/ Nonfiction /
Close your eyes. Think of a Victoria’s Secret store: the hip-hop–infused pop music squeezing through the air, the scent of $9.99 body spray. The color pink, because, even with eyes closed, you feel pink everywhere around you. You can see, in your mind, giant photos of women on the wall, as tall as a backyard tree and just as thin, breasts spilling out of bras, hair hiding their eyes.
Now, smell burning bagels.
This is what the Victoria’s Secret corporate office cafeteria in New York was like. Rather than shoppers, you heard heels click against tiled floors, chatter about unread emails, text message alerts interspersed with swift typing against a flat phone screen. The models were also there, frozen in black and white photographs, hovering over the salad bar and the commercial grade toaster, eyes boring toward you as you filled your plate.
This is where I interviewed for a job, managing marketing campaigns and social media for the brand. It was the winter of 2017, when I was let go from a start-up where I had worked for only five weeks. “We made a mistake in hiring you,” the CEO told me. She had started the same day as me. I was gutted. I had just moved to New York six months prior to live with my boyfriend, who, until then, I had been dating long-distance. Like many millennials, my work was where I poured my value. I wanted something—anything—onto which I could tack my identity. I wanted to watch the impressed reactions of strangers when I answered the question, as reliable as the winds off the Hudson River in winter, “So, what do you do?”
My parents laughed when I told them I was interviewing for the job.
“Victoria’s Secret?” my dad said, disbelief and pride crashing in the words. “What the hell do you know about Victoria’s Secret?”
I couldn’t argue with him on that: I was not a customer and I never had been. Growing up as a boy in Rhode Island, I avoided the gaze of Victoria’s Secret’s Angels in the windows of the Warwick Mall, instead quietly moving toward the bare-chested hunks of Abercrombie & Fitch, who stirred something deep in my stomach I didn’t yet know what to call. While the Abercrombie entryway was dark, a place I could hide my longer stares of biceps and pecs, the Victoria’s Secret awning flashed femininity in that cheery pink. The brightness felt like danger. What was behind that entryway, I would never know. Whenever we walked through the mall, I spotted the women with impossible figures staring out from the windows. I’d turn away blushing.
Those same models watched me interview for the job in the cafeteria. They had once hung in my junior high school locker, a deflection I used to distract from my high-pitched giggle and my interest in drama club, the way my wrists fell when I told a joke. Although I had never been in a store, I had pulled the images from advertisements as an adolescent shield; I had, in that sense, been wearing the brand for most of my life. When I was unemployed, pushed out of a dream job, and the offer came to work for the sexiest brand in the world, I took it.
When I entered my teenage years in the late ’90s, the brand was everywhere. Supermodels were plastered across store windows and magazines, with the Fashion Show on TV every holiday season.
Of course I knew about the Fashion Show, but I don’t remember ever watching it. I’m sure I wasn’t allowed to, and even if I did show interest, it would have been a controversial dinner table discussion. (My parents may have been pleased to know that I was taking an interest in women; not in the way they would have expected, of course, but still.)
At one point in fifth grade, standing outside of school with a bunch of other boys, the conversation shifted to the Fashion Show.
“Adriana Lima …” one of them said, rolling his eyes toward the back of his head.
“What?” I asked, clueless.
“Adriana, the Victoria’s Secret model,” he said. “Huge boobs.”
When I talk with my gay friends about growing up, there are moments when you knew. This was one of them for me, when, standing on a rock in the yard of South Road Elementary School, I realized there was something different between me and this boy. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I chose to ignore it. I nodded along—oh yeah, cool, boobs, big, wow—not understanding what to say or how to navigate the conversation. I didn’t have an interest in Adriana Lima, but I somehow knew to feign one in order to avoid being seen as something different. I realized that I would have to keep pretending to protect this part of me, hidden away.
When I got to junior high, my locker was where I did that. A locker was a place to store books and gym clothes but also, more importantly, a place to decorate. Just like the clothes we chose to wear, we knew whatever pictures we put in our locker would define who we were to the jury of other thirteen-year-olds in the school.
By the time I was in eighth grade, I didn’t understand why everyone was so excited about boobs when you knew the high school boys’ track team would start practicing shirtless when the temperature hit seventy degrees. I went on the offensive and borrowed magazines from the girls in drama club, tearing through the ads and selecting images of women such as Tyra Banks, Gisele and, yes, Adriana Lima. I taped them to my locker from the bottom to the top, covering the whole space with supermodels. I’m just like the other guys, it meant to say.
Of course, the other guys didn’t decorate their lockers.
Each morning, when I clicked the combination of my locker door, I would look both ways down the hall to see who was coming and then carefully crack it open. I would take my books, or my plastic bag of gym clothes, without opening the door the whole way. I may have plastered the images in there, but I was still ashamed of them.
