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"  There&amp;#039;s a photograph of me taken \u00ADshortly before my problems began. By &amp;quot;my problems,&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t mean what happened in 1988, when my father died\u2014that was a catastrophe, not a problem. But problems have a way of feeling much lonelier than catastrophes; catastrophes compel attention, articulation, action. No one cares about your problems. The date written in orange ink on the back of this picture reads June 1990, or 19 months after my father&amp;#039;s death, and yet the image depicts a happy five-year-old at summer camp, on the skins team, chasing a soccer ball and wearing white high-tops and black acid-\u00ADwash jean shorts with an elastic waistband that squeezes out just a bit of belly. When I look at my chest in this picture, I see a fullness behind each nipple, a padding that suggests soft pectoral muscles. This would be unremarkable, except there is another boy, also shirtless, in the picture. His is what a typical five-year-old chest looks like: flat and straight. There is a difference between us, but my younger self doesn&amp;#039;t know and doesn&amp;#039;t care. My problems loom right there on my body, but I am serene. Like my problems themselves, my mortification grew gradually, a bud of a notion that swelled into something irrefutable, undeniable, factual. The first hard proof of my embarrassment can be found in the flimsy black-and-white 1995 yearbook from Camp Harlam, where I spent the summer after fourth grade. On the page dedicated to my bunk, there&amp;#039;s a picture of us boys in the shallow end of a pool. I&amp;#039;m in the front, on my knees, with a single obfuscatory arm draped across my bosom in the coy manner of a swimsuit model. I&amp;#039;m not quite sure who I think I&amp;#039;m fooling, but clearly I&amp;#039;ve already developed the idea that I should be fooling someone. By the time I returned from camp for the start of fifth grade, my chest was in full bloom. The breasts sat high on my chest, two protuberant, fleshy ovals, starting in folds around my armpits and culminating in conical pink puffs where small red studs should have been. In front of my bathroom mirror, I experimented with poses meant to obscure, or at least dull, the visual effect of my pert little 11-year-old breasts. My first strategy\u2014to cross my arms up high, over my chest\u2014covered much of the offensive flesh but produced a mortifying petit d\u00E9colletage. Cupping my hands directly over each mound accomplished the task, but seemed to me ridiculously feminine, perhaps because of the famous 1993 Janet Jackson Rolling Stone cover stamped onto my boob-crazy, 11-year-old brain. I had to hide the bastards without showing that I had something to hide! One move I developed involved folding my hands behind my head so as to stretch the skin and lifting up my chin in a manner I hoped suggested the arrogant nonchalance of a young potentate. Instead, everyone asked why the hell I was walking around with my hands behind my head. At swim class, I walked the agonizing tile from locker room to pool by clasping my hands on opposite shoulders like a sleeping vampire. I must have appeared in a state of advanced preparedness for any unexpected trust-fall exercises. Or perhaps the coaches just thought I was a very, very cold young man. The strange thing about having a shame is that you become just as ashamed of the feeling as you are of the object to which it&amp;#039;s attached. Of course, to know the shame means to know the source, so to talk directly about the feelings that my child-breasts produced would have been as mortifying as talking about or displaying the items themselves. That is to say, I simply did not talk about it at all. I didn&amp;#039;t want for concerned adults in my life, my mother the most caring of them all. But my inability to name the source of my anguish led to exchanges that I am quite sure would have embarrassed her had she known. In fifth grade, while she was measuring me for back-to-school shirts, she wrapped the tape around my chest and pulled it taut, then laughed. &amp;quot;Hee hee,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;You have little bosoms!