Kurt paced nervously in the hallway. That the area near the phone was uncrowded was novel and expected all at the same time; he was used to seeing the wall beside the phone lined with boys waiting anxiously to call their girlfriends, their older brothers at college, their mothers who would send cookies...but at barely 5:30 in the morning on a Sunday, no one was even contemplating being awake yet. Even the Dalton students who elected to attend church in town - probably about half the population - didn't get up until closer to 8 as the early service was aimed at little old ladies and the 10:00 was the one that catered more to local students.

He hadn't been able to sleep. Every time he tried, he pictured himself doing horrible things - violent, angry, hateful things. Grabbing young boys and dragging them to his bedroom. Pinning classmates against the wall to perform unspeakable acts that he literally couldn't imagine but knew had to exist in a theoretical, erotic context; things a sick person like him might do. Cornering Finn and rubbing up against him, the hardness in his pants obvious and nearly comically large, had seemed like the lowest of the low, the most disgusting thing he could think of, until he woke up and realized that the unnatural-yet-ubiquitous biologic response had taken over during his brief, fitful slumber and he almost burst into sobs.

Picturing vague sexual acts with his stepbrother had been nothing compared to the horror of the next dream, though.

Infecting Blaine with his sickness. Hanging around with him too much, making him listen to feminine songs and enticing him to join feminine careers and the next thing he knew-

He wasn't sure if homosexuality was the kind of thing that spread through the blood or if he'd just seen Dracula too many times when he was stuck accompanying Finn and Quinn to the lousy old drive-in theater to act as a chaperon while the two of them made out in the backseat, but he leaned in to breathe on Blaine's neck, low and warm, like Blaine had done to him that day at lunch inadvertently, then practically attacked his neck with bites and sucking...and the next thing he knew, he could see Blaine's hips rounding and beginning to swish from side to side as he walked prancingly across the room, a deranged and sick look in his eyes.

Kurt shook his head to try to metaphorically shake the dreams away as he paced again in front of the phone. A mostly-full roll of dimes bounced heavily in his robe pocket, and the quiet slap of his slippers on the floor seemed to echo all around him. What was he even doing? He couldn't say the things he was dying to say, the words that felt like they were crushing him slowly into a million tiny pieces; why even bother calling?

Because if he didn't talk to someone familiar, he was going to lose his mind, he concluded. He was already partway there; he didn't need to make it worse.

Drawing in a deep breath, he stepped up to the phone and lifted the receiver, slipping in a couple dimes clumsily to cover the long-distance call for at least a little while. He would have to stay relatively quiet, not disturb anyone in the rooms closest to the phone, but he could probably talk uninterrupted for longer than he would otherwise get - and he could definitely do so with decidedly more privacy.

His father was a creature of perpetual habit, and Kurt knew that, while a call this early risked waking Carole, it wouldn't wake his dad. Sunday mornings he got up early for an extra long cup of coffee and to read the Sunday paper before heading in to the shop to catch up on whatever backlog collected over the weekend so people could pick up their cars as they got out of church and still make it across town in time for the big brunch buffet at O'Donahugh's. With quivering fingers, he placed his finger at the rotary and dialed with long, deliberate swipes.

Surely enough, the voice on the phone was alert, if a bit concerned. That made sense, Kurt supposed, most calls at 5:30 in the morning weren't good news. "Hello?"

"Hi, Dad," he whispered, sinking back against the wall. He wasn't sure what it was about his dad's voice that could reduce him to someone who sounded so much younger than he was. Maybe it was because he'd never been so good at keeping up all the walls around him. Maybe it was because as soon as his dad was involved he felt about ten years old, even though he was bigger than that. He was grown now, he was nearly a man; he shouldn't feel so much like a little boy.

Mrs. Jones had the same effect but to a lesser degree. As much as his dad liked to credit Mrs. Jones with raising him, she went home at dinner time and had weekends off; the rest of the time, it had just been the two of them, two quiet guys trying to somehow ever interact with each other without so much as a single genuine interest in common.