I didn’t want to be questioned. I feared other boys seeing the pictures and interrogating me—she’s hot, right? Tell me what you like about her and why. Be specific. This is not how thirteen-year-old boys talk, but nevertheless, I was terrified it would happen, a locker-side investigation with Adriana Lima’s eyes bearing down on me. I wouldn’t be able to answer the questions so instead willed to be invisible.
This panic grasped me, following me through the day. I carried my books between classes against my legs, with one arm, not hugged toward my body like the girls did; I changed quickly and nervously for gym, spending as little time as I could in the locker room. I hoped that people would see the one-arm hold, or notice that I kept my eyes toward the ground in the company of other shirtless boys. Or, better yet, I hoped that people didn’t see me at all.
Each year for Christmas, my family would drive over a handful of bridges to my grandmother’s house for dinner. On the way home, we’d stop by my aunt Ann Marie’s house, holding our breath against the stench of cigarette smoke and parrot shit to collect one of the most valuable gifts of the day.
Ann Marie lived in a long cabin with a front yard the size of a softball field. On Christmas, she sat in a giant recliner in the living room, directing, with a cigarette dangling from her long, bony fingers, which presents to open. My sister and I always loved getting the gifts from Ann Marie, because it was always, without fail, a $100 gift certificate to L.L. Bean, the most expensive gift we received each year. In our minds, Ann Marie was rich, and the generous gift was access to our own wealth, as we would sell those gift certificates to our parents for cash, peewee entrepreneurs trafficking in late millennial catalog brands.
On the car ride home one year, I overheard my mom in the front passenger seat of the car.
“I just don’t know what I’ll do with it,” she said to my dad. “I mean, why in the world would she think I’d want something from that store?”
“I don’t get it either,” my dad said. “Not really right.”
Mom’s present that year was a gift certificate to Victoria’s Secret. Like many Irish-Catholic families, four-letter words like hell or damn were more acceptable than three-letter words like sex or bra. We didn’t talk about attractions in the house often, if at all. In my early teenage years, my parents left a book about puberty on my bed, which I tore through, searching for clues telling me it was totally normal to have a crush on your best friend, then declined to bring it up when the pages failed to answer. The Bush-era abstinence-only education, which had influenced the health curriculum at my school, wasn’t doing me any favors either, where we learned that sex led to either childbirth or AIDS. It wasn’t until college that my dad stammered through a conversation, making sure that I was using condoms. At that point, I wasn’t having sex, but instead kicking boys out of my room in the middle of the night after awkward, fumbling hand jobs. By then, it was a steady tradition of silence.
After getting the gift certificate, my mom continued to share the story with neighbors, friends, anyone who would listen. She didn’t understand, she would say, in what world a woman would buy access to sexy underwear for her brother’s wife.
“They have nice pajamas,” I remember someone saying. “Or even a bathrobe. Silk, really comfortable.”
That sounded quite nice to me, a silk, pink robe to lounge in, a luxury I probably would have enjoyed as a twelve-year-old. But my mom couldn’t wrap her head around going inside the store.
“I’m just not sure it’s appropriate,” she would say, with finality.
I have no idea if she ultimately used the gift certificate or sold it off to someone else, as my sister and I would with L.L. Bean. Either way, I received the message: Victoria’s Secret was a dangerous place, and something to hide—indeed, a thing to keep secret. If the Angels were in my locker at school, hiding, they wouldn’t be seen in my bedroom either.
* * *
I had a girlfriend, briefly, during eighth grade, the same year that the world’s top models stared at the inside of my locker. She was as tall as me, with frizzy, brown curls and a voice as quiet as a picture. I was too afraid to try anything physical. I kissed her on the cheek once, on her birthday; she wore a ribbed gray sweater cropped close to her torso. (I had a similar one that I wore, picked up from Abercrombie and Fitch.) I turned deep crimson in the moment, a violent blush—I felt the color climbing up my neck as I pulled my lips away from her face. She looked indignant and embarrassed, but also revealed pity in her eyes, which sliced a line in my heart and straight through my guts.
Her friend called me a week later to say she wanted to break up with me.
I never told my parents that I had a girlfriend, that I didn’t know what to do or why it was all so stressful. I wasn’t sure how to bring it up, so I just didn’t. My parents were in the living room when that friend called, in clear earshot on the first floor of our house where everything was in one big room. It was nighttime, and they sat in their chairs reading. The voice on the other end was soft but clear.
She still really likes you.
She still thinks you’re cute.
She just wants to be friends, is all.
“Oh, yeah, of course,” I said, keeping it very general. I could hear my voice, high and fast. I wanted to end the call as soon as possible and go to my room, to breathe a sigh of relief. As I navigated the conversation, the phone pressed to my ear, I saw my parents look up, and at each other.
“Who was that?” my mom asked when I hung up.
