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CHAD MORGAN

HIDING: AN ESSAY

I believe to this day, with a conviction so ardent it is probably akin to that which 
motivates religious radicals, domestic terrorists, and Kanye West, that I did not, as 
my mother asserted that evening in 1995 or 1996, choose the flashlight because it was 
pink. In fact I am fairly certain that the flashlight in question just happened to be the 
first one hanging on the rack and that I didn’t even notice it was pink until my mother 
pointed it out to me. I’d simply grabbed it because it was the most conveniently 
located and we were in a hurry. I’ll concede that I was a pretty queer kid1, but kids 
learn quickly how to survive in the world, especially the queer ones, and at age ten 
or eleven, despite never having gone to summer camp before, it seems unlikely that I 
didn’t know better than to take a pink flashlight with me. 

That the flashlight was pink, however, was the first thing my mother noticed. 
The summer camp had sent in the mail a list of  items I’d need to bring with me. The 
flashlight was on it, and things like tennis shoes, bug spray, “modest swimwear,” and 
shortly after arriving at the Target on South Bend’s south side, my mother ripped off  
the bottom half  of  the list and, handing it to me, sent me in search of  the supplies list-
ed thereupon. I quickly found the batteries, the hiking socks (surely the first intimation 
I’d caught of  the possibility of  such an activity, otherwise it’s hard to believe I’d have 
agreed to the whole summer camp thing in the first place), plastic disposable poncho 
in case of  rainy days spent out of  doors (likewise), and the flashlight. Certain she’d be 
pleased at how expediently I’d completed my tasks, I rejoined my mother, somewhere 
between the coolers of  frozen pizza and microwaveable dinners and the first aisles of  
the Sporting Goods section, delineated by the pup tents and inflatable mattresses in 
their oblong boxes, proudly bearing my spoils. Instead of  the glad tidings I’d expect-
ed, however, I was met with a disapproval so fierce and abiding I confess it troubles 
me to this day.2   

“What are you thinking?” she railed at me. “You already get made fun of  and 
here you want a pink flashlight?” I looked at her, stunned, silent. I was near dizzy with 
the belief  that I hadn’t chosen it because it was pink, that I didn’t “want” a pink flash-
light. My stomach turned with the sickening rage that accompanies any false accusa-
tion. Yet I couldn’t defend myself, or provide what I knew was the true and perfectly 

1 I remember once waking up from a nightmare – sweaty, breathless, in tears – wherein my older brother 
was destroying my cassette copy of  Mariah Carey’s Daydream. Naturally, I went wailing of  the terror into 
my mother’s bedroom, demanding that she wake my brother and make him swear that such an atrocity 
he would never commit. I was requisitely chastised for my “dramatics” and sent back to bed; my brother 
slept undisturbed. 
2 I have hyperbolic tendencies, so you should know that when I say it “troubles me to this day,” what I 
most likely mean is that I think about it sometimes.



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logical explanation. I couldn’t, because there was a subject that breathed always just 
beneath the surface, a truth unexpressed, seemingly inexpressible, that in moments 
like this bubbled dangerously to the top. I couldn’t, because there was no way to talk 
about the flashlight without talking about that other thing, however obliquely. 

My mother removed the flashlight from the shopping cart, thrusting it at me as 
if  it were a dirty and soiled thing, and sent me to find one more appropriately hued. I 
returned a few minutes later with one that was blue.

If  my mother’s verbiage sounds cruel, let me assure you that her point was not 
wholly unfounded: I did get made fun of. A lot. In seventh grade, Eric Kelter and 
Ryan Strong and some of  the other “popular guys,” a “friend” told me, nicknamed 
me Banana Eater3; Ed Snell in ninth grade P.E. was fond of  calling me by the names 
of  gay celebrities, hurling “Elton John” or “George Michael” at me with pejorative 
force; Donald Mackey, after watching me race a group of  four classmates around the 
track sophomore year, had greeted me at the finish line with the inquisition, “You a 
cake? You a cake ain’t you?”4 I escaped the academic identity of  The Bullied for two 
reasons: 1) I was mostly unafraid to come to my own defense, usually with some retort 
as snappily generated as it was cruel, but resorting to fisticuffs when necessary, and 2) 
there really wasn’t such a thing as “bullying” in the 90s. Kids were just kids and some 
of  them were assholes. 