"Kurt? Everything okay? You're up pretty early."

"Yeah," Kurt said quietly, trying to sound as okay as possible, to keep his voice as steady as he could. "Just couldn't sleep. I...fell asleep early last night, you know."

Small lies to protect his dad. He couldn't begin to consider how many he'd told.

"They're not working you too hard at that fancy school, are they?"

"Nothing like that," Kurt assured him. "Nothing I can't handle. I'm doing okay, actually. It seemed like a lot at first, but I'm starting to feel like I'm hitting my stride."

"Good." Burt's tone was reassuring, but at the same time confident and knowing. "I knew you'd be fine."

Fine. Nothing felt fine. Nothing was fine. He was sick with something only criminals and psychopaths got and too afraid to go look at the book again to figure out how to be cured.

He wanted to say something. To start bawling and beg his father to come get him and take him back home where at least he was a sissy but he wasn't a sociopath, to his nice, safe bedroom where he and Mercedes could listen to albums and slack off all year and he could ignore everything that the "normal boys" did, the way he had for his entire life. To ask his father to come get him and take him immediately to a doctor so he could get rid of this- this thing.

Instead he asked a quiet, painful question with careful, halting words. "Can I ask you something?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Do you ever think about...about me, being older? You know, a grown up - an adult. About me getting older and having a family of my own?"

He couldn't picture it. He'd never really thought about it before, but he couldn't imagine himself with a wife and children and a house. He could picture himself at 19 living in a beautiful apartment in New York he had cut from a magazine when he was 10. He could imagine himself working at one of the fashion houses or being an editor at Vogue. But everything else, everything that seemed like the most natural thing in the world to the people he'd grown up with...it was one big blank, vague blur in his mental image.

Did other boys his age picture it? It might be the kind of thing people only started thinking of once they were older. Did Finn picture getting married to Quinn and having babies with her? Was it something he was supposed to be doing this whole time that he was being robbed of without even knowing it?

There was a long pause, and Kurt tried to picture his father's expression. Was he angry? Smiling fondly, the way he did when Kurt's baby pictures came out? Sad because Kurt's mother wouldn't be around to be a grandmother? Confused by the question? "Yeah," he said slowly. "I guess. I mean I don't really picture it, but I know you're gonna. Right now it's hard 'cause I still think of you as a kid, y'know? I know, I know - you're not a kid, but to me you'll always be about six years old, buddy."

Kurt smiled very faintly. It was kind of nice knowing the feeling was mutual. "I understand."

"But I figure one day you'll meet someone nice, settle down, have a family. I know better than to think it's gonna be around here. You've been telling me you were leaving since before your mom died, I know it's gonna be in New York or California or somewhere and I'm gonna have to drive a week just to see my grandkids," he added with a fond laugh that turned Kurt's stomach. "But yeah, someday."

He wanted to be able to envision it, to tell himself that the lie he'd told earlier just might be true. It was entirely possible he just hadn't met the right girl yet. He certainly liked girls, he enjoyed spending time with them. He might even love one of them and not know it. How was he supposed to know what "that feeling" was, anyway? People tossed that word around and said crazy things like "When you feel it, you'll know." That wasn't of any use to him - how was he supposed to know what 'it' felt like if he hadn't experienced it? Maybe if he paid really close attention he could surmise what that feeling might be based on the way Finn looked at Quinn and the way some of the guys looked at their girlfriends. He didn't know what any of that felt like, though. It was just some kind of amorphous category of emotions.

That was now likely off-limits to him. After all, love was about much more than erotic attraction, or so he'd been led to believe - mostly when the girls were pining over boys that they would never in a million years imagine going all the way with (or even part of the way with), and he wasn't ever going to have that, was he? There was a reason that the marriage license when his dad and Carole had gotten married had asked if either of them was an imbecile, an idiot, or incompetent: crazy people couldn't form that kind of bond.