“I DON’T EVEN KNOW!” I said, far too aggressively to play it cool, and ran up the stairs feeling that same redness all over my face.
Later that year, I heard that one of my friends touched her boobs behind the drama club stage. (Which was my territory, by the way.) Is that what I was supposed to do instead of the cheek kiss? I thought, and then I shook it from my head. Instead, I kept the pictures in my locker and hoped that if people saw them, they’d keep walking.
* * *
As eighth grade graduation neared, one of our teachers gave us an assignment.
“We’re going to make a personal time capsule,” she said. “You’re going to look back on these days with fond memories. Write a letter to your future self and put anything you want in this manila envelope, which I’ll send to you when you graduate high school.”
That seemed like a lifetime away. This was 1999—the class of 2003 would be graduating in the new millennium! We weren’t even sure if we would make it, or if everything would blow up on Y2K, like some of our parents seemed to think.
I wasn’t sure what to do with all the photos from my locker as we cleaned them out for the summer. I knew I didn’t want to bring them home, where they would surely invite those questions I was avoiding. Keeping them in my bedroom, or anywhere else where they could be discovered, wasn’t an option, yet the magazine clippings were too valuable to throw away. I never knew when I might need them in the future. I decided to play it safe and shove those images into that manila envelope.
I’ll know what to do with them when I’m eighteen, I thought, trusting the public education system in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, to give me the life lessons of managing shame and mature sexual development over the coming four years. When I was done, the manila envelope was so thick that I had to tape it shut, the silver latch too weak to hold in all the smut. I brought it to the teacher after school to avoid the questions from my peers, about why my time capsule was three times the size as everyone else’s.
* * *
I didn’t masturbate until my freshman year of high school. I remember one night waking up and feeling like I had to pee and, after a few quick flicks of the wrist, realizing what Mark and Ivan in band had been referencing all through junior high.
Of course, like any teenage boy, once I learned about this I couldn’t get enough, but each experience came with a heavy dose of shame. I tried to ignore the fact that images of the American Gladiators or firefighters made my stomach drop, and concentrate, instead, on the Victoria’s Secret Angels.
One night, when my family was asleep, I crept downstairs to the recycling bin and took out the Victoria’s Secret catalog. (Who knows how we got on the mailing list; perhaps my mom used that gift certificate, after all.) Whenever the catalog arrived in the mail, it was promptly placed at the bottom of the bin.
“Where it belongs,” my dad would say, not realizing that the men in the L.L. Bean catalog or the J.C. Penney coupons for Jockey briefs were more dangerous to leave lying around.
That night, when I picked the Victoria’s Secret catalog out from the empty coffee cups and old newspapers, I stuffed it under my pajama shirt and went to the bathroom. I turned the lights on and sat on the toilet, flipping through the pages and willing my body to react. Of course, not much happened. But I kept turning the page, hoping.
A photo of a thin, white woman on the beach caught my attention, so I paused, one hand holding the magazine and the other pulling my soft flesh. I tried to look at her body—the curves of the bra, the hip bones jutting out from lace—but ended up admiring her hair in the wind and learning that the price for the set was $39.95.
Ultimately, I finished, feeling fulfilled and relieved that I could complete an exercise in the same method as my peers, something that would make me normal. I cleaned up and put the Victoria’s Secret catalog back in the recycling, which was hidden in the closet. The irony of this, that the very thoughts and feelings I had were closeted away, never passed through my lens; I wouldn’t allow it. Instead, I held onto the safety that if anyone ever broke through my facade, and questioned who I was and what I was attracted to, I could confidently repeat back the price of a bra and panty set from Victoria’s Secret.
* * *
As I got older, at the end of high school and beginning of college, I was closer to knowing that I was gay, but I still pushed it aside.
Each summer, I lifeguarded at the beach, a job I took more for the image than the interest. I liked the idea of telling new friends at college that I spent the summer protecting lives from the ocean, sitting in the sun like a younger East Coast Baywatch cast member. I left out the details that the beach was only a few feet wide, that we only had one rescue, where I helped a guy stand in the wave break by taking his hand and lifting him out of the soft sand, the water lapping against my ankles. He was kind enough to write a thank you note afterward.
Colin, one of my best friends from growing up, had worked as a lifeguard before and helped me get the job. He had blond hair and pecs the size of grocery store produce, helping him look far more the part than me, the one who turned away and blushed whenever cute guys came by and took off their shirts.
It was one such guy that Colin found me in bed with one morning. A bunch of us had stayed late at a friend’s rental house, taking tequila shots until midnight. We had to work the next day, and Colin, who got up on time, came searching for me. He found me in the boy’s bed, a sheet covering us.
“Oh, I—” Colin stammered. “We’re going to be late.”
“Just hand me my shorts,” I told him, the palm of my hand covering my eyes.
