CONFESSIONS OF A MASK

In the dim confines of my childhood, I lived in a hoouse shadowed by the heaviness of sickness and old age. My grandmother, "a narrow-minded, indomitable, and rather wildly poetic spirit," consumed my early years with her sharp intellect and bitter demeanor, her illness gnawing at her nerves. She pulled me from my mother's arms on my forty-ninth day, raising me in a suffocating room, "perpetually closed and stifling with odors of sickness and old age." It was here, in this stagnant atmosphere, that my identity, already shaped by exclusion, began to take root in longing.

But it was not in this stifling existence that I found myself--no, it was in the flash of an image that pierced through the closed door of my life. I recall the moment as vividly as the rays of light filtering through the maple tree by my desk. I was flipping through the volumes of art reproductions hidden away in my father's study, treasures he had brought back from distant lands. In one of the books, my eyes met the figure that would awaken something within me: Guido Reni's St. Sebastian.

The youth, bound to the tree, his muscular arms raised in graceful surrender, his eyes open wide, gazing upon the heavens with "profound tranquility," struck me with a force I had never known. His white, perfect nudity gleamed against the dusk, his body, untouched by the violence of martyrdom, "showed none of the traces of missionary hardship"--instead, it was pure beauty, light, and pleasure. The arrows that pierced his flesh seemed to consume him, not with agony, but with an almost divine ecstasy. This image, this sensual display of the male body, awakened in me a primal recognition of my own desire.

In that moment, I saw myself. In St. Sebastian's quiet agony and pleasure, I recognized the contours of my own secret longings. It was a moment of revelation, of both exhilaration and shame, as I trembled with "some pagan joy," my body responding in ways it had never before.