I will say for myself: America, I did the best I could with what I was given.

The man – let’s call him Daniel – looked familiar when I saw him from across the room, as if each part of him had been borrowed from some other boy or man I had wanted. Leaning against that wall, disappointingly sipping a beer, he was the kind of quiet I've noticed in certain men and long hungered for: the silence of men who have it all and thus find it all boring, who don't exert the energy necessary to flirt, persuade, or convince because they know America will come crawling to them on hands and knees. I realize now that what I wanted was not just the bodies of such men, but their power and what they could use that power to do to the rest of us. The brutal exertion of will, destiny made manifest by the unspoken threat their muscled bodies and white skin posed. I hungered for the power of that all-American man, the Marlboro Man and the Marlboro Man's first-born son, the high-school quarterback, the company's future CEO, Ernest Hemingway, John Wayne, Odysseus, Hercules, Achilles, the shield itself, the stone-cut archetype, the goddamned Everyman, the golden boy, the one.

If I couldn’t actually be the one myself, I thought I could survive by devouring him whole. The more 'straight,' the more 'masculine,' the more I wanted to see him with his legs spread or up, back arched in an orgasm that didn’t just bring him pleasure but a warning: In spite of the man you say you are, in the Future I live in, men like me are coming to conquer you and we will take no prisoners. This is what I thought it meant to be a man fighting for his life. If America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.