Certainly not perverts who had dreams about sociopathic sex with members of their own family.

"What if I never find anyone I like who would be...appropriate?" he asked nervously, and he heard a deep sigh on the other end - a sound of complete and utter defeat from his father. His strong, proud, silent-type father sounded defeated.

Oh god. He knew.

He knew what was wrong with Kurt, he had suspected it for a long time but never said anything, he knew Kurt was sick but hadn't had the heart to say- Like when they all tried to hide each other from the fact that his mother was dying. His mother knew, he knew, his father knew, but no one would say it because saying it made all of them hurt so much more. His dad knew he was mentally ill and couldn't say anything because it would make everything real, the same way Kurt couldn't bring himself to say the word even to himself in the safe silence of his empty bedroom.

"I wish you could, kid," his dad said finally with a mournful note to his tone. "You have no idea how much I wish that. I want you to get all the things you want - and you know I like Mercedes, think she's a good girl with a good head on her shoulders. But the world's not there yet, buddy."

Kurt blinked, confused. "What do you mean?"

"You just gotta be patient, Kurt. Maybe when you move to the big city, if she goes with you...I know it's different out there, I know they allow stuff that folks around here won't. I know gettin' married's legal here, not like some of those states down south, but until the people change, get to where you are, are as accepting and big-hearted as you are...It's not safe. I'm sorry." Kurt was still trying to wrap his head around it when he heard another deep sigh and a "Just gotta get used to being on your own 'til then. Y'know, 'til you find somewhere where it's okay to love the person you love."

He angrily fisted at his eyes, tears welling up, and it took all his concentration to keep his breathing even. It felt like sobs were gathering in his chest and just waiting for him to open his mouth so they could escape, and the mounting pressure was almost too much to bear. His dad thought he was talking about Mercedes. About interracial dating which, while hardly accepted, wasn't nearly as big as his actual problem.

A week ago it would have seemed like his biggest problem when it came to finding someone to date. Before he came to Dalton, it would have seemed insurmountable - unfathomable that he could find a place where no one would bat an eye to see he and Mercedes kiss; now it was a cold comfort.

He could date Mercedes here. He could date her in New York in a couple years and walk down the street holding her hand proudly. There would never be a time or place where he could walk down the street with a boy holding his hand.

"You okay?"

He realized he hadn't said anything yet, but the fear of breaking down into a heap of cries and gasps while telling his father everything that the call was really about. "Mmhmm," he managed, his voice high and tight to keep it from quivering.

His father worried about him so much.

From the time he could remember, even before his mom had died, his dad had been worried about him. He was a small kid for his age, fragile, and all the others were so...they were cruel. They had always been cruel for reasons he was only starting to really understand; he wondered if any of the people who had taunted him had really known what he was or just knew he was different. He wondered if that even mattered and why he cared so much even if he really was the last person to know. In the beginning, he would come home crying from school or limp home with bruises all over him after going to the local playground - and not bruises from jumping off swings or trying to walk on the teeter-totter, either, but from other boys shoving or kicking him, wrestling him even when he cried out for them to stop - and his dad would ask what had happened...and when Kurt told him- He was so hurt by it all. So angry that people would hurt his son like that.

It wasn't until Kurt was a little older that he recognized the other emotion tangled up in all of it: fear. His father - his big, strong, burly father who lifted tires all day without any problem or sign of exhaustion, was afraid of what a few unruly kids might do if he wasn't there to break it up.

And that was when Kurt stopped telling him what was wrong.

There was nothing that could be done about it anyway, and seeing his dad scared was terrifying. Downright painful - heartwrenchingly painful as he watched his dad look him up and down, seeing the scrapes and bruises and bloodshot eyes from crying all the way home. His dad didn't cry, but the way he tightened his jaw, sniffed once, and sent him inside to have Mrs. Jones clean him up...he may as well have. He felt so bad putting his father through any of that - after all, it wasn't his fault his son couldn't hold his own in a fight. And he had so many other things in life to be scared or sad about...the least Kurt could do was not add to it.

