Dirty Books

Backstory: An essay from my archives

Backstory is a new feature for paid subscribers—work that has appeared in print only publications or publications that have failed. This essay originally appeared in 2013, in an online magazine that no longer exists, Adult Mag, edited by Sarah Nicole Prickett. I am giving it a home here for now. This version of the essay has been revised and expanded from the original. It may be reprinted in my next essay collection. Also? My summer essay collection class kicks off in ten days.

Imagine a big white wooden library several stories high, with a set of columns out front like it’s half New England house of worship, half Greek temple. The year is 1979. Card catalogs are still in use, and when you check a book out of a library, they write your name on a card that goes in the back of the book, with the names of all of the other patrons who’ve checked a book out, like you’re a team, a family, descendants—a legacy of interest in that book, that writer, that subject.

See me as I was then: age 12, in front of the card catalog in the adult section within that secular temple, or, the ‘upstairs’ as it had long been known to me—upstairs from the children’s books floor. I was a slight bookish boy, mixed Korean and white, asthmatic, slender, my hair long and light brown, down to my neck, sometimes mistaken for a girl. The town librarians had been impressed with how much I read, and the care I took with the books, and as I had more or less put my name in the back of every book in the children’s room, they told me they were giving me special permission to begin reading from the books upstairs.

As I open the drawer on the catalog, I look both ways, as if crossing the street, for I know I am too young to do this, and pull at the cards in the file for H-Hom. Homosexuality. There were two cards. I felt a mixed excitement and sadness, excited these two were there, sad they were the only two.

I had only just learned this word the summer previous, when I’d found my uncle’s old Penthouse Magazines stacked in my grandparent’s garage up at their Waterville farm. In the cold of the garage in summer, by the tarp covering the magazines, I looked through these pages into another world, a world made entirely, it seemed, of people having sex with each other. Intense, friendly, fun, and sometimes forbidden sex.

You may be thinking Penthouse was marketed to heterosexuals and you are correct, but there was a kink to the letters then all the same. You could find queer stories in the letters to the editor, allegedly written by readers about their own sexual exploits—a kind of early all-text amateur porn, or written at least as if it were. The sections were divided by categories into Boy/Girl, Girl/Girl, Boy/Boy, “Anything Goes”, “You’ll Never Believe What Just Happened”. I found all of it mesmerizing, but in particular the way previously unimaginable secrets came out, hidden lusts, hidden desires, from every part of life—it was like looking at a normal life through some strange kaleidoscope of sexual possibility. A kaleidoscope that confirmed a suspicion for me: what turned me on the most were the stories of men having sex with other men.

After several days spent there, learning about things I had never even guessed at, my mother found me with them. She asked me to go play outside, and burned them in the oil can out in the field behind the barn, a can reserved for burning such things.

I watched as the burned pieces of colored paper lifted in the wind.

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