SIX MONTHS AGO, I purchased a two-family home and moved from the apartment in which I had lived for 28 years. Both residences are in Cambridge — Cambridgeport, really — and only a six-minute walk from each other. Yet the journey from one to the other involved far more than zigzagging through the half-dozen short streets that separate them — or even making the radical transition from tenant to owner. It involved a succession of astonishing emotional transformations, the most startling of which was how I — an openly gay man who has lived mostly in a queer world for the past 30 years — came to view a crew of male heterosexual carpenters and construction workers not only as friends, but in odd and surprising ways, as family.

I have never particularly wanted to own a house, never mind hire a construction crew. But at the age of 52, I was more or less pressed into the situation. I had lived in my apartment since 1973. It was a typical second-floor unit in a Cambridge triple-decker. I had moved in with two roommates, but within two and a half years, after several household turnovers — every gay man in Cambridge seemed to be moving to San Francisco in those early years — I was living there with my lover, Walta Borawski. We lived together in the apartment until his death from AIDS in 1994. After that, I lived there alone until last December. Sometime in 2000, my landlords made moves to evict me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t a great tenant — my philosophy has always been to bother the owners as little as possible and make most of the repairs myself. But they wanted to do some cosmetic renovation and double the rent. For the next two years, I played a cat-and-mouse game of prolonging negotiations, getting extensions, and generally evading eviction.

I wasn’t trying to be a tenant from hell; I was simply emotionally paralyzed. I couldn’t even think about finding a new place to live. I had lived in that apartment a full decade longer than I had lived with my biological family. It was there that I lived with the man I had loved; there that I had nursed him for four years as he became increasingly ill, until he died in our bed. In some profound way, I could not imagine living anywhere else but in that apartment. The prospect of losing it (no matter how inevitable) sounded intense reverberations — of losing Walta, losing our life together.

Walta and I were intensely domestic. The apartment was a home that acutely reflected our lives and interests. From the photographs and paintings hung on the walls, to our books and records, to our plants and collection of religious statutes intermingled with photos of Elizabeth Taylor and Mick Jagger, the house radiated our joined lives. Walta and I were also intensely coupled — even though we both had fairly open affairs with other men, we were passionately and profoundly faithful. We were, privately and publicly, an inseparable couple. No wonder I was having a hard time on the moving front. By the summer of 2001, friends began urging me to simply think about moving. After being dragged out of the house on a Sunday afternoon "just to get used to looking at houses," I, by a series of flukes, ended up buying the first house I looked at. It was perfect — a side-by-side two-family with seven rooms in each apartment, lots of light, a back yard, and income from a rental unit. It had everything ... except Walta.

After closing on the house and beginning to make plans to move — and there was a lot to move — friends would solicitously inquire about my emotional state: did I miss Walta? (Well, I always miss Walta.) Did I feel I was leaving Walta behind? (Well, actually, I felt like I was moving him — and all his books and records — with me.) Wasn’t it sad that Walta wasn’t going to be there to move into a new home? (Well, Walta was a bit of a hysteric and would have been useless during the move. Optimally, I would have sent Walta away until I had moved, and he would have come back to hang the pictures and work on the garden.) And in many ways, ironically, Walta was deeply tied to my buying this new home: it was his life-insurance policy that made it possible. But the emotional reality was always there for me: I was doing this alone. At the moment I was without a lover, boyfriend, partner, whatever. I had had some relationships after Walta’s death — one quite serious, but it didn’t work out. (Here’s a hint: don’t date graduate students. Don’t date graduate students in divinity school. Don’t date graduate students in divinity school who used to be male strippers.) So here I was embarking on this new life.

