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On June 21, 1975, he found his first glory hole: “Hanging by my hands from the top of the stall, my legs rattled, I came hard in quick explosions. Bob, I collapsed inside from excitement.” Has anybody adequately described the sheer boredom of promiscuity? I did not have Ed’s patience, although I ad…

Life is an intolerable burden if you have no idea what to do with it. I was a writer, but not the writer I needed to be. For that I had to become a different person. I thought the answer was Ed and maybe it was. He and I belonged together: the pressure of a more coherent self would have been intole…

“Ed,” Yusuf cries, “you look so sexy!” Ed looks up without bothering to act surprised. Won’t he resent this obvious lie when he sees himself in the mirror? He tips forward without changing his expression and the tears flow. Yusuf says with complete conviction, as though he hadn’t said it before: “E…

Yusuf gives me a little push toward the bed. We’ve been together for a year, but he is still in a hurry—it makes me laugh with excitement. He wants to be continually acknowledged, even waking me at night. Yusuf is a Moroccan muscle-builder postdoc in early modern at UC Berkeley. I don’t know what I…

“I can see where he’s coming from,” my father said. “Your mother has a thing about her. That woman casts a spell. The first time I saw her I thought my heart was going to stop. The truth is, it took me a long time to be relaxed around her. Maybe I never was. It’s hard to explain. I wanted her to be…