Fake IDs

Jason Benjamin Josaphat, nineteen years old. Akyra Monet Murray, eighteen years old. Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, twenty years old. I’m reading the forty-nine names and ages of the victims killed in the June 12, 2016, mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. I am sad all over. I’m remembering when I was in high school, how my crew of friends snuck into lesbian clubs in New York City. I’m remembering that moment of stepping into the darkness: when the bass-beat hit my chest and some of my defenses let down their arms, and we danced our asses off.

Nineteen years old. Eighteen years old. Twenty years old. And Pulse is listed as twenty-one and over. What were they doing in the club? I know my own answer.

________

Underage, and I got into HerShe Bar in Chelsea, Clit Club in the Meat Packing District, and Meow Mix on Houston. It was the mid-nineties, and I was seventeen in the fall, eighteen in the spring, a high-school senior. I got my fake ID in the West Village, near where Gray’s Papaya used to be. I decided to make myself four years older, the year my oldest brother was born. Kept my birthday, which made it easy for me to remember. I was tall for my age, my demeanor calm, and I had no problem making eye contact with authority. I have eyes.

But four years earlier, my freshman year, while I watched my gym teacher pile the mats against the back wall, I wasn’t looking forward to what the guest speaker from the Gay and Lesbian Community Center had to say about youth services, HIV testing, and free condoms. I wanted to practice my Taekwondo punches. Gym class was the occasional self-conscious snicker, whispered remarks that Nobody’s gay in here, and the snapping of latex. My overly tanned black-belt gym teacher had invited the speaker so that, she said, “Regardless of being gay or straight, here are resources available to you.” Despite my irritation, something must have registered from the talk because, unlike most of my classmates, who left their brochures behind or waited to toss them after we left, I kept mine.

________

It was the winter of junior year when things shifted for me. I’d just arrived home from Israel, where I’d been on a month-long foreign exchange program. In Arad, I held the hand of a redhaired girl who cried when her work schedule at an ice-cream shop in a mall conflicted with my stay. Because Sivan wanted time to hang out with me. With me. She was sobs and apologies. I told her I would love to go to work with her, and she gave me scoops of whatever ice cream I wanted. There were few customers in the cooler temperatures of November, and Sivan and I chatted for three hours, watching mall-goers, noting the similarities and differences between our countries. The young people dressed in the same grunge look, and the mall played the same top-forty Billboard hits that were in rotation on the radio back home.

One evening, we went out to eat at the Muza pub, all the Americans with their Israeli hosts, and I remember Ram, chin-length dreadlocks and acne, saying that it might be weird for us Americans to see guys holding hands, kissing each other in hello and good-bye. He communicated this with conversant English, with gestures to signal nuance, context—cultural practices he didn’t have words for. Words that spoke to a way of being that made loving touch a basic part of their exchanges. And we got it. I understood, and appreciated reading a nation of bodies in this way. Suddenly I was no longer perceiving touch in terms of default heteronormativity.

Sivan and I spooned ourselves to sleep my last night there. She asked if we could, and she gifted me her Annie Lennox CD, because she saw that “Walking on Broken Glass” was my...