Particularly in light of what came later, I have wondered if the girlfriends’ refusal to come after me was a deliberate act of grace. Plenty of people vilified me, but these two never did—at least not to my face. “Maybe it happened to them too,” offered a classmate in graduate school. She was writing a dissertation on various versions of the embodiment of pain. The queer theorist beside her said, “Then that’s bullshit, because they needed to rally behind you.” This latter thought had never occurred to me. What a wonder. Can you imagine? We don’t expect such things of girls, from girls, for
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