Then Again, Maybe I Won't

'The next day my father handed me a book called Basic Facts About Sex. He said I should read it in my spare time and if I had any questions I should come to him. There's a whole section about wet dreams and another on masturbation. Maybe they do know about me after all! My stomach jumped around so bad I had to take a pill.'

Tony Miglione

I have written a few times about my official coming out. It was comparatively rather late, most stimulated by an engagement to a woman that I knew I could never go through with. Despite being in my twenties, I never really up until that point really felt trapped in the closet. I was doing what I wanted for the most part, had friends and thought myself fairly happy, at least I did at the time.

I hear people talk about knowing almost since birth they were gay. I never really felt that. I did know, strongly, that I was different, or at least thought differently. As a kid however, I had friends both male and female, played hockey and baseball and blended quite naturally with my peers without really giving it much thought. The differences I felt were initially called 'sensitive' by my parents and others. I had a deep, almost obsessive need to think, then talk everything through. Even the smallest problem required a degree of energy most kids did not express. I remember my parents worried how troubled I was over things most others seemed to easily blow off.

I would think and talk for hours about my concern over the birds and mice our cat killed, someone at school who was struggling or being bullied, a relative who seemed depressed or worry about the stress on the tadpoles my brother had in an old bucket in the back yard. This worry, this concern, I later discovered was my attempt to not feel or deal with what was going on in my own life. That, I think I deliberately decided to push until I was older and more ready to face.

There were many hints and signs that I was gay, most of which I didn't really pay much attention to at the time. Actors I became obsessed with, guys I school I crushed over and a certain author who seemed determined not to let me escape from my true feelings. Many teenagers, both female and male spend time during puberty with the works of Judy Blume. A key theme in two of her books, Are You There God, It's Me Margaret, and Then Again, Maybe I Won't, focus on the changes, both mentally and physically of going through puberty.

Blume says that after she finished writing Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, she decided it would be interesting to try out what life was like for a twelve-year-old boy. I was about 12 or 13 at the time of reading and remember the scene with Tony was spying on next door neighbor Lisa Hoober. I don't still have the book (although the one I did own was with the puke green color border at the top of the page), but if memory serves me correctly at one point Tony says 'It went up'. As I read that, I went up as well. I knew instinctively that I was not up because of the half naked Lisa, but instead, because of Tony and what he was experiencing.

Tony's voyeurism was at the time, the most erotic think I had ever read or experienced. The book, like many of Blume's, was like a peek into a world, one that for the most part I had been suppressing. It was a peek into a world I would enter soon, in no small part because of Blume's welcoming invitation.

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