Abraham Lincoln was the first. At five, I was overwhelmed by the chaos of it all: kindergarten, milk cartons, my father in and out of the house for weeks at a time, the numbers up to twenty. Lincoln offered a stable male presence. The more I learned about him from cartoons or flashcards or the life-size poster my mother hung above my bed, the more I admired him.
It wouldn’t be long until I met Abe in person. My family scheduled a trip to Disney World, where, according to my father, there was a place called the Hall of Presidents. For weeks, I counted down until I would finally be among them all, the presidents, in their great hall. My father explained to me that the presidents would not be alive but rather animatronic, which was a sort of robotic puppet. That’s fine, I said.
When the day came, and we arrived at the hall, I was tired and irritable from the heat. We sat in a dark room, and all the presidents stood together on the stage. When a voice introduced Lincoln, and all the presidents turned toward him, I cried and clawed at my mother with my long fingernails. In person, he horrified me. He was willowy and wrinkled—nothing like the cartoon image of him I’d seen on my flashcards or the Presidents’ Day mattress sale commercials that I made my mother record and play for me.
I felt a similar fear later that summer as I screamed and cried with my sister, the two of us standing in the bathroom doorway, when my father turned from the sink to reveal himself newly shaven, a different, seemingly younger man.
2
I spent most of 1997, my seventh year, working on my illustrated biography of Woodrow Wilson. The biography was an appreciation of Wilson’s fascinating life, but it was also utilitarian. Woodrow Wilson was president during the First World War, and from my bunk bed where I was typically cuddling with my imaginary friends, the band Hanson, I could hear my parents watching TV footage from Iraq and loudly agreeing that soon we would be in World War III. Though I was scared, I hoped the tragedy of war might save their marriage.
I hadn’t planned to seek out such a relevant historical figure. It just happened to be where I was in the series of presidential biographies that were at the Children’s Library.
“It’ll be OK,” I’d think to Hanson, petting a stuffed bear I imagined to be Taylor Hanson, who, like me, was terrified of war.
3
The first time I dressed as a US president, I was eight and it was Halloween. The year before, I’d humiliated myself, dressed as a Power Ranger when dressing as a Power Ranger was gauche. Scary was the way to be on Halloween. I knew that now. At the time, my main president book was a compendium of page-long biographies of every president, each accompanied by an official presidential portrait. I read this book every night, and every night when I got to Franklin Pierce, our fourteenth president, I knew who awaited me: James Buchanan. He terrified me. His pale skin and blank gaze, his effeminate, pink lips. I had nightmares about him crawling on top of me in bed.
He would be the perfect costume.
Designing and sewing the costume occupied my mother during the early days of divorce. She dressed me in tights with puffy Shakespeare-style shorts and a puffy Shakespeare-style shirt. None of this was historically accurate. I powdered my face. I wore pink lipstick. My mother dyed my hair gray with temporary Halloween dye and stuck it up in a prissy James Buchanan way. She had me pose for a picture to send to my dad. She said, “You’ll scare the shit out of him,” and I laughed because she’d used a bad word, but when she sent it to him, my father framed the picture and brought it from apartment to apartment as he embraced his transient bachelorhood.
Regardless, the photo reassured me of my capacity for horror. I couldn’t wait to terrify my peers. After a parade around our school building, the scariest children would be awarded ribbons and gift certificates to Wendy’s, and I wanted desperately to win.
But when I got to school all the kids looked at me like what the fuck? Even Mr. Simmons, my second-grade teacher, who was catty and cruel and in retrospect the first gay man to be a prick to me, stared when I told him whom I was dressed as. He said, “You know he basically started the Civil War, right?”
Of course I knew. But I was eight. While I could memorize facts, I couldn’t yet grasp their political or moral implications, nor did I realize Buchanan was likely a homosexual, though maybe some subconscious awareness compounded my fear of him. Either way, having Mr. Simmons as a role model did not make coming to terms with myself any easier in this moment of blatant yet unintentional vulnerability.
4
John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president, though I didn’t know it by looking at him. My image of Catholics was Italian Catholic, not Irish Catholic. The Irish Catholics went to our town’s other Catholic church. I don’t know why there was a division. No one really was anything.
