Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #2: And so, to Paris?

But first, my mom had to read her Gaydar, and warn me of the "roving bands of homosexuals" in Europe.

MY ONE-WAY TICKET TO PARIS shocked my mother, who feared (reasonably) that I might never return to the U.S. Enrollment at the language school was my father’s idea, thinking I’d be better off if I had an institutional context for my lark abroad. Funding came from a  small parting gift from my grandfather, who’d died when I was ten years old. Compound int…