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Coming/Out In the twenty-sevenyears since the 1969 Stonewall riots, "coming out" has acquired extraordinary significance in the gay community—so much significance that many of us might even saycoming out "defines" the difference between being gay and an older, pre-gay notion of being homosexual. Through much of that quarter-century-plus, when, if you hadn't "come out of the closet," many gaymen and lesbians felt you had somehow betrayed them, that you couldn't really "define yourself as gay," that you had not "accepted your gay identity," I found myself faced with a paradox: Much of my critical enterprise over that same period had been devoted to showing that such "defining" or "identifying" events (when, as a reader, you first became aware of science fiction; when, as a child, you realized you were black, gay, or an artist) simply did not "define"anything. In the gradual, continual, and constantly modulating process of becoming who we are, all events take their meanings, characteristic or uncharacteristic , from the surrounding event field in which they occur. While certainlythey contribute to what we are or are becoming, single events simply do not carry the explicative strength "definition" and "identity" denote. This is not to say some events aren't more important than others. Recently I had a discussion with a woman who, some years back, had been a catcher in a circus aerial act. "Well," she said, "I see what you mean. But I remember the moment my partner fell. It completely changed my life. We were in the middle of a performance in LasVegas.I didn't drop her—I'm rather touchy about that. She was swinging around, hanging from a hand-loop attached to the trapeze. To steady her, I was fronting the bar—my term for balancing horizontally on my pelvis on a still trapeze. We were just getting ready for the finale. The loop broke and she flew out, still on her side—and went down. She landed on the concrete, almost thirty feet below. No, she wasn't killed. 4 68 Shorter Views But she shattered her elbow, broke her arm, and bruised herself from head to foot. From that moment on, Ijust couldn't be an aerialist again. I formed another act with my boyfriend immediately, where he was the catcher this time. I guess it was to prove to myself that I hadn't changed. But three weeks later, after three more performances, I quit." She sighed. "I missed the circus for the next ten years. But my life just wasn't the same after the accident as it was before." "I didn't saythat what happens in a single moment can't change jour life," I told her. "I said that it doesn't define jour life. What made that moment have the meaning for you that it did was your previous years of training as an acrobat, as an aerialist, the circus tradition; it wasthe medical emergency that followed, the severityof your partner's injuries, the response of the people around you—all that makes such an occurrence as overwhelmingly significant as it was.The fact that you did go up again, and also that you missed the circus for so long, once you left, showshow much wasn'tchanged in spite of the veryreal change that did occur." It's a subtle but important difference. My friend agreed. All the incidents I am going to recount—none so dramatic as my aerialist friend's adventure—changed my life. But they changed it in small, distinct ways. None of them marked a before or after point, distinguishing absence from presence. Rather, each isnotable because it wasa point of change, a point where what was present before was still present, only in rearranged form. / My second summer camp was as wonderfully rich and pleasant (I was ten) as my first had been nightmarish. The boys in the senior camp area were housed just beyond a small hill, the Knoll,in a clearing in the trees, the Tent Colony. To one side wasa plank-walled, black-brown shack with a slant roof: the boys'John. Inside were twowooden-stalled showers,two wooden-stalled commodes, sinks, and urinals. Outside, just left of the door, against the creosoted planks and above a splatter of gravel, the steel basin (that let the water fall out the bottom onto the stones) leaned askew. A water fountain's rusted spigot thrust up from it, with an ancient spring...

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