In third grade, a grouchy girl in tie-dye came to our Sunday school class. She’d never been before. Her name was Brittany. I’d seen her in school, but we’d never met. She sat in the back row with her arms crossed. Monsignor Lewis came in while our teacher was explaining one of the cartoon Jesuses in the book, and he put his hands on Brittany’s shoulders and said, “I’m glad you’ll be joining us.” I remember thinking she looked uncomfortable, but I was relieved the priest wasn’t paying attention to me. Brittany cried, the priest did not remove his hands, but I stayed quiet. This was either an early test of morality that I failed (standing up for the downtrodden) or a spiritual test that I passed (acquiescing to the will of the Holy Spirit).
Much later Brittany told me it felt like he was pushing her into the desk or exorcising her. She never came back. This moment contributed to the development of her bitter cynicism and anti-sociality, which, when we became best friends years later in high school, rubbed off on me. This moment didn’t turn me gay, but that cynicism later proved to be a crucial defense against both homophobia and the risk of developing close interpersonal connections with other gay men.
5
As the divorce finalized, I entered a phase of life defined by my mother’s love of the musical artist Papa Roach. It was her only CD. A divorced friend had given it to her. All our drives were sound-tracked by Papa Roach and my mother singing along in a sort of Norah Jonesy croon to lines like “Suffocation … No breathing,” and “This is my last resort,” and “I’m crying. I’m crying. I’m crying.” Before long trips, my sister and I would move the CD from the car and place it in our mother’s Discman (she also listened to Papa on the treadmill, so forgetting the CD there was plausible). Usually, my mother would fill the void left by Papa with sweeping condemnations of President Clinton’s behavior. We all knew she was really talking about my father. While there were some similarities—“An intern, can you believe it! My god, she’s practically a child…”—biographical details quickly diverged. “And that apartment he moved to, you know, by your school, it’s where whores go. Men take whores there.”
6
When George W. Bush was up for reelection, I went canvassing for John Kerry with Brittany and her older (out) gay friend James, who was very political. It was scary to canvass for a Democrat where we lived in rural Pennsylvania. Political James told us which houses to go to, and I wasn’t sure if the houses were preapproved by John Kerry as safe or likely Democratic or if James was picking at random. The night before we canvassed, I looked up facts about the play “RENT” in case James wanted to talk about it. In addition to being political, he was vice president of the drama club. He didn’t want to talk about it. We actually didn’t talk a lot at all. His other friend Paula came, and he talked to her about bottoming and topping, which I didn’t know were anal sex words, while Brittany and I walked behind them.
As we left the last house, a little dejected because most people hadn’t answered their doors, I started quietly singing “How do you measure … measure a year?” I got a little louder when James didn’t turn around. “In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee, in inches …,” but I tapered off when James looked at me, squinted a little, but didn’t erupt into a climactic “How about LOoOVE!!!” as I’d fantasized.
George W. Bush won, and I learned a little bit about the total inconsequence of individual actions in respect to both love and democracy.
7
The summer after my senior year of high school, I participated in a trip to Georgia with Habitat for Humanity, an organization to which Jimmy Carter maintains his involvement despite his advanced age and occasionally ailing health. My participation contributed little to humanity and, in fact, likely detracted from it. While I worked on various wood-related tasks, I often injured myself in minor but nonetheless distracting ways. Productive men had to stop what they were doing with their drills, etc., to come bandage me or help me down from roofs. On the third day, I was reassigned to landscape-related tasks, such as spreading mulch.
I went because my crush political James was going, and on the last day in Georgia, James invited me to a circle jerk with two other guys. When I grabbed my cock, all I felt was the sting of bloody bruised skin beneath my fingernails, which I’d shattered with my hammer days before.
8
In college, I got my first boyfriend. He was studying botany. This was before plant gays were popular on social media, and he didn’t actually have any plants. He had two rats: Dorritt and Gabrielle. Gabrielle was hairless. My botanist boyfriend called himself a “rat daddy.” In his spare time, the rat daddy botanist was involved in the circus arts club on our campus. At the end of each term, the circus artists would congregate in front of the library and spin ropes that were on fire. To practice, he would put balls in knee socks and spin those around instead of holding my hand while we walked to class or the dining hall.
