There was no point probing further. An impenetrable sheet of privacy stood between us. In his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie writes of a doctor who is allowed to examine his patient, a young woman, only through a hole in a white sheet of cloth. It seemed, at times, that I could visualize my patient only through a hole in a sheet of cloth—of what? Homophobia? Denial? Sexual shame? Addiction?
