And if I was really being honest with myself, I wasn’t into it. Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays But as I closed the screen, I memorized the Dewey decimal number of the section where, I presumed, a mirror ball sprinkled stardust across the aging carpet and the rows of books waiting to be opened.” A very quiet gay bar, perhaps? I figured it wasn’t worth the risk. I didn’t know what I thought I might find if I actually went to the aisle where the books were. And where if not a library could I go to understand the unknown, to expand my world, to make sense out of gibberish? I would type “gay” and then survey the titles that came up and then click the window closed without ever doing any further exploring. Libraries were the only space I felt remotely comfortable even acknowledging the question-which didn’t yet even have words or language, just the faint outline of the punctuation. Just “gay,” as if more specificity would kill me right on the spot. Every once in a while during my high school years, I would hesitantly and cautiously type “gay” into a search bar in a card catalog. “Another thing I liked about the Dewey decimal system was that it could sometimes function as a secret code.
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