It is the student, away from friends and family for the first time, free to explore these feelings and thoughts she's had for a long time, thinking she will be safe amongst people of her own kind. Instead she finds her peers jaded, catty, and abrasive, their politics selfish, their wants and needs childish.
It is the soldier, burning in hell, who realizes that his training has led him here, his devotion and love for his country meaning nothing. He would lay down his life, not for his country, but for the love he bears toward his fellow soldier. He has the audacity to wonder why it is acceptable to die for this love, but not to live for it.
It is the priest who devotes his life to a higher power. He acts as an instrument of unconditional love, but finds no such love within his church, no peace or forgiveness for those whose sins he hears, those sins that are within him as confessor as they are within those of his penitents.
It is the son, a bastard child of divorce and war who seeks nothing but a father to which he may give his love, searching in secret, searching alone.
It is the homosexual, walking down any Main Street in any town, who does not touch his partner with anything other than friendly affection, for fear of upsetting all those around him who can express a deeper affection without fear of losing life as a result.
It is the beast, whose fists pulp soft flesh and pulverizes weak bones, extinguishing the light of another soul for daring to express what the beast itself cannot, will not, must not express.
It is the prisoner, who must face her remaining years without all she has come to accept as hers, who turns, in a moment of weakness to another for simple touch, simple warmth, simple contact. She pays for giving in to that loneliness again and again and again.
It is the athlete who trains himself to the physical peak of perfection out of vanity and want and desire, forever keeping secret these emotions for the small comfort of the game.
It is the addict who has turned to drugs to escape the shame and guilt of things she has done and things she wants to do, slowly sinking into madness, because madness is far more acceptable than the alternative.
It is the celebrity who must forever live in public, never having a private moment in which he may stop being his image.
It is the pauper who lives beneath our perception, but to whom we give money to salve our conscience, so he may put an artificial barrier between what he is and what he wants.
It is you.
It is me.
Whether we are or not. Whether we want to or not...
We are all straight acting. | 