From a certain perspective, I did the absolute most to make myself  an easy 
target. That’s what my mother was teaching me with the pink flashlight, and if  her 
rhetoric seems misguided her intention is understandable in a way I couldn’t, truly, 
until many years later, as I watched a group of  three year olds ignore my nephew in 
a McDonald’s PlayPlace. I can’t imagine it’s pleasant to hear daily the many ways 
in which people had been cruel to your child, or see, as clearly as my mother did, 
the things about her child that made him subject to those cruelties. She was trying 
to help: if  I didn’t want other campers to make fun of  me, she was saying, perhaps 
I shouldn’t take a pink flashlight to camp. If  I didn’t want Marcell Peterson to ask 
me nine times a week if  I was sure I didn’t have a pussy, or for Leon McCray to 
spit slurs at me in the cafeteria line at lunch, then perhaps I should not do my best 
Jessica Rabbit, singing “Why Don’t Do you Do Right?” for the entire class during 
free period. Perhaps I should not know all the dance moves from the 2001 Lady 
Marmalade music video – or at least not perform them, wholly without irony, at Ben 
Cusk’s sixteenth birthday party. After all, those were not compulsive, uncontrollable 
behaviors but very calculated5 performances I enacted with complete agency, and, 

3  Long before I’d ever, ahem, eaten my first banana. 
4 I confess that it was many weeks before I figured out that Donald meant “Cake” as an abbreviated 
version of  “Fruitcake,” and, as it struck my impressionable fifteen year-old mind as a rather creative 
neologism, I found I could only be mildly offended. This as well happened in gym class, which is 
basically a master-class in the enforcement of  patriarchal ideals of  manhood. 
5 And, it has to be said, expertly executed. Incidentally I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize, 
sincerely, to Ben Cusk, if  my antics hampered your birthday festivities.



85

though they happened a few years after the incident with the flashlight, they are 
nevertheless emblematic of  my general hijinks. Recalling them leaves me as tempted 
as anyone toward viewing my situation with a well-damned-if-he-wasn’t-asking-for-
it attitude. But I was bothered by it. I think of  the times I stayed home sick when I 
wasn’t, or the passing periods I spent nervous-vomiting in the bathroom, or the nights 
my anxiety was so bad it kept me awake, mentally going over the ways I could be 
better, pressing the dome of  my head methodically against the headboard so that it 
hurt just a little. 

I’ve often wondered if  being an effeminate guy might never have bothered 
me quite as much if  I weren’t gay also. An effete nature is not a prerequisite for 
being homosexual, certainly, but in some circles, many of  my characteristics read 
as indicative of  same-sex desire, and that desire is what they were always objecting 
to, the flaw they were really pointing out. It didn’t matter so much that I “ran like a 
girl” or “talked like a girl” or that I listened primarily to music by women or had a 
fondness for movie musicals – things few traditional males would have much truck 
with. What mattered for the people in my life – for Donald Mackey, for Ed Snell, 
for my seventh grade math teacher who more than once euphemistically chided me 
for being “too charismatic” – was that these peculiarities weren’t so much reading 
“feminine” as they were reading “gay.” And if  I didn’t care if  that they thought I was 
girly, I did care that they thought I was gay, because I was gay,6 and, moreover, I didn’t 
want anyone to know.

Maybe that I was gay wasn’t why I “ran like a girl,” or why I liked “girl music,” 
or might have chosen a pink flashlight, but it was the terrible secret those things 
threatened to disclose. My body, that treacherous thing, and the things I made it do, 
my interests, habits, tastes – absolutely everything about myself, it seemed – constantly 
betrayed the only secret I wanted to keep. Secrecy equaled survival, so, albeit with 
a lack of  success that belied my true ambition, I tried to be a man: I practiced 
masculine postures in the full-body mirror on the back of  my bedroom door, lowering 
and broadening my shoulders and training my hips away from their tendency to 
jut out to either side whenever I stood idle. I watched the men and boys I knew, 
studying the way they walked – slower than I, I noticed, at once more causal and 
controlled, their hips hardly moving. My entire torso seemed to sway when I walked, 
and I suffered backaches and constipation training it to do otherwise. I studied male 
characters in movies and on television and tried to emulate their natures and speech 
patterns and mannerisms. I spent more time with my brothers and less time with 
my sisters, and started going to the baseball games and wrestling meets my father 
officiated on the weekends, as if  the problem all along was that I was simply spending 
too much time around women. Yet any sustained effort to modify my behavior was, I 
discovered, ultimately failed, not to mention exhausting. I tried, bless my little heart, 
but the cold truth was that I just wasn’t any good at being a dude. I would not be able 
to hide there. 

