Noodle

The noodling guide took a long, derisive look at my week-old Jeep.

“What are you, a sorority girl?” he deadpanned.

Normally—if I hadn’t been technically at work—that would’ve elicited a Go fuck yourself, but I shut it. Smiled evilly. Compliantly. Suddenly, I was more than ready to try to catch a fifty-pound catfish with only my bare hands. For work.

It was a muggy May Saturday, and I’d taken an early-morning drive to southwestern Oklahoma for a magazine assignment about noodling, also known as hogging, catfisting, or hand fishing. In the most extreme examples—the ones you’ve seen on reality shows—noodlers reach into massive holes in river banks and pull out monster flathead catfish.

Yes, they do hear the word crazy a lot.

I wasn’t dying to participate in this activity, if I’m honest. But somehow, I’d agreed to the assignment, and now, this dickweed had insulted the car I’d just bought the week before—the first car I’d ever bought myself, in fact.

What are you, a sorority girl? The words started to burn a hole in my mind—and in my cheek, because I was chewing on it to keep from chirping back at him. Instead, I started steeling myself to absolutely kill at noodling. On my first try.

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Personally, I thought the Jeep was kinda butch. But I have a history of misreading things like that.

Because my brain is what it is, I misread a lot. It’s why I’m terrible at team sports: Too much information is coming in at once and too quickly, and I never have any idea what’s going on.

So I never joined in with the other boys playing soccer on the elementary school playground, because—not being visibly the best right away—I had no interest in participating. I had no interest in most of what the other boys were doing.

I missed out on learning the secret language of masculinity, though I don’t think playing soccer or pulling girls’ hair then running away would’ve helped. It’s a deeply arbitrary set of conditions and behaviors, and my overclocked little brain never could sort the why from the wherefore.

It always felt to me like the random nature of what defined a man was part of the point: It was prey you could never catch but could never be seen to stop chasing. Whatever’s going on inside my skull, I never could quite clock the finish line, so I never saw any point in starting the race.

Because what do you mean it’s gay to wear long pants in the winter? It’s fucking cold!

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The first person I ever told I was gay was a Navy recruiter named Sean. I was seventeen and a senior in high school, and for a month solid, Sean called me every afternoon. It was like he knew when I would get home from school. It was like he was watching my house.

Finally, I was fed up, because I had no interest in joining the Navy—and, frankly, I would’ve been a huge liability to that august institution. So after people-pleasing Sean and leading him on way too long, in the middle of his nine-hundredth spiel about why I should forgo college and join the Navy, I just spit it out.

“Sean, I can’t. I’m gay.”

There was a weird silence on the line. Even the room I was in seemed to get quieter, and I was the only one home. Outside, I could hear the wind shaking the branches of the pine tree in the back yard, the ice cream truck driving up a street deeper in the housing addition, the men working on the roof three houses down.

Then, I heard a click. Sean had hung up.

I stood there way too long, staring at the phone, agape at what I’d just said for the very first time, trying not to smile at how good it felt.

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The first thing that happens when you engage a noodling guide—And seriously, don’t try this by yourself. Engage a guide.—is that you learn about safety. Because wading around in murky waters and trying to grab fish that could weigh a third of what you do isn’t the safest thing to do. Especially given the existence of water moccasins.

The biggest question people always have is, Isn’t it scary putting your hand in those holes when you don’t know what’s in them?

Yes. Yes, that is scary. But that’s why the guide: I learned all kinds of little safety tricks—for instance, to get a stick and use it to feel around inside the hole. If you feel the stick break the surface of the water, that means there’s air inside. So there’s almost certainly not a catfish in there, but there could be a snapping turtle or a snake. Is the hole full of water top to bottom? And did you feel like there was maybe something moving around inside there when you poked the stick in?

Well then get to noodling.

The other factor is the fact that many of Oklahoma’s lakes and rivers are impossibly muddy most of the time, and the place I had come to try this sport out was no exception. There’s no opening your eyes underwater—it wouldn’t help most of the time. Noodling is all about feeling your way to what you hope to find.

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I once engaged the services of someone to help me become manlier. Or at least not gay.

It was my sophomore year of college, and, racked with youth-group guilt about the homosexuality of it all, I had confessed my depraved desires to a couple of friends. They’d urged me to talk to the college minister at our church, who put me in touch with a Christian counselor named Mike.

The first time I walked into Mike’s office, he appraised me with an extremely skeptical expression that never fully left his face the few short months I knew him. There was something about me Mike didn’t like, but he gestured to me to sit and begin unpacking my trauma.

