... The rest of this story is more particular to the boy who as response becomes a homo or trap, and Paglia is right about that part—masculinity rejected simply because of distance from other boys in general, mostly as a result of a certain native over-sensitivity. But then there is the added observation that when, late in adolescence or some time in youth, such boy decides he is “gay,” that is but the final act of self-misunderstanding. The drama of his spirit is reinterpreted on sexual terms. He has convinced himself that the feeling of suppression and dread that had accompanied him his whole life was because his sexual desires or “sexuality” had been repressed by “society.” He forgets how these sexual desires developed in the first place, that these desires themselves were a circuitous result of the truth that dawned on him in silence, the truth of the utter subjection and domestication of the space in which he found himself. In becoming “gay” he believes he is escaping that sense of primal limitation and subjection that he felt as a small boy: he has reinterpreted his entire drama as a maudlin story of sexuality suppressed or oppressed by retrograde social and political norms.
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