It had started when Dave was ten, almost eleven. He could remember it like it was yesterday. They had taken a class field trip to Columbus to an art museum. In the front lobby there had stood an imposing statue, a replica of Michael Angelo's David. It had been quite large, towering over the crowd of sixth graders who had pooled around his legs as they waited for their guided tour to begin.

The presence of the ostentatious naked figure had caused the group of adolescents to exchange various meaningful looks. The girls had mostly giggled, glancing furtively and curiously at the statue's penis only to move in and whisper to their fellow female gawkers. The boys had largely avoided looking directly at the bared, erotic piece of stone, preferring to pretend to be above the girl's silliness, while actually appearing quite uncomfortable and exposed themselves.

But something different had happened to Dave, something that would change the course of his adolescent life, and indeed his entire life forever. Instead of being made uncomfortable by the statue, Dave had felt drawn to it, and had stared outright, unable to tear his eyes away. The stone had possessed a kind of magnetism, carved as it was in the shape of an absolutely beautiful boy. It had not been the penis that called for his attention, for it was small and far more familiar to him than to his novice female classmates. It had been everything else – the strong legs, the flat muscled chest, the tilt of the slight male hips…and that perfectly curved behind.

As his eyes grazed the figure, becoming more glued the longer he looked, Dave had felt his first real stirrings of arousal. He had felt his temperature rise. He had felt the stream of blood begin to pool in his groin and the air flowing rapidly and shallowly over his parched, swollen lips. For a moment, for one thrilling, heady moment, Dave had felt nothing but pleasure, and that now familiar primal flash of pure want. And for that one moment, it had been blissfully unencumbered, free of judgment, of value, of any kind of significance. A self contained experience of life-affirming desire, clear, pure, unadulterated, without hesitation.

Then it happened.

"Hey Karofsky stop staring. It's time to go. Besides, what are you, some kinda fag?"

An icy deluge of fear had submerged Dave then, drowning out all of his previous feelings of arousal and replacing them with an affect of quiet terror. On the outside Dave had laughed the moment off, quick to rejoin his classmates with a look of nonchalance on his face. But inside a horrible, hideous feeling had taken root in his body, one that would sadly never dislodge itself entirely.

He could not remember which of his male classmates had said those words to him. But it hardly mattered. Nothing would erase them from his mind. Nothing could stop the ringing in his ears of that one horrid, soul-crushing word: FAG. It had set his teeth on edge. It had knocked the breath from his body. At the sound of it, a dark shadow had taken up residence in his mind, and Dave would never again be perfectly whole.

He remembered nothing else from that field trip. For the rest of the day he had wandered through the museum in a state of numbness, seeing none of what was in front of him, hearing nothing that the tour guide or any of his teachers said. Instead, he heard only the panicked hollow assurances of his mind as it began its' years long process of placing him in a perpetual state of denial.

It's not true. It's NOT. It was just a one-off thing. It doesn't mean anything. It's not true. You're not really…gay. You're not. It can't be true. It just can't be. It's not. I won't let it be. I won't let it!

And so had begun the mantra that would haunt Dave almost daily for years to come. It had quickly become a constant, involuntary refrain in the back of his mind, issuing forth with greater emphasis each time a moment like the encounter with statue came upon him.

Although predictably there would be plenty of other moments as puberty descended on him with full force, Dave had never again allowed himself to drop his guard in front of other people, the way he had at the museum. He had learned that lesson well enough the first time. He knew if other people even began to suspect, his ability to function would be severely compromised. And he was too good at protecting himself to let that happen. Whatever battles may have been waged internally, Dave's exterior remained one of perfect sexual stoicism in public for years to come.

Inside, the life of his desire fought a grueling painful fight.

Outside, however, it was almost as if David was made of stone.