Even though there were many reasons I should have ended the relationship with the rat daddy circus arts botanist, it was he who continuously attempted to break up with me. He would say things like, “I never used the word love,” or “I wouldn’t call this a relationship,” or “My boyfriend back home would be so mad if he knew you thought I was dating you.” Yet, I felt convinced that he didn’t want me to leave his life but rather to accept less and less affection while continuing to offer emotional support and, if he needed it, sexual pleasure.
Andrew Johnson was the first US president to be impeached, but as hard as Congress tried to remove him from office, he would not go. He completed his disastrous one term as president. Similarly, I continued to kiss and suck off and cuddle with (but never fuck) the rat daddy circus arts botanist for two years even though it made us both feel bad afterward.
9
Socially, it was hard to come back from my association with the rat daddy circus arts botanist, and I had trouble meeting guys at my college even though there were plenty. I posted on Craigslist and met a guy who lived in downtown Poughkeepsie. My ad said I was down to do “it all.” I didn’t know gay slang, so I had to be vague. I took the 7:00 p.m. campus shuttle to the train station and walked to the guy’s house from there. Our anal sex did not go well. He played a zombie movie on the TV, and his overweight beagle sat on the arm of the couch and looked down at me while I was on my back and saying things like, “Yeah, OK, that’s great, sure feels OK, absolutely keep going … harder? You bet,” and “Oh, well, actually, maybe—”
The next day the guy called my cell phone and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was your first time.”
“It wasn’t my first time,” I said.
“Oh, it seemed like you’d maybe never—”
“It wasn’t my first time.”
To be honest, it was my first time bottoming, though I’d done several other sex acts with rat daddy, and I do consider this to be the time I “lost my virginity.”
While George Washington is credited as the first president of the United States, several men served as president before him under the Articles of Confederation. Only on rare occasions, though, does history acknowledge presidents John Hanson, Elias Boudinot, Nathaniel Gorham, etc.
I don’t know why I lied. It was likely less shameful to accept that I was bad at bottoming because of inexperience rather than a failure to learn even with practice.
10
When I first moved to Brooklyn after college, I fell into a depression. I had few friends and a bad job, and I was going on demoralizing dates with guys who thought they were too good for me or whom I thought were too good for me, which in effect convinced them of their superiority. One studied critical theory at NYU and said we didn’t have enough in common because I didn’t know who Giles Deleuze was, and if I didn’t understand Deleuze I could never understand him either; another left me because he was in a PhD program studying medieval times, and I didn’t know how to talk about religious triptychs. I took to taking long baths. I wanted Lena Dunham–style shame, but I wasn’t living in the Lena Dunham part of Brooklyn. I was living with the parents of a rich friend. I would sink into their bathtub, float there warm and alone, and think, “I am the William Howard Taft of Park Slope.”
11
In the spring, I moved to an apartment near the Pratt Institute with a gay guy named Ryan, who was a senior illustration major there. He’d been a senior four times, so he was older than I. He was always getting institutionalized. It made me mad because I thought if I had health insurance, I could also be institutionalized. He took frequent trips to Greece and once had to be flown back and institutionalized. “The feta! The olives!” he said when he was released. “It’s so repetitive. Who wouldn’t want to die?”
He got angry when he saw other people eating bagels or talking about bagels because, he said, “Bagels were my thing first.” He ate only the outer part of the bagel and threw away the inner parts. He learned the term food desert in a required sociology class and started using it to describe how he suffered in our neighborhood, even though he took cabs to restaurants in the East Village every night and didn’t seem to care about whether or not our neighbors had access to food. I guess I didn’t care either, but I didn’t make a thing out of it.
We lived across from public housing, and the police were always there harassing black men. Ryan would throw big parties on our roof with underage Pratt twinks who did coke in our kitchen. When I said I was worried we would get in trouble, he said, “White privilege bitch!” and did a move from Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” dance. During the parties, I sat in my room and researched library science schools. I thought library science school would change everything for me. I liked the idea of being alone and creating order.
A year or so into living together, I found out Ryan wasn’t actually being institutionalized. He just “called it that.” Really, he was flying back to California to spend weeks at his childhood home in Yorba Linda, birthplace of disgraced president Richard Nixon.
