My first year as a teacher, twenty-two and stuck in a prep school run by Dickensian colonels in Connecticut, I had a student called Styler, by turns diffident and shyly charming, working to please, wouldn’t swat a fly. I was in the closet and never thought twice about him, until three years later when he killed himself, and his sister wrote to tell me. Oh, I thought with a knot of hopeless sorrow, so he was gay. I hadn’t thought to help him, because I couldn’t even help myself then.
