
    Gayness was a thing that people recognized by the early 1980s, but if there were any actual gay people among us, they kept it to themselves. Homosexuality was no longer illegal and underground, but it wasn’t cool yet; Neil Patrick Harris was a toddler. We were in between, where gay people were mostly just there to be the butt of a massive percentage of the jokes in movies and on television and in real life, and not only could you not point this out or act like it bothered you, you did your best to avoid the word “butt” altogether, because the way you said it might give you away.
    “Gay” was the preferred put-down among boys at the time, as it had been for years and would continue to be for many more, and it was a bit of a catchall. While on paper it was very simple—anything that is cool is
not gay,
everything else
is
—in practice it was extremely complicated. Here is an incomplete list of things you could do to get yourself called a faggot as an American thirteen-year-old boy in 1984:
    Display enthusiasm
    Wear your backpack over both shoulders
    Walk faggy (precise definition is fluid)
    Wear argyle socks
    Use big words
    Not care much for The A-Team
    Say the answers to things in class
    Have a female friend
    Know the words to Matthew Wilder’s “Break My Stride”
    Smile
    In this environment, if you do not fit into the narrow, ever-shifting definition of what is masculine and therefore acceptable, life becomes a constant, exhausting effort to stay on what you are told is the right side of the cool/gay divide. You study older, more secure-looking boys for cues on how to talk, how to walk, how to yawn and cough and laugh, so that you will be acceptable. You make a hundred thousand micro-decisions about your behavior before lunch. You never exactly get it—you can’t wear coolness and masculinity as effortlessly as the boys who are born with it—but you can fool some people. And when you can’t, when you hear things like “man up” or “quit being such a faggot,” you don’t recognize these comments as bullying, you take them as you would notes on a performance.
I should be better at not being me,
you think.
Thanks for the reminder.
*1
    To be a young gay kid is to work around the clock. You start to feel feelings and you immediately get to work telling yourself that you’re not feeling them, or that they’re a phase, or that they’re motivated by some part of you that’s not the real you—a curiosity that’s spun out of control, a sickness, a demon, if you’re religiously inclined.
    And the work never ends. The foreman never rings the dodo bird, you do not slide down the tail of the dinosaur, you never get to shout “Yabba-dabba-doo.” You work and you never stop working and you never tell anyone, even yourself, that you’re working.
    You develop crushes, but you don’t recognize them as crushes. You just find yourself drawn to that boy who talks and walks and yawns/coughs/laughs like he’s never had to think about how to. You think about him all the time. You want to be him and you want to be with him, but you immediately tell yourself that you don’t. You feel love and then you feel shame for feeling love. You pretend none of this is going on, because if anyone suspects that something is wrong, they might figure out exactly
what
is wrong, and then it’s all over. So you push it down. You push it down and you smile, but not too much, because, again, smiling’s pretty gay.
    You put yourself through this process over and over, in the years when you are learning how to be a human being, and you get so good at it that it becomes involuntary. It’s like a computer process, and like computers, you’re getting faster and more efficient. You get so good and so quick that after a while you don’t even notice yourself doing it.

    The process really got moving for me in seventh grade, the year all