12
I was a bad roommate too. Ryan had an incredible body, so I would say things to shame him for what he ate. If he ordered Thai food, I would say “Noodles? Yummy!” and he would throw them away. During his depressed periods, I would say, “Skipping the gym again this morning?” and then he would go to the gym, which I figured could have positive mental health effects. It made me mad when he skipped the gym because I didn’t have a gym membership and he took his for granted. It made me mad when he went to the gym too. I thought all this was justified because he also made me feel bad; he just did it without words.
I would scroll through his Instagram until I felt horrible. I would open a shirtless picture of him and put it next to a shirtless picture of me and notice the differences. Then I would make ridiculous meals, like peanuts and kale in boiled salty water. I’d eat these meals with whiskey, which could get me drunk for under two hundred calories. Some historians believe that our twelfth president, Zachary Taylor, died after eating bad green apples.
13
Most nights, I would run from Bed-Stuy to Greenpoint and back until I threw up. One night, I was running along the Williamsburg waterfront, looking at the city across the river, feeling the rush you feel when you’ve been running for a long time, and theorizing about my life to avoid the obvious. What I was doing was not disordered but a willful pursuit of fragility, a desire to confront death by becoming the flimsy scrim between life and it. I could see my veins and bones and I thought, if I were to undress, maybe the tourists eating ice cream on the pier would see right through me. Later, while I crouched beside a cupcakery to throw up, I found a two-dollar bill. Thomas Jefferson! An incredible leader with a lithe, fit body. I swallowed what was left in my mouth and kept running.
14
Eventually I got a boyfriend. We met on the Internet, and we both had depression, though we didn’t know it. He should have known it because he was in a psychology graduate program. It was nice to be with someone who also didn’t want to wake up until the afternoon. Once in 2014, Barack Obama came to give a speech in the city, and I asked my boyfriend if he wanted to go. He said, “No, I fucking hate Obama.” He said the only person he would vote for was Glenn Greenwald. In 2012, he’d written him in. I said, “You’re black and you don’t like Obama?” “No,” he said. “I’m black. I don’t like Obama. They’re different sentences.” I said OK, but I probably wasn’t hearing what he meant.
We dated for three years, and near the end we went together to the Laura Poitras exhibit “Astro Noise” at the Whitney. In one part of the exhibit, you’d lie down in a dark room and stare up at time-lapsed night skies from Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. You were waiting for a drone to come. At the time, my boyfriend and I were both cheating on each other, but neither of us had gotten caught yet. I felt intensely anxious while we waited for the drone, but it wasn’t the anxiety I was supposed to feel. Afterwards, we stood outside the Apple store before he got on the L, and I got on the downtown C. We weren’t spending many nights together then. I said, “You were right, Obama sucks.” He said, “Told you so.” We lasted another month.
15
In order to demonstrate my political purity to my ex, I joined a reading group sponsored by a socialist magazine. I went to the reading group with my socialist friend, who was also the person with whom I cheated on my boyfriend. I now considered this friend my boyfriend. He was in another relationship, too, and his other boyfriend was the discussion leader of the socialist reading group. The discussion leader boyfriend said he felt no sense of possession at all, over things or over people, so seeing us together wouldn’t hurt him.
The discussion leader turned to me in the circle and said, “What did you think of the article?”
I hadn’t read the article because I’d spent a long time getting dressed. I tried to remember what it was about. Schools maybe, or banks. Global warming? Occupy Wall Street? Were socialists still talking about Occupy Wall Street?
“Well,” I said. I had recently begun reapplying to library science school, so I decided to talk about that. “On the topic of libraries—” I looked around to judge people’s reactions. They were nodding with big, patronizing smiles. I knew I was saying something irrelevant, but I had to keep going. “Simply no one is talking about the revolutionary potential of libraries! It’s, well, it’s a major oversight of this article.”
“OK,” said my boyfriend’s boyfriend, the socialist reading group leader. He returned to the article at hand, which was about the disastrous effects of microcredit and other neoliberal policies on development in the Global South. In some ways, the dissolution of my relationship with my new boyfriend, who was the boyfriend of the socialist reading group leader, began with our fifth president, James Monroe, whose infamous Monroe Doctrine initiated US hegemony in Latin America, paving the way for future forays into global imperialism and, eventually, microcredit, which I Googled that night after my new boyfriend left me.