&amp;quot; No, this was not a problem to be talked about. Certainly not with a woman, who, I imagined, could not possibly understand the emotional ramifications of boy-breasts, who might even see them as unproblematic, cute imitations of the real thing. Little bosoms! What could I even say to make a woman understand? Imagine if you had a little, tiny dick. But I also couldn&amp;#039;t speak to a man, who I knew would have no trouble comprehending the horror but who might cast me out, if not by word than by attitude, from the club of men I was so eager to join. In fact, I took it as a relief at the time that I didn&amp;#039;t have a father to whom I might have to disclose the truth. With honesty out of the question, I began to practice a new and subtle art of deceit. By late middle school, I&amp;#039;d learned to forecast and avoid shirtless situations. These included but were not limited to: trips to the water park, trips to the amusement park (because of the tendency of amusement-\u00ADpark guests to walk around shirtless), school camping trips, pool parties of every kind, summer playdates that could potentially involve a trip to the pool, summer camps that featured bodies of water, early attempts at strip poker, coed hot-tub experimentation parties, beach houses, river houses, lake houses, houses with pools, and the locker room. I coupled avoidance with a day-to-day concealment strategy that required the constant monitoring and instant elimination of any visual suggestion of breasts underneath my clothing, a feat I accomplished through a strict program of posture and costume. By seventh grade, I&amp;#039;d developed a standing pose\u2014shoulders curved, back hunched\u2014that ensured my shirt always hung slack. In case of wind or other accident, my left forefinger and thumb never strayed far from the front of my shirt, so that I could whisk the fabric away from my chest with the same motion as a chef dispensing a pinch of salt. I \u00ADstarted to wear white Hanes undershirts two sizes too small, to flatten out and round off the monsters. I wore the shirts at all times, under everything. If I&amp;#039;d been allowed to see Boys Don&amp;#039;t Cry, in theaters at the time, I might have attempted Brandon Teena\u2013style Ace bandaging. For four years, I hid my breasts the way you hide a fugitive cousin in the attic: grudgingly, with no other choice, but also scrupulously, as if someone&amp;#039;s life depended on it. And for four years, I succeeded. I first encountered Akhenaton in my senior art-history seminar. The eighteenth-dynasty ruler, Tutankhamen&amp;#039;s predecessor, was projected onto the wall, his arms folded over round, full breasts. &amp;quot;Dude&amp;#039;s got tits,&amp;quot; someone offered, followed by much laughter, including my own, but as the teacher began to lecture us about the introduction of naturalism into pharaonic portraiture, I couldn&amp;#039;t stop staring at the busty pharaoh. His back was straight, his gaze untroubled, kingly. His wife, I knew, was Nefertiti, the legendary figure of Egyptian beauty whom we boys in the seminar had already deemed &amp;quot;\u00FCber-hot.&amp;quot; Yet why were his arms crossed over his chest in nearly every representation? Was this merely a trope, or did the pharaoh feel actual shame about his body? I could almost imagine Akhenaton shuffling to the royal bath, scepter in hand, arms crossed over divine breasts, as a gaggle of courtesans and guards looked on, too afraid to laugh. Did a man who ruled the New Kingdom actually share my suffering? Years later I would read about the research of Irwin Braverman, a professor of dermatology at Yale University School of Medicine, who attributes Akhenaton&amp;#039;s mounds to familial gynecomastia, or &amp;quot;femalelike breasts.&amp;quot; The condition, a result of excess estrogen, afflicts approximately 15 percent of adult men and is, as far as I can tell, the reason for the pale lumps that cursed my adolescence. Braverman scoured representations of Akhenaton&amp;#039;s family and found evidence of man-boobs going back at least six generations\u2014a dynasty of flabby-chested man-gods passing their shame down the family line. Braverman discovered what I&amp;#039;d intuited from the moment my problems started: the pharaoh&amp;#039;s curse, like my own, haunted his genetic past. No sooner had I developed my misfortune than I began to sift through my gene pool for someone to blame. My father&amp;#039;s side had to be faultless. Though there aren&amp;#039;t many pictures of my dad shirtless, the ones that float around the family photo drawer, such as the one of him camping on the Boundary Waters, show a thin, almost sunken, chest. And nowhere in the photographic record does there exist even a hint of protrusion from beneath his starched shirts. As for the women in his family, his mother once asked for a second opinion after an impolitic radiologist called her &amp;quot;small-breasted.