He was about to add to it tenfold, Kurt thought with a ragged sniffle, tears burning his eyes as he wrapped his free arm around his torso. What could be scarier for a parent than knowing his son was sick? Let alone knowing his son was crazy and that it wasn't entirely the other kids' fault for hurting him over the years...

He couldn't put that look back in his dad's eyes. Not now, not when they had finally gotten okay. Not when his dad had started smiling again, now that he had Carole - and Finn, the perfect, healthy son he had always wanted. The kind of son who didn't need protected and hadn't gotten beaten up on playgrounds his entire life. The kind of son who could play sports because he wasn't so sickly and small as a child and then too uncoordinated as a teenager to do much more than drop the ball when it was lobbed easily in his direction. The kind of son-

The kind of son Kurt could only ever pretend to be.

"I should go, there's someone else who needs to use the phone, but I'll call you this week sometime, okay?"

"Sure, sounds good. You sure you're okay?"

Kurt winced, angry at his voice for giving him away like that, and replied in his most practiced 'Nothing at all wrong here, I promise' voice, "Of course. I'll be home in a couple weeks for fall break, you can see for yourself."

"Looking forward to it already. I miss you, buddy."

His heart ached and he wanted to fling himself into his father's arms in a way that was wholly inappropriate but had never been trained out of him the way it had been for some boys; he wondered if it was because his father had always known he was sick and you didn't deny crazy people the tiny pleasures that made them feel minorly sane. "Miss you too, Dad," he whispered as he placed the receiver back in the cradle and tried to stand up straighter.

He had to go back to the library, he concluded, glancing up and down the hallway to make sure no one saw him half-crumbling and in tears. He needed to go back to that library and figure out what precisely he could do to stop being sick. After all, most diseases weren't cancer or TB - most didn't kill you. Most had a cure or, at the very least, they had treatment of some kind. He could go find treatment and be-

...be normal. Be better for everyone.

His dad had looked out for him his entire life. He had tried so hard to make sure that Kurt could be healthy and safe and provided-for. He had sat through countless movies that he had no interest in because Kurt wanted to see them and he wanted to spend time together. He had never tried to tell Kurt to be rougher, to not cry, to stop liking certain things...he had tried so hard, and Kurt...

Kurt owed his father this. After everything his dad had done for him, Kurt owed him to at least try to get better. To at least attempt to get help and not be mentally ill anymore. The quality his dad had always said he admired most in him was his strength - said it reminded him of Kurt's mother. She had fought as hard as she could to stay alive for as long as she could, taking every one of the pitifully few options the doctors gave her as potential treatments. She had tried her best...and Kurt had to do the same. He just had to. If there was even a chance that he could fix this...

Everyone would be so much happier. Himself included.

Drawing in a deep breath, he walked quickly and with purpose to his room, pulled on the first ensemble he could piece together, and headed for the library.

The silence of the building was unnerving; the only other occupant was the ancient librarian who had been at the school, Kurt swore, since John Dalton himself was traipsing around campus, and it felt as if every footstep he made echoed through the stacks. He racked his brain trying to remember which book it had been in, which of the giant stack of potential references for Sam he'd moved on to by that point in the evening. He spied the frayed binding on a low shelf and stooped to collect it, then carried it to the table and began to flick through the pages with nervous, clumsy fingers.

For a brief moment, he thought maybe he would discover that he had misread the original entry. Maybe he had been so shocked by the word that he'd made up some of what he thought he saw. After all, his reading comprehension was hardly at its best at nearly 11 p.m., perhaps he had fabricated entire portions of the entry. His heart sank as he found the page and began to read, finding the words exactly the same as they had been 36 hours earlier.

Had it really only been 36 hours? It felt like a lifetime.

He searched for the treatment portion - he had seen one with every other disorder - and found only two sentences.