16/17 (tie)
For the two years of library science school, I lived in Oregon, which I thought would be ethereal and calming, but which was, in actuality, a depressing forest for subtle white supremacists who treat their clinical depression with tinctures and mountain biking.
I lived between Van Buren Avenue and Harrison Boulevard. These were two of the worst presidents. William Henry Harrison got sick and died, and in Oregon, because of the rain, I often thought I would get sick and die. Martin Van Buren had the ugliest haircut of any president, and in Oregon, because all the barbershops were queer barbershops, I had a terrible haircut too.
I had sex with two people between those thoroughfares. They were both studying botany. The first botanist taught me how to forage for mushrooms. In Oregon, people forage for mushrooms to avoid confronting their inner demons. When someone takes you mushroom foraging, especially for truffles or chanterelles, they blindfold you on the way there so you can’t go back to their spot without permission. He didn’t blindfold me, and we weren’t hiding from inner demons; rather, we talked about our inner demons while we foraged. I told him about my parents’ divorce and how often I used it as justification for poor behavior in relationships, but how, really, I didn’t understand why I grasped for unattainable affection. He told me how it tortured him that he would never give back to the earth as much as he has taken and would inevitably continue to take. A few months later we broke up, and he moved to New York.
The second botanist said, “You’ll never be able to make me cum. It takes incredible skill.” And he was right.
18
When I moved back to New York, I wanted to have reckless sex in a way that I couldn’t in Oregon where for most of the year having sex with someone involved first asking them to take off their “rain pants.” While I searched for an apartment, I moved back in with my rich friend’s parents and went on a lot of dates, hoping the men would invite me home with them.
One date was with a guy who said he’d invented the Red Bull slogan “It gives you wings.” He was living off the money from that. We were talking about Donald Trump, and because as an unemployed librarian I had few career achievements to mention, I was trying to impress him through insight. I was saying it’s insane that the state exerts a direct influence on our sexuality. He asked what I meant. That morning I’d read a Tweet about biopolitics, but I didn’t know how to explain it. I said, “Well, take me and the US presidents,” but then I stopped. In the past, I’d been told that I needed to do a better job determining what was “first date material.”
I showed self-restraint by concealing my particular interest in presidents from the Red Bull guy, but then I ate his ass in what wasn’t even a single stall kind of bathroom in what wasn’t even a gay bar. Afterward, he said “Wow,” and “I wish Trump could’ve seen that.”
19
Wait. I repressed this one. In 1994, my great-grandmother was dying. She had Alzheimer’s, and we visited her in hospice. She didn’t remember me, but I didn’t remember her either. A few weeks after she died, Ronald Reagan announced his own diagnosis with Alzheimer’s. I’m now realizing that when I think of Ronald Reagan, there’s a flicker, subconscious memory of my dying great-grandmother. I don’t think of Ronald Reagan much, usually only in the context of his genocidal negligence toward HIV/AIDS. It’s weird to think that when I think of AIDS, often after having unprotected sex, as I get indignant and channel my fear into a social critique that summons Ronald Reagan into my mind, I remember, however briefly and imperceptibly, my own great-grandmother dying in the same way I likely will if I’m able to avoid everything else.
20
Life started to come together. I got a job at a library branch in Greenpoint and moved in with a lesbian poet in Astoria. Work was rote but fulfilling. Sometimes I got to teach little lessons, like reading classes for children or computer classes for the elderly. One night, a gay coworker invited me to a costume party he was throwing. I asked if the party had a particular theme. He said, “Just dress like a whore.”
I decided to dress as slutty Ulysses S. Grant because my lesbian poet roommate had a lot of clothes that looked like nineteenth-century military outfits. She helped me order a fake beard online, and we cut the sleeves off her clothes and ripped them in spots to show skin. I’m not sure if my newfound sexual confidence came from my professional success as a librarian or from wearing the wardrobe of a battered Civil War general, but I’d never gotten so much positive attention in my life. I didn’t have sex that night, but I spent some time in the party host’s bathroom admiring my dirt-stained face in the mirror and thinking, “I’ve finally made it.”
21
Then the library lost funding, and my roommate moved in with a woman she met in her archery club.
