It's National Coming Out Day.

Steven and Eduardo, summer 1983, camping near Phoenicia, New York.

This is an excerpt from Jack, the piece I’m working on:

“Here’s something on the reliability of memory, on how stories get told, and on whether or not they are true and whether or not it matters: after two years in New York, broke and not sure what to do anymore, I decided to return to Greencastle, live with my parents, and attend DePauw University long enough to finish an undergraduate degree. I was 22. But that summer, two months before I was to leave New York, I fell in love with a boy, Eduardo. This was the summer of 1983. In the fall, I brought Eduardo home to Indiana to meet my family. Both Eduardo and I had bleached our hair platinum blond and wore oversized Bermuda shorts and black boots. We looked like every other kid in the East Village that summer. But this was Indiana. I hadn’t yet told my parents I was gay. The bus dropped us off in front of the Greyhound station, which was at Marvin’s Pizza Place but not the old Marvin’s, which had been torn down. There was a new building on the same site and it doubled as the bus station. Eduardo and I went straight to the library a few blocks away to meet my mother who would drive us home. Our appearance there made a stir. A janitor at the library taunted my mother about her queer son, she cried that night and pleaded with me to cut my hair. I did. For her. A few days later, Eduardo went back to New York, and I remember waiting with him for the bus at dawn on a bench in front of Marvin’s, the smell of his shoulder, how sad I was. That’s my coming out story. My mother tells a different coming out story that takes place four years earlier during my first visit home my freshman year of college in Ohio. She and I and Dad are having lunch at Moore’s Bar downtown on the courthouse square, where they served, where they still serve, the best tenderloin sandwiches in town. Mom says I told them I was gay that day over lunch and my father told me about his father, Ed, and told me that it was fine that I was gay, that they knew already, but to be careful because there are men who will hurt you if they find out. I have no recollection of having said anything about being gay that day, but I had pierced my left ear and I remember how strongly Mom disapproved. In my mother’s version of my coming out story, which I don’t remember, there is a conversation where I say the words, ‘I’m gay.’ In mine, there is not.”