It wasn’t precisely that I was a bad student. In a certain sense I was too good a student, overcommitted to my studies. The problem was that my field of study was not school, and schoolwork was one of many worldly matters I had renounced in my ascetic pursuit of knowledge. It was discipline, not laziness, that had me reading Maurice and The Picture of Dorian Gray under my desk during class, or playing hooky to catch Red River at Film Forum, or ignoring weeks’ worth of homework assignments to read fanfic and write Faunfic. In essence, I’d spent all four years of high school studying to be a gay
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