He administered an emetic, and I vomited up my mother’s stash. My parents found me in my room a while later, crying and drowsy, and sent me to a doctor who lived in our Manhattan apartment building. As it turned out, ten Valiums don’t kill you. But there it was, and I subsequently plunged into a spiral of depression and anxiety that has recurred sporadically throughout my life.īy the summer after my freshman year in college, I was so dejected that I snuck into my mother’s medicine cabinet and swallowed the contents of her bottle of Valium. I don’t know what cognitive process had transpired, how the various pieces of knowledge had fallen into place so that my subconscious announced the truth to my conscious self. Then one morning when I was a junior in high school, I woke up and thought, I’m a homosexual. I told no one and instead scrubbed the bed until the sheets had holes. Once, when he was seeing a famous actress, my mother arranged to have dinner with the two of them so she could meet the celebrity.) The first time I ejaculated, fantasizing about Robert Conrad in The Wild Wild West, I had no idea what had just happened and wondered if I was the only person in the world who ever had this experience. My parents slept in separate rooms, and sex was never mentioned in our household (I found out later that my mother encouraged my father to have affairs to avoid going to bed with him. When I was young, I knew I was attracted to my own gender but I didn’t know what that meant, or what other boys felt, or what sex was all about.
I remember the exact moment I realized that I was gay. I’m too nervous to say yes or no, because, sometime in the next two hours, I am supposed to have sex with her, and I don’t want to, I know it won’t end well, but my psychiatrist told me I had to. She asks me if I want something to drink. It resembles a garage sale, except for the enormous pink dildo on a shelf. This place is all clear plastic tables, sectional furniture, showy fabrics, and stuffed tigers, in random disorder. It’s a strange apartment, not at all like the gentrified apartments of the late seventies that I know, filled with oak furniture, antiques, and ferns. A very attractive Asian-American woman with long, dark hair invites me inside. 3 is closed, but she knows I’m in the building, so it’s too late to run away. But then an angry buzzing noise means the door is now unlocked, and so I open it and climb the desolate stairs up to the third floor. No other options, I realize, so I ring the bell.
Gathering my strength, I walk into the tiny entrance, the floor covered with Chinese-restaurant menus and grime, and stand motionless for a full minute. My hands are shaking, and a mixture of rain and sweat covers my forehead. I’ve taken the 86th Street crosstown bus from the West Side to York Avenue, a part of New York I’d never seen before, and am looking for an old tenement building where I’m supposed to ring No. Six thirty on a cold, rainy Monday evening. “Other People’s Dirty Laundry.” Photo: Tiana Markova-Goldįall 1980.
in New York (2007), an image from the series