A chill went through Michael Salazar’s body when, at 16, his mother asked him, without the slightest bit of shame whether he was a “faggot” — not gay or homosexual, but “faggot” — with all the contemptuous charge that this word can contain.
The question caught him off guard and he felt himself dying of shame and fear. “I froze,” Salazar says, 35 years after it happened. “I don’t know where I got courage from and I answered yes.