Originally published in Electric Literature on 9/12/22.
he old reading room in Irvington, New York was a glorious Gilded Age folly, filled with heavy wooden furniture cracked by decades of use, opalescent turtleback Tiffany lamps, a card catalog the size of a small car, and piles upon piles of dust. History, constrained safely in the pages of old and untouched books, went there to be forgotten—as did I, hiding there during my shifts as a library page, trying to eke out a vague eroticism from primers on Greco-Roman art, the only books I could find that listed “homosexuality” in the index.
It was nineteen-ninety-one or two or three, and I was trying to prove I existed. In the shadowy library stacks, I searched for myself, and those books were transmuted into mirrors by the dim slanting light of the early evening sun. I was Zeus, Elagabalus, Kalamos, and Karpos. I lived a hundred lives, one minute transforming into a bull, the next kissing a boy – equidistant fantasies, equally unreachable from where I stood. In those classical myths I saw myself, a modern homosexual, rendered fetchingly in period drag.
I was wrong, of course. Those pages? They were no more mirrors than I was a god. They were windows, but I had not yet learned to see beyond the seductive ghost-self the glass offered me. In other words: I let what I was looking for obscure what I was seeing. And yet, in that moment, that mirage was my salvation.