I may be growing older, but I’m getting no wiser when it comes to matters of age.

At halftime, there was a hip-hop performance on the court. Apparently it was a fairly well-known act – this was, after all, opening day in a city with little else on its mind. But I had never heard of them, the result of iPod OCD and my desire – nay, my need – to know profoundly each album on my hard drive before I’d move on to a new one. The radio, of course, was thus out of the question.

About two minutes into their act, however, my father erupted into a fury that could not be cooled by our cheap Coors Lights, a fury directed at the idea that the entertainment desires of old, white men might not be exclusively catered to at this – HIS – sporting event. He rushed up the stairs, knocking over our food along the way, and waited in the bathroom of the promenade for it to end.

I myself could not hear the performers. My head was instead filled with what I imagined to be my father’s enraged inner dialog, his supposed futility of life in this modern age.

To “trust” is to abandon common sense in the vain pursuit of shared humanity. To trust someone who wants to sleep with you is to simply be a fool.

In a trio of poems, Corey reflects on things long lost and things long lingering.

“When’s the last time you washed the sheets?”

I’m not entirely sure, so I say, “If I had any idea when I was going to see you, I’d wash them before you came.”

It is entirely possible that we both dislike each other immensely, and just really like sex.

I got my first pair of 2(x)ist briefs as a “saw-it-at-TJMaxx” gift from my grandma. Presumably she didn’t know of their iconic gay status, much less of my iconic gay status. But she did always have fabulous taste.

Like most confused young homosexuals with psychological disorders, I go back and forth between living for sex and wondering if sex is even worth pursuit. How much time do we put into our search for a feeling that, in but a fleeting moment, is no more?

But knowing that most of us seek out this feeling regardless, perhaps a better question is: what happens to the emotions and feelings of sex long the act itself is over? What do we hold onto that makes it all worth it? And what do we lose?

I find that the locking of eyes, the locking of lips, and the touches of skin are all too soon forgotten, lost in the endless parade of opportunities and mistakes that this world has to offer. But the aspects of sex that stick with me – those that make it all worth it – are those strange and unsure moments… Those seconds in which I realize that beneath their facades and clothing, all people are brilliantly fucked up and startlingly human.

The contemporary queer experience is largely one of discovering one’s self. We discover through desire, we discover through dreams, we discover in memories and stories and imaginations. We discover, in short, through life.

As someone who grew up writing, one of the most frustrating things for me was the exclusion of queer experience in the narrative of this world. Our stories, poems, artwork, advertisements, textbooks, and tall and short tales are all void of real queer voices and imagery, with a few notable exceptions. So even before I knew for sure that I was gay, I found myself writing and singing and talking endlessly as a means of sorting out who I was and how I fit in.

In this new series – named “Little Black Book” for the Moleskin journal in which I’ll write it – I will take a more abstract and creative look at life as a queer person in America today. As was true from my days writing TNG’s singles column, there will be sex and dating and all of those lovely things. But for today, I wanted to share a story I wrote in high school that put me on the road to self discovery through writing.