Mike also gave me books to read. One of them was a collection of case studies of men who’d supposedly been cured of their gayness with the help of the kind of “therapy” Mike and I were doing. The book told the allegedly true stories of the factors that had led these men to “choose” homosexuality as a trauma response and how they were healed of the trauma and, therefore, the desire to munch on penis.

In one case, a man’s homosexuality could be traced back to the fact that he was short. This made him—I dunno—a huge Britney fan somehow. (No, kidding. The author of this book had no idea who Britney Spears was).

Even at the height of my desire to please God, I couldn’t metabolize these stories, each of which seemed a bigger swallow than the last. I’m five-foot-six, but I knew that even at six-foot-four, I’d have wanted men.

I started to find it hard to take Mike seriously. I started showing up late to our sessions. To his credit, he never charged me a dime. I think we both knew I was a lost cause.

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There’s a question both noodlers and gay men hear often: Does it hurt?

The answer is yes. Yes it does. A little. But it’s worth it.

I didn’t catch a monster flathead catfish that day in southwestern Oklahoma. Never did prove my manliness to Mr. Hates-on-Jeeps. On a couple of dives, I managed to snag a little channel cat or two, but they always wriggled away from me before I could drag them out of the water.

But I had an article to write, and there was a TV crew there filming the whole thing, so the guys at the guide service had gone out and caught a monster flathead for the hosts and I to pretend to catch on air.

“When it bites you, it’ll feel like a suitcase handle closing on your hand,” the guide told me. “Just bear down and grip tighter.”

It was an oddly apt description. Despite never having had a suitcase handle close on my hand, when the catfish’s bony, wide lips did bite down on my hand, that was exactly the sensation: a blunt, flat pain across my knuckles. But not bad enough to make me reflexively let go.

She thrashed around pretty hard in the water, but I managed to hold on to her. In the pictures of me from that day, I look absolutely wild with excitement.

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My friend Dylan sent me a photo recently. It was from National Coming Out Day 2001. In it, a few members of what we used to call the gay-straight alliance—myself among them looking oh-so-wanna-be-sexy in jeans and an orange sweater—sit on a bench outside the college post office. We were passing out little bags of Skittles. Telling people to taste the rainbow. It wasn’t cute.

I came out on the same college campus where, two years earlier, I’d tearfully confessed to friends about having lustful thoughts regarding men. Now, here I was, cuter and fitter and having recently gotten laid, and my fellow students were following entire Great Circles to avoid me.

Mike had told me I was “confused” about what it meant to be a man, and I think in his parlance, he wasn’t wrong. I was confused—deeply confused—about what it would mean for me, specifically, to try to wedge myself into the extremely narrow set of parameters that acceptably defined man for the community I was a part of. It felt like cutting out nine-tenths of myself, but from random places in my body. And the fact that doing so was the bare minimum price of entry to belong in that community made it so much worse. This awful process was step one.

The Skittles bench was harder, but it was better. We just should’ve used a different slogan.

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I did keep going to the same evangelical church for a little while. The pastor had a habit of rushing up behind me and tackling me in a wrestling hold, which I hated. Boys. Rough housing. My neurodivergence hates it. I’d indicated to him it stressed me out and wasn’t fun. He insisted on continuing to do it.

One day, to get him to stop, I made a suggestive face at him. He laughed for just a second then remembered who I was. What everyone had recently learned about me.

The next week, for the first time ever, he invited me to coffee.

“That made me extremely uncomfortable,” he said of my joke.

I apologized—it really wasn’t okay, and I really was sorry—but reminded him that I’d asked him not to run up and tackle me on several occasions. He told me I needed to get over it and that continuing to do this would help me get over my anxieties and bullying trauma. Exposure therapy.

He told me about a group at the church. Not a lot of people knew about it. A group of men, mostly married, mostly older than me, who “struggled” with homosexuality. They got together once a week and supported each other. Most of their wives didn’t know.

I thanked him, but I knew I’d never go. I didn’t go back to church much after that, and the few times I did, I was always glad not to know who was in that group. Because I had a lot of guesses.

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The noodling guide didn’t have shit to say as I got out of the water. I hadn’t turned out to be the best handfisher in history, but I’d been eager and unafraid, so I guess I’d passed or whatever. I also guess I didn’t care.

This was the beautiful thing coming out gave me: I got to stand up from the desk, put my pencil down on my Scantron, and stop constantly subjecting my masculinity to standardized testing. I got to go outside and play in the sun instead.

I never did agree to pick up a bayonet and patrol the borders of what is and is not acceptable male behavior. Do you have a Y chromosome or feel that you’d be really great at having one—that maybe you were supposed to, but mistakes were made? Come join the party. We’re gross, but there’s beer and fried catfish. I caught it with my own two hands. Maybe I could show you how. No, it doesn’t hurt. Much.