Unfolding

In the beginning, all is without form. Light slowly rises, creating a
heaven above a lingering void. Five deities, the first of their kind,
blink into a genderless existence, shy and solitary. They quickly
withdraw.

Five boys converge on Billy’s bedroom. With a showman’s
flair, Billy, the youngest of us all, reveals a pile of strange
magazines. I stare mystified at the other boys pawing through
Playboy and Hustler, hooting their appreciation. When another
ten-year-old boy discovers a centerfold, they are awestruck.
Confused, I leave.

Another generation arises, two more genderless deities, both of
whom hide nearly instantly too. But soon ten more follow, five
pairs of brothers and sisters. The first four pairs present a jewel-
encrusted spear to the youngest pair, Izanagi and his sister Izanami,
and require them to make order from the primordial slop.

At first, I fail to connect the sketches in my pad, ineptly drawn?
naked men, with the happy-shy-ticklish feelings swarming my
body. It is late 1977, and I am eleven.
As I draw some more, my legs fall asleep. I stretch out on my
stomach to continue, but a sharp stab startles me. The happy-
shy-ticklish feelings coalesce and part of me is larger than
before. I examine that largeness, shocked: something wet
glistens at its tip. I lay on my side and, eye to my sketches,
explore a different creativity.
Early in 1978 my father leads twelve-year-old me to the
bathroom. It is time for the talk, he announces, and I perch on
the rim of the claw-footed tub to face him. He discusses the
mechanics of puberty and sex, words I only know the sound of.
A new word catches me off-guard: vagina. He elaborates as I
blush with a stellar heat.

Equipped with the divine spear, Izanagi and Izanami stand on the
floating bridge of heaven and stir through the ooze below. Each
time they raise the spear, salty water drips from it, coalescing into
an island beneath. The siblings alight and erect a column in support
of heaven.

Leaving my father with his nurse, my mother leads me to the
store at the corner of Broadway and Main. My chubby hands
riffle through the 45s, looking for as many 1979 hits as my
thirteen-year-old’s allowance can manage. Disco Inferno enters
my clutches as my mother peruses paperbacks two rows over. I
turn my head and stare at the top row in the periodicals section.
Magazines hide behind cardboard placards, only their titles
visible. I spot Playboy and Hustler, and memories of Billy’s
stash has me rolling my eyes. But Playgirl? I gingerly raise it,
and Burt Reynolds smiles at me from above a sea of chest hair.
Shocked, I let him slip from my grasp and the magazine
thumps back into place.

Standing beside the new column, Izanagi and Izanami pay
closer attention to each other’s divine anatomy. Izanami
confides that a part of her has not yet grown enough.
Izanagi counters that a part of him has grown too much!
Inspiration strikes: If I use my grown-too-much part to
cover over your not-yet-grown-enough part, perhaps more
land shall arise from the amorphous seas.

A week later, I ask my mother if I can spend my allowance on
an issue of Playgirl.
She demands to know why.
To… to compare, I stammer.
She counters: Men in that magazine are not good for
comparison.

Izanagi’s proposal notwithstanding, the duo admit to a problem:
neither know precisely how a conjoining might proceed. A wagtail
alights—from where, the myth’s scribe does not note—within
view of the deities. The bird begins to pump its tail feathers up and
down, as wagtails do. A moment of avian eureka occurs.

In September of 1980, I find a new store on Main with a wider
selection of magazines. An education awaits within the pages
of Honcho, Blueboy, and Mandate. Better by far than any of
my sketches, I see the fullness of men, and catalog their beauty.
The locations and densities of body hair. Eye color, hair color,
skin color. Angles, widths, lengths, and curves.

The inspired siblings perform a courtship ritual, circling the
column in opposite directions, and when they round the column
and encounter each other once more, Izanami compliments her
brother on his fair appearance. Izanagi repays the compliment,
though he suspects he should have spoken first. Their shared libido
overrules protocol concerns, however, and his grown-too-much
part covers over Izanami’s not-yet-grown-enough part. Sadly, the
first two fruits of her womb—a wretched leech-like thing and a
wisp of foam—disappoint the new parents and they set the
loathsome offspring adrift.

I am sixteen when I graduate from my periodical novitiate into
active pursuit. I learn about cruising and about sex in public
spaces, and my thirst grows deeper, my hunger more profound.
My oral skills outstrip my confidence—I am, after all, just
another fat kid.

Distressed at their loss, Izanami and Izanagi seek the counsel of
their older siblings, who in turn seek omens and auguries. The
divined conclusion, as Izanagi surmised, finds fault in the order of
the compliments: Izanami should have waited for her brother. The
twosome return to the column, repeat the ritual, and Izanagi
compliments his fair sister first. Their now-successful union begins
to bear progeny. Island after island glisten into being, the delicate
scatter of Awaji, Oki, Iki, Tsu, and Sado, together with their more
substantial brothers, Shikoku, Kyūshū, and Honshū.

