NOT EXACTLY NATURAL; STUNNING, NONETHELESS: Someone sent an email to me, in my capacity as editor of Marriage Debate, that read, in its entirety (as best I can remember), “What is homosexuality?”

And to be honest, I don’t think I know.

Homosexuality has gone from an adjective applied to acts to an adjective applied to people–from a tendency to an identity. But that identity shivers out of your hands when you try to grasp it.

Some define it as a lack: an incapacity for sexual and/or romantic fulfillment with the opposite sex. (I am guessing, though I’m not sure, that this is how Jonathan Rauch is defining it in Gay Marriage.) This negative definition is wildly unpopular with contemporary gay activists, for obvious reasons. “I’m only gay because I can’t possibly really love a woman/man” is not a rallying point for “pride.” (And notice how “real love” in this formulation is always sexual….)

I don’t have that lack. I ordinarily do not write much about my personal life on this blog; I don’t like giving out information, let alone Too Much Information. But here is where the personal really does intersect with the political, and so I think it might be worth talking about. So: I can have romantic relationships with men, and have. (“But not very often!” as the Smiths say.)

What I remember–what makes me “identify as queer” as the young folk say, even after my conversion to Catholicism and my very, very late decision that I opposed same-sex marriage (I am not sure I opposed civil SSM as late as a year ago today–I was super ambivalent about it)–is this: I remember feeling like an alien, freakish, reprehensible outsider for my sexual orientation. I remember finding gay culture in books and movies and music and taking to it “like a duck to ducks” as Quentin Crisp says. I remember hiding everything I felt from myself and everyone around me. I remember that intense, sensual, paranoid awareness of how everyone around me was reacting, so I could be sure to react the same way, to react appropriately instead of reacting in a way that would expose me. (Possibly this experience has made me sympathetic to wildly desiring hetero guys, who ordinarily would really piss me off!)

I remember, too, pretty girls in their summer dresses, and the sweetness when my eyes swerved and I noticed some summer beauty. I remember, too, seeing my semi-secret girlfriend in the hallways of our high school, and remembering the smell of her cigarettes and her shampoo, and hearing again her voice as she explained why I had to be so careful so her parents would never know we were dating. I remember, too, what it felt like to find other people who lived as I did. I remember developing secret languages with my best friend so we could talk about the people we had crushes on and the ways we envisioned structuring our romantic lives. I remember spending obsessive hours reading gay subtext into every single book I read and every single song I liked, so I could find someone who was like me–so I could feel that astonishing thing, like when you solve a difficult rhyming problem in an English poem, like when you pick a lock and hear all the tumblers finally shifting into place, click-click-click. So I could feel the door open.

I remember all that, I should note, even though I was raised in an extraordinarily gay-positive family and general atmosphere. But still there was this sense that it was not only the usual childhood alienation, not only the usual estrangement of the over-intellectual, but some specifically sexual, specifically queer exile that caused my sense of difference.

Doubtless this was strongly reinforced by cultural messages that homosexuality was an identity, and that, therefore, if you desired the practice you must share the identity and make it a huge, defining part of your sense of self. I think we are far too naive about how much our culture shapes which identities we think are “real” and “deep” and “my essential true self.” That’s why I’ve said a couple times on this blog that we should focus on what we should do, and Whom we should love, rather than on what we think we are.

But I don’t want to go there just yet. What I want to do is ask: Is this a description of a queer childhood? Is this the narrative that launched a thousand lawsuits? What do we talk about, when we talk about homosexuality?

I have never been sure.