  I just want to take this opportunity to exercise the approach I’m going to use to analyze the gay short stories in English and Filipino in my CW 199 thesis. Here I go. In the story, the narrator tells us about his childhood with Fanshawe: “…for several months Fanshawe kept the cardboard box in his room. He had always been generous in sharing his toys, but this box was off limits to me, and he never let me go in it. It was his secret place, he told me, and when he sat inside and closed it up around him, he could go wherever he wanted to go, could be wherever he wanted to be. But if another person ever entered his box, then its magic would be lost for good. I believed this story and did not press him for a turn, although it nearly broke my heart. We would be playing in his room, quietly setting up soldiers or drawing pictures, and then, out of the blue, Fanshawe would announce that he was going in to his box. I would try to go on with what I had been doing, but it was never any use. Nothing interested me so much as what was happening to Fanshawe inside the box, and I would spend those minutes desperately trying to imagine the adventures he was having. But I never learned what they were, since it was also against the rules for Fanshawe to talk about them after he climbed out.” In this whole passage, the image of the box was a derivative of the gay’s closet (and it doesn’t need to be sexual). The gay’s closet is a representation of a gay man’s experience in most societies, where homosexuals are not acceptable. Just like Fanshawe’s box, a gay’s closet is “off-limits” to anyone. It’s a caution, which every gay man has to have because of fear of discovery, and then of persecution, of rejection, of discrimination.
It’s a personal space, “a secret place”, where one can be himself – “go wherever he wanted to go, could be where he wanted to be”. Its secrecy, “its magic”, will be lost for good because of public humiliation and false judgment. However, in this passage, the narrator’s character was showing curiosity not towards the box itself, but to the experiences Fanshawe was having inside of it.
He was not a threat, but someone who wanted to experience something new. Outside, the narrator was doing mundane things – setting up soldiers and drawing pictures. Doing them was more rational than “out of the blue” going inside the box. The curiosity was driving the narrator to imagine the “adventures” Fanshawe could be thinking of inside the box – an onset of desire to cross the boundary from where he was to where Fanshawe was.
But Fanshawe was keeping it to himself because it was his secret. In terms of identity, Fanshawe’s character was a representation of the universalist-separatist dichotomy of gayness. He was described as someone who was a stand out among the crowd, but at the same time, blending in it. It was the very heart of the gay identity – the contradiction between being an individual, and being someone who was just like any straight men around. On one hand, he left because he realized he wasn’t meant to live with others; on the other hand, he kept on moving from one place to another, establishing relationships with different people, acting like normal people. 
