“Me-at-seventeen badly needed a queer mentor, someone who could open the gate to the gay world and give me a tour, answer my questions.” 

Hearing the line that will stay in my head for weeks and years and decades to come goes like this: I am fourteen or fifteen or maybe even sixteen. I am in Tallahassee, in my parents’ backyard. I am lying in our hammock, sharing it with my father, when he asks me if I know Ken Johnson. Of course I know Ken. He cuts my mother’s hair. He cuts my hair and my father’s too. For years, we’ve kept appointments with him at Ardan’s, an old home converted into a salon where every surface is somehow pink or purple or mauve or lavender. So, how could I not know Ken? But before I can ask my father why he would ask such a weird question, my father says, of Ken: “He’s a nice guy. A good person. But that’s no way to live your life.”