I first corresponded with Jim the summer I was 13, in a chat room where I whittled away hours talking to gay strangers, looking for attention.
Those entries are maddeningly self-aggrandizing, full of references to brand names that I thought would make me sound adult and sophisticated and big words that I thought would make me sound smart they’re also sometimes heartbreakingly self-aware. In the writing I did during that period, I told the story of myself as a self-conscious boy Lolita who seduced an older man as a conquest. For a while I said that I was “predated upon,” because that felt softer than the word “rape.” Mostly, I think that’s because saying that I was raped divorces me from a sense of my adolescent precocity that I am frightened to relinquish, and I would rather be someone who was inexplicably damaged than identify as a dumb kid who thought he was smart and got in over his head. The relationship I had when I was 14 with an older man named Jim certainly qualifies. But I was certain that the quotidian drama of being a high school student in crunchy Portland, Ore., wasn’t compelling enough, and I craved the source material for stories that would make my story debauched enough to document. I was already practicing for the memoir I wanted to write someday I loved pulpy personal narratives, stories of trauma and dysfunction, and I was captivated by the idea of writing about my own experience. Like a lot of millennials who grew up in the first chapter of the Internet era, I spent a lot of time - certainly too much time - online, in chat rooms and on sites like LiveJournal, where I documented my life in exhaustive detail. I had emotionally fraught relationships with boys who were still in the closet, smoked a lot of clove cigarettes, and wrote maudlin poetry with titles like “Your Bulimic Girlfriend” and “Semi-Meaningless Physical Manifestation of Loneliness” and, during a brief and ill-fated period of experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, “I Am Writing This on Acid.”
I was too loosely supervised by my well-intentioned but distracted parents, who gave me too much freedom after I came out unusually early, at age 11 I think they confused being overly permissive with allowing me to be myself, or maybe they just didn’t know how to control me.
I shouldn’t have been so worried, since I was already crazier than most of my friends - bright but narcissistic, sexually precocious, and emotionally high-strung. When I was a teenager, nothing frightened me more than being ordinary.