He picked up the shorts from the floor and put them in my other, open hand. I slipped them under the sheet and found the holes for my legs, creeping them up while the cute guy stayed sleeping beside me.
I shimmied my way into the shorts, while Colin stood there awkwardly, unsure of what to do and where to look in the shock of the scenario. I tried to move fast, but the shorts got tighter and tighter, making it harder for them to get over my thighs.
“Colin, hold on,” I said, my legs stuck. “These aren’t my shorts.”
We laughed about that later, as he drove us to the beach. He had a Jeep Cherokee with the top off, sun, wind, everywhere.
“I’m not sure if you’re worried about me saying anything,” he told me, once the car was parked. “But don’t worry. I won’t.”
I knew that I had to trust him, that he now had critical evidence I wasn’t who I said I was. Through my first summer before college, I strived to wrap up my high school life in a way that felt normal, all-American. I was terrified that my past would come back to out me: namely, that the junior high time capsule would show up, the one promised to be delivered by my eighth grade teacher. That a stack of Victoria’s Secret models would return one afternoon to mock me at eighteen for never kissing, dating, showing interest in a girl.
I could trust a secret with my friend; one from myself, five years prior, I couldn’t.
I often thought about that envelope, dreading its return to me. I took to visiting the mailbox at the end of our driveway to look for the package, hoping to capture it before my parents did and avoid that conversation: interrogations about women, why I wasn’t dating, questions I avoided in my own head because I was too afraid to tell myself the answers. I worried that it would come while I was at the beach, pretending, yearning, to be straight. I raced to the mailbox through the summer, once I was released from work, hoping I would be back in time for interception.
The frenzy never reached a finish line. By the time I left for college, the package had not arrived.
* * *
When I accepted the role at Victoria’s Secret, I had been out of high school for fifteen years and out as a gay man for ten, having accepted that of myself at the end of college before sharing my identity with my friends and family. I was out at work until I got to Victoria’s Secret, where, outside of my immediate team, I didn’t talk about my personal life. It was never explicit, but I felt as though revealing this part of me meant the people, the (mostly) men in charge, would no longer invite me into rooms with the models, where I needed to be in order to get my job done. I was back to hiding in plain sight, creeping the locker door open to get my things before slamming it shut.
At one point, while taking pictures for social media at the Fashion Show, one of the models pulled me aside.
“You and your team have great concepts,” she said, tapping her finger to her head. “Keep doing what you’re doing.”
It was a high compliment from someone I respected—one of a handful of models who was great to work with, super professional, sharp and full of good ideas.
I thought of myself years prior, that boy standing on the rock at South Road School, not knowing who Adriana Lima was. The same boy hiding the break-up on the phone, hiding the catalog in the recycling, hiding the locker decorations. It took more than twenty years, but the pictures had finally come back to me, their eyes watching, in my own flesh, seeing me for who I was.
* * *
I continued working that job for a full year, walking east each day from our Hell’s Kitchen apartment to the office in midtown: first through the cold, frozen snow, then the buds of spring, the heat of summer, the breezes of fall, and finally, once more, the familiar cold.
By the end of that year, my boyfriend had accepted a new job in Atlanta, closer to where he grew up. I had sworn I would never move to Georgia—one of the first conversations we had after committing to one another—and yet, I was ready to go.
“It’s not like I love my job,” I told him, as he neared the final rounds of interviews. I surprised myself in saying it. My job at Victoria’s Secret provided the glamorous narrative I had asked for, the hook sinking into the sea when I was desperate to find something. That’s not what it turned out to be. I was shoving images of who I wanted to be into envelopes all over again. I was ready to be thrown back into the water, even if it meant losing the job without something else lined up. The time capsule had its place in the past.
I still don’t know if that self-addressed envelope from eighth grade ever arrived at my parents’ house. Most likely, the teacher didn’t follow through with the promise that haunted me for years. By the time I graduated college, I wondered if the whole exercise was a ruse, a way to get a classroom of thirteen-year-olds to focus and quietly do something, anything, in the final days of school when summer pulled at our ankles.
I suspect there was a day when this teacher retired; an afternoon when she removed her name from the door and cleared out her classroom closet, collecting old copies of tests and sheets of homework and packets of time capsules. I imagine the years of paper creating one big pile, my envelope deep within, hiding a letter to my future self, pressed against advertisements and editorials of models.
She looks at this massive heap and wonders what to do.
Maybe she decides to put it all in a box, something to go through from time to time and reflect on her career, passport stamps in children’s handwriting. Or maybe she leaves it for the next teacher to come along, a way to share assignments and resources.
Or perhaps, quite simply, this teacher picks it all up in her arms. She lets it fall into the trash, the plastic bag stretching with a soft and swift swoosh. She turns and walks out the classroom door.