Photo by Nicolai Kjærgaard

Tonight as I shared a smoke with my father outside my parents' house - me smoking a cigarette and he, a cigar - he said to me, "Son, you have a corporeal existence."

He illustrated this point by asking me to put down my cigarette (I looked for a dry place to set it down; he told me to hold onto it and simply let my arm hang). Then he gave me a light but firm slap on the shoulder. "Feel that?," he asked. I did. "That's what I mean. You have a physical existence, a body, clothes..."

I'm not sure why, but suddenly I thought my father was going to talk to me about sex. Not sex per se, but my relationship to my body, as though suddenly he had divined that I wasn't comfortable in my body, had never even much liked it. Like most children in the western world, I was raised to distrust the body - other people's bodies as well as my own. It's not that my parents were especially uptight about sex. True, they fast-forwarded sex-scenes in movies if my sister and I were watching, and for a time my father seemed strangely uncomfortable with my sister and I play-fighting. Otherwise, my parents were fairly typical. They certainly didn't raise us in a sex-positive home, but they weren't strictly sex-negative either. They simply raised us to be suspicious. Our bodies may not have been evil, but they certainly weren't an appropriate topic for dinner conversation.

By the time I hit puberty, I knew about sex as a means for reproduction. I knew what my own penis looked like. I knew a little about what a vagina looked like, too, thanks to a female friend who lived a few houses away. I knew sex was natural and important because it made babies, but I also knew it couldn't be as natural or important as, say, schoolwork. My parents talked endlessly to me about schoolwork; only rarely did we talk about sex.

So, like most children, my parents raised me to be suspicious of my own corporeal existence - and, by extension, the external, physical world. At the same time, however, like many gay children, my environment taught me to be ashamed and terrified of my sexuality and gender identity.

I walked like a girl. I sounded like a girl on the phone. In fact, I can remember actually being mistaken for a girl on at least once. It was Halloween, I was around 12 or 13 years old, and I'd decided, rather than wearing a traditional costume, that I would paint my face with my mother's yellow and auburn eyeshadow so I'd look like the sun. A women opened the door for my mother and I. I held out my plastic jackolantern to collect candy, and the woman smiled and gave me some. Before she closed the door, she complimented my mother on what a beautiful daughter she had.

I was, in short, as femme as they come, even at the tender age of 12. I've "butched up" a bit since then - partly, I suspect, as a survival mechanism. But I'm no Paul Bunyan. And almost as far back as my first memories of sex, I can remember feeling deeply ashamed.

I had my first orgasm with my neighbor from across the street. He was a year older than me and one of my best friends. Like all of my "best friends" throughout childhood, he made fun of me. I always "stuck out," and the only way my friends could avoid becoming targets themselves was to periodically turn on me, in public and in private, and subject me to the same taunting (or worse) as I received from most of the kids in my school.

My playmate - I'll call him "Sam" - would invite me up to the loft bed in his bedroom. The bed was suspended about six feet above the floor; as a 12-year-old, the distance seemed endless and dangerous. Once in the loft, the two of us sprawling amongst his tossed blanket and sheets, he would undress me, undress himself, and rub himself against me. I never came, but I didn't matter - it felt wonderful. Some time later - two years, perhaps - Sam and I were playing in my room. The ritual had ended at least a year before, but now, on my bed, as though no time at all had passed since our last encounter, we were naked and rubbing against one another again. I didn't ejaculate, but knowing now what an orgasm feels like, I know I had one that day, and it was my first.

As we got older, Sam grew distant. He belonged to two crowds. One crowd included me and many of the kids who lived nearby; the other consisted mostly of kids a year older than us in Sam's grade. As Sam began to gravitate more towards the "older" crowd, it became clear that he couldn't remain friends with me. He could be friends with the other kids in our group, perhaps, but as far as the older crowd was concerned, I was a deal-breaker.

The shame started then, or it at least it was amplified and made tangible in a way that felt different from the shame I experienced daily as a result of constant insults from other kids. That shame was verbal, comprised mostly of words - many of which I didn't even understand. (One girl in Hebrew school used to ask me unrelentingly if I were "a fruit or a vegetable." I knew this question was meant as an insult, but I had no idea what it meant.) My new shame resulted from physical sensation and rejection. The boy who had made me come for the first time was refusing to be my friend because who I was - and the pleasure we'd shared - was wrong. This new shame was tied directly to my body - to what (and who) I wanted to do with it.

This body-shame and (gay-)sex-shame followed me throughout high school. It convinced me to date girls. It demanded I cultivate an elaborate imagination. I'm thankful for this in some ways, but I became an intricate fantasy-builder only because I knew could never, ever, act out on my fantasies. My shame made me incapable of having orgasms; it trapped me in my head, cuffing me to an array of needless thoughts while I should have been focusing on my partner. The shame made me embarrassed about having sex, and the embarrassment created more shame.

