How To Figure Out You're Gay Or Something ("Or Something") Before You Know What Being Gay Or Something ("Or Something") Is

Before I Knew I Was Anything I Knew I Was A Social Climber

• Not everyone grows up in a charmless exurb structurally designed to evade any sense of history or cultural development under the blandly-waking eye of a featureless, genericized version of American Christianity but many do and in such cases the earliest glimmer of gayness or something (“or something”) develop along the lines of delusions of grandeur and an inexplicable identification with social climbers, even or perhaps especially in the absence of actual society one might conceivably be able to climb

• Call it Prufrock-in-reverse syndrome

• Not “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas” but “I should have been the doge of Venice, with vulgarly noble enemies in the towers of Greece and Byzantium,” before one even knows that there was a doge of Venice a person could possibly wish to have been

• Learn about Venice…good news, there is a floating city that marries the sea every year in a formal ceremony by sending a duke or mayor out in a boat to drop a consecrated ring into the Adriatic…“Someone ought to build a city that works…”/“Someone did.” Know that like Venice you too were meant to be referred to as “La Dominante,” “La Serenissima,” “Queen of the Adriatic,” “City of Masks,” or like the Doge, imperialis hypatus et humilis dux Venetiae, humble duke of Venice…this is your doge, if it please you…I will humbly marry the sea on behalf of my beloved, floating, serene Republic, yes…I live to serve my people and the sea, between whom there is no distinction, only a wonderful watery sameness

• Learn about Dinotopia, which is just as real as Venice…learn about utopias…“throughout history humans have enjoyed imagining a really terrific place”…imagine a really terrific place, imagine placeholders, in the absence of intellect imagine an intellectual gloss, in the absence of a meaningful education think about a Parasaurolophus in a toga…and she’s a librarian…you belong here, where your second-place finish in the countywide spelling bee will finally be appreciated by true lovers of knowledge, where sapience matters more than sapiens…

• Someday you may be called upon to ride in the Palio di Siena and bring victory to your contrada…to ride through the streets with the drappellone swathed over your nonchalant shoulders…the cheers of Aquila carrying you even more than your spirited horse…“No one has won for Aquila in thirty years….no one until you…”

• Someday it will be important, necessary even, for you to distinguish between good society and the merely eager-to-please…you must be on your guard to defend against social climbers like yourself…you are merely correcting an unfortunate accident of birth, likely a clerical error; they are abominable graspers who will always betray themselves in the final telling… “he buys his furniture,” how terribly funny…he does not even realize he has been insulted…

• Learn about out-of-place artifacts…learn about the Antikythera mechanism and learn to call yourself a meteorite, a happy heir of hobbyism, whose only birthright is mystery…so unlike your barn-faced, heavy-kneed contemporaries, who could only ever hope to be called children of their parents…yours is an excellence located within the ineffable, untethered from your indifferent test scores…any excellence located squarely within merit is too pedestrian, too anodyne, when the impenetrable enigma of your real value remains as elusive as Lud-in-the-Mists…

• Learn about the Cave of the Golden Calf, a London nightclub that existed for exactly two years before the first World War…find out a way to have been there somehow…the height of decadence swallowed hastily in the machine-gun mouth of Europe…the playground for the grandmothers of the Bright Young Things, whose ranks you merely sniff at, led by Lady Manners herself…“I am late to meet Lady Manners at the Cave of the Golden Calf”…all the boys I ever knew died piloting biplanes…I was known in my lifetime first for my extravagance and second for my great generational grief…if someone does not make me an object of great glamour in the next four minutes I am going to scream and die, then bring great ruin down on the heads of every man, woman, and child in Ms. Hart’s fourth-grade class…failure to recognize your Dauphin will result in ignominy, imprisonment, and iron masks for all…is that how you spell ignominy…

[Image via]