Free The Paternity Test by Michael Lowenthal Page B

companions.
    Meanwhile, boys were pulling away. Why? Had I done something wrong? Maybe I myself was the mistake.
    I kept finding girls—or no, let them find me . My trick? The art of apparent indifference. Actually, though, the quality they saw was indecision. I wanted the girls, and clearly pictured someday tying the knot with one, so we could get to work on making babies; but also what I wanted was for this wanting to triumph, to nullify my less-accepted yearnings. Which wasn’t possible: my love for boys was hard and imperishable, a hunger from a whole different stomach.
    I was twenty, and prominently, stridently gay, before I found the woman I believed I’d settle down with.
    I’d come out of the closet as soon as I hit college. I hadn’t planned to, had expected to be fraught and frustrated, chalking this up as character-building and good for making Art: all those coded poems I would write. But college was another world entirely from home, a planet where the gravity was gone. The RA in my dorm was a dyke with spina bifida, her girlfriend a Haitian refugee. Everyone, it seemed, was a something . Pretty soon I tallied up a different calculation: sure, being gay would undoubtedly bring stigma, but maybe not as much (at least among my crowd) as being just a white-bread WASP.
    The Homecoming Ball was Columbus Day weekend. “Bringing a date?” my roommate, Russ, asked. I told him no. Then I said, “I’m single.” And then, in a torrent: “You know of any eligible bachelors?”
    “Oh,” said Russ.
    “Oh!” I cried—surely, of us two, the more surprised.
    One second to the next, I had a new identity. You had to stand on one side of the line; I’d picked mine.
    Which wasn’t to say being gay was easy. My gang was a small one at a small, rural school: a dozen other openly gay students, and none appealed. So far I was only gay in theory.
    Like many sayers who haven’t yet chanced to become doers , I often overcompensated with volume. I challenged any homophobic comments during class, led teach-ins, shouted from the rooftops (literally: the Dykes for Divestment staged a rally; I scaled the fire escape of College Hall). I also aimed my shrillness at my parents. My mom, when I came out to her, said, well, she’d always love me, but . . .
    “But what?” I said.
    “But don’t you want kids?”
    “Why? So I can tell them that I really love them, but ?”
    By the time I met Becky MacLeod, I was Big Fag on Campus, co-chair of the school’s nascent chapter of Queer Nation, straight-A author of papers like “A Poetics of Promiscuity? Allen Ginsberg’s Horny ‘Howl.’” Since coming out, I hadn’t had sex once.
    Becky and I were named to the Ad Hoc Symbol Committee, saddled with proposing—and selling to alums—an inoffensive replacement for the school’s Redskin mascot. In a room full of graybeards, we were the only students, and had to bond, if only by default. But there was nothing default about Becky. She came from Manitoba, the middle of the prairie, and had, like her homeland, a stark, windblown beauty. The latest in a long MacLeod lineage of bagpipers, she pitted her buffed-clean looks against a smutty wit. Her frank, focused gaze and her buck teeth intrigued me; she seemed to be hankering after something.
    At every session, we sat together, a subcommittee of two, passing bitchy notes that often ended: “Eek! Burn this!” We dubbed our little private support group Obstreperous Anonymous.
    The night before the final vote—our last chance at influence—I asked Becky over to my place so we could plan. “How about some pizza? Some Coke and Captain Morgan?”—my standard fare for pulling all-nighters. Sounded fun, she said, and she would bring the weed: her standard fare for any evening.
    I was living off-campus in a tiny, stinky studio, big enough for a futon, not much else. Becky acted as if it were a marvel of less-is-more. She praised my Frank O’Hara broadsheet, my framed ACT UP poster, my