Current treatment protocols range from electrical impulse aversion therapy, to electroconvulsive therapy, to prefrontal lobotomy or leucotomy, to castration, though the latter is falling out of favor amongst most experts. There are no reliable statistics for the relative success rate of any method of treatment.

Kurt swallowed hard, suddenly feeling far too warm despite the cool morning stillness around him. Lobotomy - so he really was crazy. That was what they gave schizophrenics to try to make them stop babbling. Or to stop other people from being credible...It was in the movie- damn it, the movie from the Tennessee Williams play, he'd seen it not six months ago with Mercedes, it had Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. Why couldn't he remember it?

He really was losing his mind, he thought with a bitter, choked-off laugh. It echoed around him and made him feel like he was drowning somehow.

And electroconvulsive therapy- He felt dizzy and wondered if he would have time to slam the book shut before he threw up so that when the librarian inevitably came to see what had happened and why he had made such a mess, she wouldn't see what he had been looking at. But the contents of his stomach stayed where they were, even as his tears blurred the words on the page together.

Castration was-...maybe that was the one for him, he thought, trying to look on the less-devastating side, if there was such a thing. At least that one came with a career path, right? It was something done to only the most talented and honourable for centuries, something for people who occupied a position of trust, of power, of talent. That certainly beat the other options, which were given only to people who were truly too far gone to ever be productive members of any society. Castrati were renowned the world over, and he had always taken pride in his singing range.

Besides, it would be one way of getting rid of those disgusting, aggressive, overtly-sexual dreams. He couldn't attack people for the purpose of unwanted erotic gratification that way, right? Maybe-...maybe it wouldn't be so bad. He could be famous and talented and...abnormal for good instead of for ill.

He wondered why it had fallen out of favor - was there some kind of other side effect? Or did most boys just not want to become Orlando di Lasso? And he wondered about that first option, what precisely "electrical impulse aversion therapy" was. The book yielded no answers, just moved on to sadism and other sexual sociopathic conditions that turned his stomach.

Meaning he needed to find other sources of information.

His legs quivered as he walked unevenly to the large card catlog in the center of the room. Slowly, he pulled the drawer labeled "hm-hu" towards him, the heavy wooden box making a conspicuous scraping noise as it slid. He cringed at how loud it was, as though everyone in a five-mile radius could hear and would somehow know what he was doing. When no one appeared to stare over his shoulder, he flipped carefully through the cards, taking large chunks at a time until he arrived at "hol-" and slowed down, moving fewer cards at a time until he arrived at his destination.

homosexuality

The word still made him feel like an elephant had settled on his chest, but there it was. There were a few entries, but he knew that - if he couldn't remember the movie he was trying to think of - there was no way he would remember any of the information long enough to go find the book. He carefully plucked the relevant entries from the two rods holding it mostly in place, then slid the drawer closed and vowed to return the cards when he had finished.

He was probably the only one looking, anyway. No one else around here had this problem. To be entirely honest, he was almost surprised there were entries at all.

The first card sounded illicit, like something a school shouldn't be permitted to have on its premises, but there it was: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey. He slipped it off the shelf, then grabbed a larger book from a few sections over to conceal what he was reading, should anyone happen by. Not much chance of that, considering how early it was, but in case.

It seemed exceedingly unhelpful. Not only did it not discuss treatment whatsoever, but as he skimmed the pages quickly to find anything that might relate to him, he was struck by the sheer oddness of what was apparently normal. He didn't want to think about anything in there. He didn't want to think about how many men had sex outside of their marriages - even if his father had been unmarried for nearly a decade, he didn't want to imagine what that meant, either. He didn't want to think about how 40% of males under 20 apparently had solicited prostitutes (and dear god, he hoped Finn wasn't among them!). He didn't want to read in such intimate detail about people's masturbation habits for crying out loud, and was he the only one who wasn't doing that?

