ABOUT THE BOOK
For some, “passing” means opportunity, access, or safety. Others don’t willingly pass but are “passed” in specific situations by someone else. We Wear the Mask, edited by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page, is an illuminating and timely anthology that examines the complex reality of passing in America. My essay, “Among the Heterosexuals,” deals with the random murder of someone close to me, and how this altered the course of my life.

EXCERPT
Passing involves deliberateness, which makes my authentic yet conflicted foray into heterosexuality all the more confusing, and maybe even sad. Passing is studied and intentional. I know this because I once tried to pass as something that I wasn’t. As a Yale freshman from an undistinguished West Coast public high school, I tried to be a chameleon. I didn’t throw away the embroidered peasant blouses and denim bellbottoms that I had worn at home. I kept them to pass with hippie-identified Yalies. But being a flawed person, a person who had read This Side of Paradise way more often than a peasant child should, I was intrigued by the upper tiers of Ivy League society—the glittering private school kids, who stood out in part because of the rigid coding of their clothes. They wore things I had never even seen in the surfer-hippie slum where I grew up: Top-Siders, duck boots, pastel polo shirts with small embroidered alligators, and Fair Isle sweaters that looked, when new, as if a small animal had been trapped inside and stretched random sections of wool in a fierce effort to get out.