The other day, while groaning through yet another day of food-poisoning, I turned thirty eight. Because I was so sick, it was even more of an anti-climax than usual. In fact, I'd have forgotten it was my birthday had not I received a phone call from my friend John Paul, who always calls on my birthday.

But yesterday, just for a while, I was twenty two again. I received an email out of the blue from a man named Vincent. It was Vinny - the second man I ever had sex with, way back when I was a very young graduate student at Penn. I'd only just come out of the closet, and was attending my first ever gay dance "club", a relatively tame affair put on by the gay and lesbian student society. The event was more like a high-school prom than anything else; and not just because of the music, but also because many of us, certainly myself, were probably as inexperienced as high-school kids are at the prom.

My eye was drawn to a short, hunky Italian-American with a flashing smile, wearing what looked like a leather t-shirt sculpted to his torso. I never for a moment thought that such a self-confident, gorgeous guy could be interested in me. I felt so tall and awkward in comparison to his lithe grace. Yet somehow, suddenly, towards the end of the evening, he was talking to me. "I've been staring at you all night", I thought I heard him say, however incredibly unlikely that seemed. I blurted out some stuttering nonsense which he pretended to understand, and we managed to arrange to meet on a date the following weekend.

I don't remember the intervening days, but I'm sure they were fraught with nerves and excitement. It was my first real date. The day arrived, and pretty much the only thing I remember about it was that we went to see "Moonstruck." I couldn't pay any attention to the movie, and have no idea what it was about; all I remember is that we held hands, and the feeling of our hands slowly exploring each others' hand and forearms was the most erotic thing I'd ever experienced.

We didn't date for very long. Even then I recognized that we were too different to sustain more than sexual excitement. He was going to participate in the amateur striptease concert at Kurtz one weekend, and suggested that he swing by on the way over there to pick me up, along with his parents who were actually going to videotape his performance. I declined, and that was that. But I would see him now and then over the years, before I left Philadelphia. When I last saw him (apart from a brief encounter one steamy summer night several years later on my first return trip to Philly), he was pole-dancing at a gay bar near Rittenhouse Square.