when I was 23 I joined the Merchant Marines. It was one of those things you do in life where you test yourself to see if you’re a man. Threw myself into a quasi-military training academy to learn how to tie knots and lower a life boat, operate a forktruck and put out a chemical fire. I lived with 12 other guys in a dorm room. We took showers together. We lined up and marched to class dressed in matching tan khakis.
When you’re young, at some point you want to know who you are. Nowadays going away to college is where American men find out who they are. But I didn’t go away to college. I took a few night classes down the road while I lived in my parents basement.
I wanted to know if I was gay. Probably the best way to answer that question is to have sex with a man and see how you like it. But men aren’t given the luxury to try that and then decide against it. Like women aren’t given the luxury of having multiple male partners without becoming “slutty”, a man can’t have even one sexual experience with another man without becoming “gay”.
Of course it happens. Guys get drunk and make out in a dark dorm room and never speak about it again. But you can’t suck some guy off and then go to the cafeteria the next day and tell your lunchmates, “Hey, I’ve been wondering if I was gay, and last night I found out I wasn’t!”
You can’t find out if you aren’t. You only find out if you are. So I took an indirect route of cloistering myself with 12 other young men for three months to see if I was gay.
Gay seemed like a possible explanation for why I was so weird. Being a weird dude was the real problem for me. It seemed quite plausible that my weirdness stemmed from a latent homosexuality, and to quit the weirdness all that was necessary was to start gaying out.
I really got to know these twelve guys in my dorm room. Maybe barracks is more appropriate. We had bunk beds and a foot locker and a little wardrobe to hang our shirts in. The floor was tiled. It led into a room with a row of sinks, and a sloped floor room with a single stainless steel pole in the middle with seven shower spigots sticking out of it was behind that but nothing had doors on it. Except the shitters. But I could lie in my bunk and look down the room past the sinks and see a guys feet under the bathroom stall. We were living on top of each other, in other words.
Not being sure of the point of this story makes it hard to wrap up, and I gotta get on the road now. Mitch, my gracious host, and I are heading into the 9th Ward to see how well our government has helped the victims of Hurricane Katrina. But the thing I think I learned about myself by joining the merchant marines is that I can’t deal with any issue in my life directly. Very few of us can.