&amp;quot; My mother and her family were the obvious culprits. The Lebovitz line, from robust Litvak stock, has never, based on pictorial and anecdotal evidence, failed to produce women of impressive bust. This is treated as a matter of high comedy between my mother and her sister, my aunt, who refers to the family inheritance as buh-zooms. Whatever was causing such consistently imposing buh-zooms in the women of my family must have seized hold of the requisite base pairs and noodled its way into my unsuspecting genotype. This, I reasoned, was how the fleshy legacy of the Lebovitz bosom hung itself around my neck\u2014and my life. As the end of my high school senior year approached and even the most awkward of my friends managed to trip into intercourse, I desponded. The sad knowledge that I would matriculate as a virgin was underscored by a deeper des\u00ADpair\u2014that even if I found myself on the precipice of manhood, I would probably lack the courage to remove my shirt. True, there had been the usual teenage fumblings, but I&amp;#039;d always managed to keep my top on, even when I was forced to explain to the person kindly administering my first blow job that I couldn&amp;#039;t take off my hooded sweatshirt because yes, I was just that cold. Then, in the month before graduation, H., a very lovely, very smart, very sophisticated classmate, expressed her interest in me. H. was the child of two anthropologists, spoke several languages, had lived in Paris and Pakistan, and had no business being interested in a sarcastic, uncultured gynecomast such as myself. But who was I to tell her that? When she informed me after several weeks of dating that I would need to make the necessary preparations for sex, I knew I had only one real preparation to make: finding a way to get through sex without exposing my chest. I resolved to wear a thin T-shirt (thin being my concession to the intimacy of the act), which I planned to keep on for the duration. But the next day, when H. tugged at the front of my shirt and said, &amp;quot;If my pants are off, you can take off your shirt,&amp;quot; what could I do? I walked into the bathroom and shut the door. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was naked from the waist down. I entered a thoughtless panic. My hands were trembling. My face was red. I removed my shirt. I walked back into the bedroom. None of the first-time worries\u2014the condom, the vagaries of the penis, being too quick\u2014were close to my thoughts, and because of this, none of them were problems. My only concern was whether I could hold myself high enough on my elbows that my breasts did not graze hers. Except for only one or two agonizingly soft exceptions, I was successful. Afterward, crammed next to her in my twin bed, I was exhilarated. H. had not laughed, averted her eyes, retracted her affections, or as far as I could tell, acknowledged whatsoever the presence of an extra pair of breasts in the room. Were the fleshy bulges sitting on my chest truly so unremarkable that my sexual partner didn&amp;#039;t even notice them? When I made a self-deprecating joke, she turned her head to look at me. &amp;quot;What man-boobs?&amp;quot; she asked. She just hadn&amp;#039;t noticed. That afternoon was the beginning of the end for my great jiggly secret. As I spent more and more time shirtless with H., I came to the great realization: No one cares about your problems as much as you do. Certainly not H.; we never \u00ADtalked about my breasts again. Sorting back through the years of excuses and evasions and light-speed shirt-changings, I realized that for all my anxiety, no one\u2014no one\u2014had ever teased, disparaged, excluded, or otherwise shamed me for the two modest fat deposits on my chest. For the past half decade, the only person torturing me had been, well, me. One afternoon soon after my college graduation, I was sitting with my mother having the same conversation we&amp;#039;ve been having since I was five, the conversation about the kind of guy my dad was. Despite their recurrence, sometimes I think to ask something I haven&amp;#039;t asked before, something like, Did Dad have any scars? &amp;quot;Oh yes,&amp;quot; my mother said, excited to recall something that she hadn&amp;#039;t told me before. &amp;quot;He had a scar on his chest because he had a breast reduction when he was a teenager. Did you know that?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Really,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Yep. It was just a little scar below his nipple.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Did he talk about it a lot?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, I don&amp;#039;t think so. I don&amp;#039;t really remember. I think it just bothered him, so he had it removed.&amp;quot; I changed the subject and made some excuse to go upstairs to my room. There I lay down on my bed, stared up at the skylight above my pillow, and produced a sound that was technically laughter but felt like it came from a different, weaker part of my stomach. And then, lying there, I started to ask myself some questions. When would he have noticed? Would I have fooled him? What would he have done, my father? Sat me down, showed me the old scar on his chest? Apologized for the inheritance? Shared his own stories of embarrassment and secrecy? Offered to find a doctor who could help? Rested his arm around my shoulders? Told me that I was his son, that I was like him, a Bern\u00ADstein, that he loved me, that I should never be ashamed? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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