I never understood people who say, “Be careful what you wish for.” How come? “Because you just might get it.” Um, yeah, that’s why I wished for it. I've got forty coming at me like the shinkansenBirthday Express, and I’m not scared of getting hit—not even trying to get off the tracks—precisely becauseI’ve always gotten pretty much exactly what I’ve wished for, and I gotta tell ya, it’s alright.

Big stuff, little stuff, I’ve always been a pretty lucky guy. At least as an adult. I figure I paid for it growing up gay in Nowheresburg, USA; in a big shot family in a small town that never even tried to understand me, just tried to cram me and my brother into the same mold they’d been pressed into. It pissed my mom off especially. We were identical twins. How come she was able to pour my brother Hunter into the mold like he was made of hot wax and she couldn’t even get me to figure out what her finished project was supposed to look like? I was always trying to add feathers and sequins and fruity music to what was not intended to be a multimedia presentation. Why couldn’t I just be happy with a black and white photograph in a cheap drug store frame like every other man in town? In the world, for all she knew.

But there’s my point, beautifully illustrated. The only thing I ever wished for growing up was to get the hell out of there—out of that house, out of town, out from under that whole world view that nothing was worth seeing or even knowing about that couldn’t be had from Corny’s Corner Store—and I was still in my cap and gown when I hopped the first bus heading West on graduation day. Didn’t even stick around for a picture, not that anyone probably cared. There were days when our own father couldn’t tell me and Hunter apart. Let ‘em take two pictures of himand put them up on the mantle. It’s the closest she’s ever gonna get to seeing me in one of those broke down-lookin’ frames. We’ll call it a parting gift.

Young, homo, and hot. I’m turning heads at thirty-eight, so you can be scared of how I was looking then, six-two, seventeen, and farm-fresh as a bucket of milk. There was nothing a kid like me could wish for that couldn’t be found in San Francisco, so that’s where I headed. Growing up, I’d never met anybody who’d been outside of the United States. Never even met anybody like me who’d want to. But I’d seen pictures of the Zocalo in Mexico City, of Table Rock in Cape Town, of the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower. I longed to see these places, to see myself in these same photos, smiling and wind-blown and half a world away. I wanted to hear unusual languages, to smell and taste exotic food. I wanted to know what it felt like to be foreign, and finding my way around San Francisco three days out of high school was more culture shock than I would ever go on to feel in Mexico or South Africa or China.

I’m not trying to act like I stepped off the bus into some kind of perfect life, but all I was really wishing for was a place to live, a job, and what we’ll call an active social life. After a couple of false starts, I settled into all three in pretty short order.

The whole world passes through San Francisco sooner or later, and in the absence of a glamorous international career, it was not a poor substitute for world travel. I heard Tagalog, Mandarin, and Spanish on the street every day. I discovered Indian food and dim sum and how to cure a hangover with Panang curry. I dated kids like me from Iowa and Illinois, but also guys from Hawaii, Brazil, Ireland, and Iran. I heard stories about, saw pictures of, was brought souvenirs from places it had never occurred to me to think about. The more I was exposed to people, food, and ideas from around the world, the more I craved to get out in it myself.

Which was why, when a guy chased me down Castro Street to give me a flyer for a cattle-call interview for “Onboard Ambassadors” at a start-up luxury airline, I jumped at the chance, even before his lusty once-over and his heart-felt “You should really apply.” The next morning, milling around the lobby of the Hyatt Regency amongst a blue-suited army of statuesque women with up-dos and excessively slender men with bangs, I didn’t even have the sense to be nervous when two blue-suited people—a statuesque woman with an up-do and an excessively slender man with bangs—sporting airline nametags approached me and asked for a quiet word. They had seen me come in, they explained, and were quite sure I didn’t need to bother with the hassle of an initial interview.