Ex tried to set me free from my shame, but he could only do so much. At the start of our relationship, I was sexually ravenous (understandably so, since prior to Ex I hadn't had much sex). At the same time, I was also a pot-head, and the pot helped ease my inhibitions. But as time wore on, and once I stopped smoking pot, the shame resurfaced. At the time I had no real vocabulary with which to speak about it, no true conceptual understanding of what it meant. I think I simply felt I was ugly and no one could possibly want to have sex with me. Ex knew this. He did everything he could to assure me I was beautiful, sexually desirable, and a good lover.

His assurances helped, but only so much. By the time I fell into a lengthy depression in 2002, I had been miserable for so long, and so ignorant of my own misery, that even simple, "corporeal" gestures like kissing or holding hands made my skin crawl. My depression had many causes, including a chemical disorder. But over the next two years, with the help of my therapist, I learned to confront my shame. I had, I discovered, been systematically brutalized by a deeply homophobic society for most of the first 17 years of my life. I cried about this in therapy. I yelled. I demanded of my therapist and of the world, "how could no one have intervened?" I felt an uncomfortable kinship with the Columbine shooters; I almost was one. Kids called me 'faggot' in the middle of class, in full earshot of my teachers! How could those teachers say nothing?! How could any adult who knew what was happening say nothing?

I'd assumed that by confronting my feelings, the shame would deteriorate. Looking back at this period of my life, I believe it did, though certainly not completely; I've read books that refer to a gay person's shame (or some variation of it) as a "primordial wound," one from which most of us never fully recover. But whatever progress I'd made in healing my wound was overshadowed by more pressing threats to my mental (and physical) health. I suffered from what my therapist called "compulsive thoughts." I thought I might be a child molester. For a long time I feared I was secretly transgendered - a woman trapped in a man's body - and this thought was so terrifying that I wanted to kill myself. I have nothing against transgendered men and women; I simply couldn't imagine myself being happy as a woman, even though my own brain was bombarding me with thoughts of becoming one. No matter how rigorously I confronted these thoughts with my therapist, they wouldn't go away. Finally she insisted that I try medication. She'd suggested this from day one, but I'd resisted because of the stigma attached to anti-depressants. Now she put her foot down, and by this point I would have tried anything. I started taking Zoloft, gradually building to a 200mg dose. A week later, the compulsive thoughts had lessened. Another three weeks later and they were almost completely gone.

Also gone was a significant portion of my sex-drive, but I didn't care. I was so thankful to be rid of those nightmarish thoughts that sex seemed besides the point. After a year constant, gladiatorial battle with my own mind, I could finally rest. Who needs sex when you're finally beginning to feel like yourself again?

Strangely, now that Ex and I are separated, I am more attracted to him than ever. This may simply be a case of the old adage, adapted with such beautiful, poetic simplicity by the great Joni Mitchell: "On and on we seem to go / But we don't know what we've got til it's gone." It may also be part of a desire for closure. Ex and I never had "breakup sex," and lately I find myself craving it constantly. Perhaps I want to challenge him, as in, "I dare you not to be physically attracted to me again." Perhaps I want to use sex as a séance. Perhaps it would allow me to catch a glimpse of the "old" Ex - the Ex I fell in love with - so I can say goodbye.

In either case, Ex would need to be willing, and he isn't. On Day 11 I asked if he'd imagined having breakup sex. He paused for a moment, then said "yes" - one time, for one moment, he'd thought about it. I suspect he said this just to make me feel better. Yesterday I asked if he was still attracted to me at all. He paused again, then said "no." No qualifying statements. No, "I still love your eyes," or, "sometimes I think back to the beginning and remember how much I wanted you." He simply said "no," and it broke my heart.

So here I am again as I was at the beginning of Ex's and my relationship, only now I have no one but myself to assure me that I'm beautiful, desirable, and a good lover. I'm a dozen years older and at least half-a-dozen years wiser, but I've suffered a huge blow to my confidence, and it will take time before I can begin to build a newly single and positive self-image.

As if he sensed this, I thought for a moment that my father was going to say something profound about my relationship to the corporeal world. I imagined him saying, "You have a physical existence, a body, clothes. Be kind to yourself. You're handsome. Be kind to your body, learn to trust it, and stop being so fucking judgemental about who you are and how you look and who you sleep with." (I added the swear word to be truer to my father's voice. I can't imagine him saying anything from the heart without tossing in at least one "fuck" and maybe a "bullshit" or two.)

It turns out my father's lesson in corporeality had a far less lofty purpose. "You have a physical existence, a body, clothes. Clothes get worn out. That's why people have more than one pair of shoes, more than one coat. That's why your shoes are always wearing out. Now that you have more than one pair" - he was referring to my Macy's shopping spree - "alternate. That's how you keep your shoes looking new."

Have I mentioned my father loves shoes?