If he had felt abnormal and separate while watching the Warblers talk about their girlfriends and female conquests, he felt downright freakish reading this. Isolated beyond adequate explanation. Apparently he was the only teenage boy in the world who didn't fantasize about having sex with practically every pretty girl walking down the street - and acting on it with all manner of girl, or with themselves, either way. Evidently he wasn't just sick, he was bizarre.

Then he got to the section he was really looking for: Homosexual Outlet

A considerable portion of the population, perhaps the major portion of the male population, has at least some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age.

Kurt stared at the sentence. That couldn't possibly be right. If homosexuality was a mental illness, was a sign of derangement on par with - or at least treated on par with - schizophrenia, then it could not by definition be an affliction impacting the majority of people. If it were, that would make it no longer a disorder, wouldn't it? Something normal instead of the abnormal.

Skipping down the page, he saw another statement that made no sense to him whatsoever.

It is one thing if we are dealing with a type of activity that is unusual, without precedent among other animals, and restricted to peculiar types of individuals within the human population. It is another thing if the phenomenon proves to be a fundamental part, not only of human sexuality, but of mammalian patterns as a whole.

First, wasn't it? Restricted to peculiar individuals, that was - he certainly felt peculiar, he kind of always had, and other people had treated him as such. And the mentally ill were kind of by definition abnormal. If it was so fundamental to human sexuality, why was it considered an aberration, a condition to be treated, the people afflicted individuals to be pitied?

Second...he was confused by the notion that animals could be homosexual. Animals didn't engage in erotic activity for pleasure the way humans did, it was solely instinct for procreation...wasn't it? His biology teacher last year had claimed so, at least. But he did take minor amusement in the mental image of homosexual animals in the world all around him - Mr. Henderson's lazy old dog, the two stray cats that seemed to wander the neighbourhood together at all times but that no one had ever gotten a good enough look at to know whether they were male or female. He almost smiled at the idea of the canary currently in his charge as the most junior Warbler being just as sexually inversed as he was - after all, the males were the ones of the species who sang sweet, high songs in a clear tone, just the way he did.

But it did say "mammalian," he realized with a reluctant sigh. Fleta couldn't be a homosexual canary.

The more he read, the less-at-ease he felt. For one thing, the report seemed to essentially say that everything psychologists believed was wrong but without any real basis for it except numbers that Kurt still maintained were too large to be real. For another, there was a lengthy tangent in the middle about men who were neither homosexual nor heterosexual that seemed to imply that that might be the true norm, and that didn't feel quite right to him. If he were homosexual, it was a fairly exclusive.

By the time he completed the section, he was just...torn. On one hand, it seemed fantastic - a document saying he wasn't actually crazy...but at the same time, if one said he was a pervert and a sociopath and unlike most people, and the other said he was exactly like some 60% of people around him - completely normal as defined by a man for whom all sorts of behaviours Kurt would never consider were deemed equally normal...which was he meant to believe? The only grey area seemed to be the conclusion that he was mentally ill, but so was everyone else; that didn't sound quite right.

The only legitimate solution, he concluded, was to find a third source to break the tie. He picked up the cards from the catalog and checked the next title: "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual." It was more recent than either of the previous sources, and if he were to literally judge a book by its cover, the title seemed to suggest that homosexuality was something to alter, at the very least. What else would there be to adjust?

But 'Overt Homosexual' did seem to fit him, didn't it? He had never been particularly good at concealing himself in any way.

Current psychiatric and psychological opinion about the adjustment of the homosexual may be illustrated by a quotation from a report on homosexuality recently issued by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (1, p. 2): "When such homosexual behavior persists in an adult, it is then a symptom of a severe emotional disorder." If one wishes to subject this opinion to experimental investigation, one is immediately confronted by problems of considerable magnitude. One problem is the attitude and theoretical position of the clinician who may be asked to examine the data. I quote again from the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry in the same report (1, p. 4): "It is well known that many people, including physicians, react in an exaggerated way to sexual deviations and particularly to homosexuality with disgust, anger, and hostility. Such feelings often arise from the individual's own conflict centering about his unconscious homosexual impulses. These attitudes may interfere with an intelligent and objective handling of the problem." One hopes that the clinician does not react with "disgust, anger, and hostility." It is not realistic to hope that he will avoid theoretical preconceptions when looking at psychological material which he knows was obtained from a homosexual.