I needed to get my life together, so I moved home with my mother in rural Pennsylvania. She was a mess, and so was I. She was realizing she might die alone, and so was I. My friend Brittany had just moved home too. She’d been managing a grocery store in Vermont and had made a big mistake that caused her to get fired. Her boyfriend had been an undergrad studying environmental science at UVM. He left her because her mistake involved violating an environmental regulation in a way Brittany described as “actually unforgivable,” so she was also realizing she might die alone. After the dinner rush, the three of us would go to the BYOB diner across from my old elementary school and get insanely drunk.
“I just feel,” I said, “like I never felt the need to interrogate my own behavior you know? I just spent so long as a victim, you know? Of bullying that—”
“You weren’t bullied as bad as you say you were,” Brittany said. “I don’t remember you getting bullied all that much.”
“It was me, wasn’t it?” my mother said. “It was my parenting.”
“Your parenting only made me stronger, Mom.”
“I became obsessed with power,” Brittany said. “I thought if I had power, I had everything. I didn’t have love. I thought I had love. He only loved part of me. The part I showed the world.”
“Your rising sign,” my mother said.
“Your rising sign is business lady,” I said. “But your moon sign is environmental terrorist.”
“Fuck off.”
“Your father is a prick. I know that—why can’t I stop thinking about him? Sometimes I see his car in a parking lot, and I have to drive away. I should have moved somewhere else. The beach. Why can’t I stop thinking of him?”
“You have an attachment disorder, Mom. You’re an anxious attacher.”
She put her hand through the blinds and touched the window glass and stared outside.
“Look at your old school. Remember I used to pick you up because you were afraid of the bus?”
“The bus was hell.”
“Honestly, name ten times you were bullied.” Brittany flicked some Caesar salad at me. “I got bullied more than you. You think your life is bad because they won’t let you put books into the Dewey fucking Decimal System? Do you know what it’s like to be a villain in your local newspaper? Do you know what it’s like to have the whole city of Burlington, Vermont, wanting you dead? Bernie Sanders tweeted about me. I don’t know how this happened. I don’t know how life became this. I wore tie-dye every day in high school.”
I took a sip of wine to signify a thoughtful pause.
“I guess I wanted power, too,” I said. “But I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree in management, so I had to get it in different ways. Maybe I always had power and tried to ignore it or hide it and wield it cruelly. I hope Ryan is alive. Remember my old roommate? The nightmare. I hope he’s healthy. Maybe I loved him. Maybe my cruelty was really just love.”
I started to cry, and my mother had been crying, and Brittany said, “Jesus Christ, I need to drink more,” and she waved the waitress over because the waitress had the corkscrew.
When the waitress came over, she said, “I’ll only uncork your next bottle if you’ll get rides home.” Because we lived in a suburb, we had to drive. Dwight D. Eisenhower passed the Federal Highway Act in 1956, a boon to suburbanization.
“It’s roads,” I said. “And cars. Little glass boxes like our own minds keeping us apart from each other. The body! No one wants to confront the body. All its messiness! Its fluid!”
“Give me your keys,” the waitress said. “I’m not kidding.”
We did, and she opened the bottle. When we finished it, Brittany and I brainstormed friends we could call for a ride, but everyone we knew had left our town or if they’d stayed were likely drunker than we were. We called my dad. We put Brittany’s sweater over my mom’s head to protect her anonymity.
“Is that your mother? Joanne—”
“It’s not mom, Dad.”
“Let him see me,” she shouted. “Let him see what he’s done!”
That night my parents had loud sex in the bedroom they used to share. It made me mostly sad but a little happy to be back here, hearing them. It was nice to think that we can experience time nonlinearly and that sometimes in life’s messiest moments, we can access kinds of happiness we walled ourselves off from because of, I don’t know, routine or decorum or fear.
My drunk nights with Brittany and my mother often felt epiphanic like this, so I knew when we woke up in the morning, we’d still have all our same disorders. I went on Grindr, and a few squares away, there was political James, my high school crush. I didn’t realize he still lived here. I posed on my bed, took a nude, and sent it to him. In reply all he said was, “Are you posing in front of Abraham Lincoln?” I hadn’t noticed the poster there. I messaged back, “I am.”