Ode to a Boy I Once Knew

by Richard Scott Larson

I’m determined to leave home, to go find someplace where I will want to live, forever, someplace I will never want to leave. Someone is out there who I will want to be always with, won’t want to leave. Somewhere I feel like I can live.

—Douglas A. Martin, Outline of My Lover

I grew up in the Missouri suburbs almost an hour west of St. Louis, and my bookstore was a Borders in a shopping mall several exits down the highway, a drive I’d make quite often on my own as soon as I was old enough to do so. I loved not knowing what I’d find each time I walked through the doors, and I loved the almost illicit sense of possibility, a thrill I’d later rediscover in the act of cruising. The smell of a bookstore—the smell of books themselves—is something I’ve always associated with desire: all those dangers and surprises, secrets hidden in the text explaining a world I hadn’t yet learned to see. Words in books browsed surreptitiously in empty aisles that named things about myself that I couldn’t yet say out loud. And I wanted to be consumed by them, wanted to disappear inside of them. I wanted, back then, to disappear.

This was the same mall where I watched boys from behind the curtains of dressing rooms at Abercrombie & Fitch, the beautiful boys who’d been hired because of the sharp angles of their cheekbones, toned and hairless chests exposed beneath patterned shirts always half-unbuttoned, or at least it seems that way to me when I call them to mind now. The same mall where I’d browse jewelry and studded belts at Hot Topic for what felt like hours because I couldn’t take my eyes off the bleached blond boy with black studs in his ears manning the cash register, his arms and hands colorfully tattooed, T-shirt and khakis baggy over his thin and delicate frame. The same mall where I watched boys kissing their girlfriends and wanting more than anything for their lips to be on mine instead.

I say grew up, but that wasn’t what it felt like. What it felt like was waiting—waiting for the chance to leave, and thus to finally begin—and I did a lot of my waiting in the bookstore, circling the section with books for queers like me but never lingering long, for fear that someone would notice where my gaze was at its most hungry and would see me for what I was. The opposite of disappearing. Eve Sedgewick wrote that “‘closeted-ness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence—not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it.” And my silence, as well as my performance of silence, was deafening. 

I had always seen the bookstore as a place to hide, but I didn’t truly understand that that’s what I was doing there until I moved to New York City after high school and stepped foot inside the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in the West Village for the first time. There’s no hiding in a bookstore designated as a queer space, where your very presence announces something about who you are before you even have a chance to open your mouth—silence now heard in a different key, the body having learned its own language. And shame shot through my chest as I looked back and saw the boy I’d been before back in that other bookstore, now from the other side of growing up. How he’d always cast nervous glances side to side to make sure the coast was clear before finally reaching for the books in which he saw other people like himself. How alone he was, and how little he thought he deserved from the world.

But at least he had the bookstore. At least he had a place to go—a place where he could begin building an identity from the ground up, with the help of the words left behind by those who came before. The bookstore is where so many of us first gave voice to the parts of ourselves that we otherwise silenced, remaking ourselves in fits and starts until we had the courage to show our true face to the world. And while the Oscar Wilde Bookshop closed more than a decade ago, the continued arrival of new bookstores in its place, both in New York and throughout the reading world, is a testament to the necessity of these spaces of exploration, of looking beyond what we know—about ourselves, about each other—and seeing what might be waiting for us there. 

Sometimes a bookstore can even save your life.

Richard Scott Larson is a queer writer and critic. Born and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis, he studied literature and film at Hunter College in Manhattan and earned his MFA from New York University. He has recently received fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and he is an active member of the National Book Critics Circle.