Kurt's posture tightened further and further with every word. If this was how the people offering psychiatric treatment responded, he was better off avoiding it alltogether. He would be better to just cut everything off and move to Europe to pursue a singing career. Better than standing in a room while the people in charge of making him better stated how emotionally disturbed he was. Unless he could somehow get rid of it in the next few years, before he reached adulthood- but that seemed unlikely, considering at the very least the comorbidity of his sexual inversion. If physicians reacted to him with the same disgust, anger, and hostility as everyone else around him...if none of them had been able to make him change his disgusting habits yet, why would someone with a medical degree approaching it the same way?

But this woman was apparently different. She started by finding homosexuals who were not part of a psychiatric treatment - from the sounds of it, not part of treatment at all. They were part of an organization, something called the Mattachine, and Kurt wasn't sure what that was but could hear Finn calling it the Machete Society which made him smirk wryly. He filed the name away for later use as he continued reading. This Dr. Hooker had set out to compare heterosexual men to homosexual men and show whether homosexual men were less mentally stable-

...and they weren't.

The numbers were small, but even. There were descriptions of the doctors trying to distinguish the mental profiles of homosexuals from heterosexual men and being unable to do so - honestly? Kurt couldn't imagine ever being mistaken for a heterosexual boy...unless that other report had been right and almost no one actually was heterosexual, but he was still skeptical of that. No, if heterosexual was Finn and Puck and their friends, he was decidedly unlike them. If it was Jeff and Nick and Blaine and Wes and Thad, he was...still unlike them, certainly when discussing sexual disorders.

But they weren't crazy. They weren't disturbed. They weren't maladjusted. They, presumably, lived lives that were deemed abnormal only by virtue of this erotic homosexual attraction.

Then Kurt came to a paragraph that blew him away.

Dr. Hooker described in detail (though anonymously) several of the study's participants. One, a man identified only as #16, was a highly-intelligent, razor sharp, and well-spoken. He was described as ethical and moral by every expert examining his record. In fact, the doctor who ranked him the lowest - essentially giving him a B if one could have a class in being well-adjusted - commented:

He gives an original twist to ordinary things. For him it is very important not to be conventional. He avoids it like the plague. He tries to keep it cool. I get the feeling that he wants to deny dependency. He has passive longings, but these would not fit in with his ego-ideal of being strong, superior, and wise. He would be able to be very rewarding emotionally. He does not wish to expose his aggression ordinarily, but would in relation to manly intellectual pursuits.

Kurt felt like that could be describing him. From the giving a twist to ordinary things - something he had prided himself on his entire life, whether in decorating a room or writing an essay - to being strong, superior, wise, and independent...those were his best and worst (well, previously-worst) qualities all rolled into one, simple explanation. In reality, it was describing a man in his forties who held multiple degrees in artistic fields and worked at both a college and managing a magazine...and was homosexual. In fact, the article said the man was in a "homosexual marriage," and while Kurt didn't know what that meant, he felt like he could imagine that somewhat - he would make a good Donna Reed, maybe. It certainly made more sense to him than the idea of coming home to find Mercedes cooking dinner while their children ran around the back yard, that was for sure; whatever flash of undefined future he saw, it felt closer to the nondescript term in the article than to anything else he'd seen.

If one brackets the fact that he is a homosexual, one would think of him as being a highly cultured, intelligent man who, though unconventional in his manner of living, exhibits no particular signs of pathology. He has never sought psychological or psychiatric help. He has been a homosexual from adolescence, with no heterosexual experience or inclination.

It was almost enough to make him cry.