The captain of the baseball team, a senior to my junior, eyes
me at his graduation party. The crowd shifts and he is
suddenly, surprisingly, alone. I note the question in his raised
eyebrow. My too-long repressed crush panics a ploy into
action: I’ve never tried pot before.
He nods, gesturing for me to follow him into the darkness. We
secret ourselves behind a garden wall so he can teach me the
fundamentals of toking. In the light of a match, I glimpse his
gray-green eyes.
A confession breaks free: I think I’m bi. I pause to prevaricate
for someone’s benefit—don’t ask me whose. I’ve never sucked
dick before. Can I practice with you?

Izanami becomes pregnant with her last child. Kagutsuchi, the god
of fire, is the first god to be born unto gods; his arrival burns his
mother to death. Izanagi, furious with grief, wields his divine
sword to rend his son’s head from his neck, chopping what’s left
into eight pieces. Izanagi scatters the carnage across the
archipelago, creating volcanoes with each hurl.

During the summer of 1987, I learn how to come out. My
pretense of heterosexuality relied on the magic of its
mythology—girlfriend, then marriage, then children—but my
new identity brings unreal fantasies of its own. Outness does
not equal attractiveness, however, nor does it create sexual
opportunity within a small college town.
The transition from twenty-one to twenty-two across my senior
year is flamboyantly angry. I argue with evangelicals, military
recruiters, psychology majors.
I envy the easy beauty of my peers as I rage against my
solitude.

Death’s presence is felt, and Izanagi grieves as his sister-wife
enters Yomi, the underworld. He follows, hoping to retrieve her,
but he cannot obey her one entreaty: look not upon me. Her
putrefaction repulses him and the Shikome, the eight guardian-
hags of Yomi and protectresses of Izanami’s corpse, pursue him.
They close in, their wrath undeterred by the peaches he hurls. It is
only when Izanagi creates grapes and tosses them in their path that
the Shikome pause to inspect the novelty.
He escapes.

Coming out brings the dangers of HIV-AIDS into clearer
focus, and the fear of disease and certain death overwhelms my
pride. I promise everyone that my journey to Japan is only for a
year, yet independence abroad inebriates me. I gain sexual
traction in a landscape not dominated by the North American
monoculture of hyper-masculine homosexuality, and at age
twenty-six I succumb to the shy eyes of a soft-spoken man.

Yomi has rendered Izanagi unclean, and he hastens to purify his
divinity. As he bathes, deity after deity alight from the clothing he
discards and the water falling from his skin. During his final
ablutions, new, noble and powerful deities arise: Amaterasu, in
whom resides the sun, Tsukuyomi, the moon, and Susano’o, the
seas.

The soft-spoken man moves in with me in January of 1992, but
the passion he displayed when first we met cools faster than a
wagtail’s wag. Within four months, I learn to read his secrets
and connivances as normal—surely I can afford his fruitless
search for employment—and the bed we share is barren, his
protestations of love notwithstanding. Finally, my tears birth
my self-respect.
I ask him to move out, whereupon he confesses his HIV-
positive status.

Ukemochi, the goddess of food, invites Amaterasu to a feast, but
because her solar duties require much of her time, she dispatches
her sibling Tsukuyomi in her stead. But Ukemochi’s idea of a
feast—she commands the seas to regurgitate fish, the forests to
vomit forth game, and a rice paddy to cough up bowls of rice—so
disgusts Tsukuyomi that they kill Ukemochi, infuriating
Amaterasu. Meanwhile, Susano’o times a temper tantrum with a
visit to his sister. He flays her favorite horse alive and throws the
hide around her home, killing her handmaiden. He smears his feces
everywhere as a final insult.

I repeat my demand for his departure, unsure whether his status
is yet another manipulation. As 1993 dawns amid my reclaimed
independence and confirmed negative results, I consider
potential relationship upgrades. Serial monogamy follows,
punctuated with a dalliance or three during otherwise unmated
weeks. A realization arrives in August: novelty fosters the
interest in me for most Japanese men. I am a box they check
off.
I heed friendly advice and seal my libido away.

Amaterasu and Susano’o delight in angering each other. After one
final insult involving, gasp, feces again, Amaterasu blockades
herself, all sunlight and life, within a cave. The gods gather,
hoping to end the new darkness. Amenouzume, the goddess of art
and humor, begins to dance. The more clothing falls away during
her divine disco, the more she entices Amaterasu; the sun goddess
loves a good bawd, and the world knows light once more.

I marinate in loneliness for two months until I plan a big event
at a Tōkyō festival, inviting many friends, hoping to bathe in
their warmth.
Excuses are voiced, and the friends bail, all save one young
man. We had been chatting for months on a BBS and on the
phone, but had never actually met until this accident? Or
coincidence? A long evening unfolds into a date.
As our night ends chastely, I fall in love.
Come the morning, Amaterasu’s sun rises for me.