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Intimate wit

In this excerpt from his new book, Naked, David Sedaris tells tales out of camp in "I Like Guys"

There was one boy at camp I felt I might get along with, a Detroit native named Jason who slept on the bunk beneath mine. Jason tended to look away when talking to the other boys, shifting his eyes as though he were studying the weather conditions. Like me, he used his free time to curl into a fetal position, staring at the bedside calendar upon which he'd x'-ed out all the days he had endured so far. We were finishing our 7:15 to 7:45 wash-and-rinse segment one morning when our dormitory counselor arrived for inspection shouting, "What are you, a bunch of goddamned faggots who can't make your beds?"

I giggled out loud at his stupidity. If anyone knew how to make a bed, it was a faggot. It was the others he needed to worry about. I saw Jason laughing too, and soon we took to mocking this counselor, referring to each other first as "faggots" and then as "stinking faggots." We were "lazy faggots" and "sunburned faggots" before we eventually became "faggoty faggots." We couldn't protest the word, as that would have meant acknowledging the truth of it. Embodying the term in all its clichéd glory, we minced and pranced about the room for each other's entertainment when the others weren't looking. . . . We used it as a joke, an accusation, and finally as a dare. Late at night I'd feel my bunk buck and sway, knowing that Jason was either masturbating or beating eggs for an omelette. Is it me he's thinking about? I'd follow his lead and wake the next morning to find our entire iron-frame unit had wandered a good eighteen inches from the wall. Our love had the power to move bunks.

Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown. Naked (304 pages, $22) is due in bookstores this March.

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