6  SPOILER ALERT: Still am.



86

* * *

We find other ways of  hiding. Because I wasn’t and felt that I’d tried and 
couldn’t be traditionally masculine, I became obsessed with masculinity. If  I couldn’t 
appease its mighty strictures with my life, I could, perhaps, mollify it with my ethics. 

This line of  thinking manifested itself  in many ways, most prominently in my 
habit of  “dating” only “straight acting” guys. These were guys who were masculine in 
the most typical ways: sloppy dressers, careless groomers, video gamers. Because they 
were all, like me, in their early 20s, they skewed toward un-showered skateboarders or 
the type of  guys who went around dressed as if  they were always on their way to the 
gym. We had very little in common, but that seemed beside the point. What mattered 
about these guys was that they were successfully masculine.

When I was with them I could imagine my father liking them. I could imagine 
them getting along with my brothers, all of  them huddled in front of  the television 
some Sunday talking about football – never mind that I could hardly get these guys 
to go to Burger King with me, let alone home meet my parents. But if  I could have, 
I knew that they would have been included in ways I was not, because I didn’t follow 
sports and didn’t have the vocabulary to participate in the conversations, didn’t know 
anything about cars, wasn’t in a poker club, wasn’t interested, and these things, too, 
snitched of  my gayness. Being with a veritable “man’s man” seemed like a vicarious 
sort of  masculinity, like if  I couldn’t be it I could at least find some validation in 
possessing it. And even as these relationships happened largely in both the literal and 
metaphorical dark, even as “dating” these fellows very rarely entailed actual dates, 
I relished knowing and telling my friends that the guys I slept with were routinely as 
butch as football quarterbacks.  

And yet, it wasn’t just that they were masculine. It was the privilege that mascu-
linity allowed them. I liked that they could engage in homosexual acts in private and 
still be whomever they wanted in public. It wasn’t the first thing people asked them. 
It wasn’t an attribute people noticed from across the street, as it was for me, like a leg 
ravaged by Polio. It didn’t have any bearing on them as a person. 

To be sure, there are perfectly masculine gay men in the world, even if  you 
don’t see them on television, and while my “boyfriends” ran a spectrum of  sexual 
identity from strictly-dickly to inconsistently straight, they tended toward the latter. 
It’s no coincidence that many of  them were closeted and that the ones who weren’t 
lost some of  their appeal each time they referred to themselves as gay. By the time I 
got to college I was beginning my coming out process, which was incremental and 
longer than necessary. I spent a long time one-foot out, testing the waters, unsure that 
I wanted to get wet. Those were heady times and things were very enmeshed: because 
my masculine failures had always left me exposed, masculinity and heterosexuality 
had become synonymous. That these guys were masculine meant they could be gay 
without it disturbing their lives very much, and, as long as we didn’t go out in public, 
my life could be undisturbed as well. There was nothing wrong with the honest 



87

attraction I felt for these guys, even if  it was purely sexual, but beneath its lusty veneer, 
motivating it, there lurked a sinister self-doubt, if  not self-hatred, that liked these men 
solely because their behavior coded masculine, because they “passed,” and not because 
I liked them.7 I knew those connections would never amount to anything deeper than 
the exchange of  basic banalities and bodily fluids. They weren’t even connections; 
they were a way of  staying in the closet, of  denying myself  an authentic life. 

Full disclosure: I still like masculine guys. The acknowledgement does not 
necessarily portend rectification. My preference is still and will probably always be 
for guys who are slightly rough around the edges, slightly muscled, able to navigate a 
toolbox, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We are to a certain extent mere slaves 
to our tastes, wily as they are, and too-close analysis turns up more inconsistencies 
than followable logic. However, I work now to remember that I wasn’t merely finding 
delectation in my proximity to masculinity, but justification, exculpation, absolution. 
At least, I thought I was finding those things. I realize now, with the clarity that comes 
only from hindsight, that what I found there was not amnesty but further abjection. 
In those guys I “dated” and the things about myself  I tried to change I wasn’t finding 
the clemency I didn’t truly need: I was finding a place to hide. 

7  In fact, I’m quite certain I resolutely hated two or three of  them, and at least one of  them was a 
downright deplorable human being.




