When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,21

their homes are sold to young married couples who scrap the earth-toned carpets and build islands in the kitchens. The interiors of these houses used to look the same, and, eventually, as each is bought and remodeled, they’ll look the same again, but in a different way.

The party was held at what I thought of as “the Rosens’ place,” though that was two owners ago. The hostess was one of the new people, as were her guests, and it surprised me that my dad knew everyone’s name. Here were Phil and Becky, Ashley and Dave, and a high-spirited fifteen-year-old, who threw himself onto the sofa with great flourish and referred to my father as a she, as in “Lou Sedaris, who invited her?”

“My son is gay!” the boy’s mother announced, as if none of us had figured this out yet. He may have attended one of those magnet schools for the arts, but still it floored me that a ninth grader in Raleigh, North Carolina — on the street where I grew up — could comfortably identify himself as a homosexual. I felt like someone in a ten-pound leg brace meeting a beneficiary of the new polio vaccine. “She just happens to be my father, young man, and I’d appreciate it if you’d show her a little respect.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

When I was this kid’s age, you’d be burned alive for such talk. Being a homosexual was unthinkable, and so you denied it, and found a girlfriend who was willing to settle for the sensitive type. On dates, you’d remind her that sex before marriage was just that, sex: what dogs did in the front yard. This as opposed to making love, which was more what you were about. A true union of souls could take anywhere from eight to ten years to properly establish, but you were willing to wait, and for this the mothers loved you. You sometimes discussed it with them over an iced tea, preferably on the back porch when your girlfriend’s brother was mowing the lawn with his shirt off.

I kept my secret to myself until I was twenty years old, and I might have kept it even longer had a couple not picked me up when I was hitchhiking one night. It was 1:00 a.m., and the last thing I expected was a ride in a Cadillac. Stranger still was opening the back door and discovering that the people inside were old — my parents’ age, at least. The car smelled of hair tonic. A CB radio crackled from its berth beside the steering wheel, and I wondered who they could be talking to at this time of night. Then I noticed that the woman was wearing a negligee. She leaned forward to press the cigarette lighter, and I could see a tag the size of an index card showing through the sheer fabric at the back of her neck. We drove in silence for a mile or two before the man turned in his seat and asked, as if he were inquiring about my health, “How’d you like to eat my wife’s pussy?”

Then the woman turned as well, and it was to her that I made my confession: “I’m a homosexual.” I’d been waiting to unload this for as long as I could remember, and, amid the screeching of tires and the violent swerve to the side of the road, I felt all the relief I’d imagined I would.

A few months later I said the same thing to my best friend, Ronnie, who pretended to be surprised and then admitted that she’d known all along. “It’s the way you run,” she said. “You let your arms flop instead of holding them to your sides.”

“Work on your run,” I wrote in my diary the following morning.

At the age that many would consider their heyday, I had not had sex with anyone. My confessions did nothing to alter this situation, but for the first time in my life I felt that somebody actually knew me. Three somebodies, to be exact. Two were roaming the highway in a Cadillac, doing God knows what with a CB radio, but the other was as close to me as my own skin, and I could now feel the undiluted pleasure of her company.

Next on my list of people to tell was my former college roommate, Todd. I hitched from Raleigh to Kent, Ohio, but once I got there, the time didn’t seem quite right. It was harder telling a guy than