I was taking on the huge project of buying a home, moving, and renovating a rental unit. I was making decisions about matters of which I had little knowledge — such as mortgages and renting to tenants — and I was doing it alone. Until Walta’s death, I had had a lover from the time I came out. I know I am perfectly capable of being a single person — indeed, I had done some of my most creative intellectual work in the two years after Walta’s death, when I was dating no one. In fact, as much as I miss Walta, there are many, many ways in which I love being single and living alone. But this felt strange, even disorienting. I had gotten used to being single in a house that was still occupied — in my imagination — by me and Walta. But this was going to be different. There were days when I was not quite sure what was happening or what to do next. Like when the lawyer guides you through signing the final papers with scary, but comforting, repetitions: "sign here," "now here," "now here," "now here," "sign this line," "now here," now here," "and sign this page," "now here." Like a somnambulist lost in a fog, I went through the process of packing, signing legal papers, planning what would go into what room, and wondering what this new life would be like without the joy of sharing it with someone else.

MARJORIE GARBER has written perceptively of the many connections between sex and real estate. But for me, buying the new house and moving were never about sex. It was about family, about having a partner in the project, about sharing — not just the house, but the process of putting the house together. I was not going to deliberately find a boyfriend to do this project with me — as did a close friend (disastrously) several years ago. Nor was I going to insist that my incredibly generous and loving friends provide me with even more support than they already do. I figured that I was a perfectly capable adult who could do perfectly capable adult things on my own. If I needed to deal with housing inspectors and banks, I could. If I needed to learn about legal documents, I would teach myself. If I needed to get work done, I would hire people. This was my house and I could take care of it on my own.

But it was in this frenzy of self-imposed self-sufficiency that I was blind-sided: the house’s rental unit needed major renovations before it could be leased. Cosmetic work wouldn't cut it. Nothing had been done to the place — quite obviously — for decades. Even I could see that the electrical wiring looked dangerous and that the joists supporting the bathtub — which could be viewed above a sagging ceiling in the utility room — were in such bad shape that they required immediate attention. I needed contractors and had no idea where to turn. The idea of interviewing people, getting bids, haggling, drawing up plans was overwhelming. That's an understatement. Then I remembered that a good friend had a brother who did construction. I called him, and he seemed nice and competent and easy to work with. I hired him.

Beginning some time in December and lasting through the end of May, Dave and his crew — a tolerably shifting array of carpenters, electricians, plumbers, painters, and people who were in for a few days to rip out walls — showed up each morning around 7:30 a.m. and worked all day. They were all straight men in their 20s and 30s — a demographic with whom I generally have little personal contact. Ever since I was a little gay boy, I've had a lingering fear of straight males. Whether my dread stemmed from the beatings I received in the hallways of my Catholic high school by the odious Donald Drummond (who I now suspect was a closet case) or rested on a fairly realistic appraisal of the social and emotional limits of manly heterosexual tolerance, it was there. Although I have never hidden in a queer ghetto — as if that were possible in a predominantly straight world — I have never sought out friendships or close relationships with heterosexual men. But these weren’t friends, they were people I was paying — albeit on extremely reasonable terms — to do work.

At first it was a little odd. I am used to working for other people, not having people work for me. But it was fine. We said hello in the morning, and I would check in at the end of the day to see where we were. (I figured that demonstrating trust and not being in their faces all the time would help promote a good working relationship.) But then something odd started to happen. During the day, Dave would call on his cell phone to have me look at something they had just done. Sometimes he'd call to get my okay on a new detail, but often it was because they had just solved a complicated problem — like filling in the hole-ridden joists under the bathtub — and he would proudly show me their work. Other times, they were pleased to show me how nice something looked when they had finished it ("Look at these windows, look ... fuck, they are sweet"). Within two weeks, I realized that the pride they took in their work was exhilarating me. It wasn’t just that it was great work (although from what everyone tells me, great, or even good, renovation work is not all that common), but that I began to feel that I was sharing the house — or rather, the project of the house — with someone, or a bunch of someones.

As the weeks went on, the relationship became more ensconced. I began to look forward to their showing up every morning. Sometimes we would have lunch. Frequently Dave would come over to my side of the house when the others were working, and we would figure out what kitchen stuff had to be purchased next, or what colors to paint the hallways. It all began feeling very comfortable, very familiar.

And then I realized that this is what I would be doing with Walta. It most certainly wasn’t a boyfriend relationship, or even what I would call a friendship. But even though I was still the employer here, the relationship transcended its commercial basis. It felt both comforting and a little odd — there is an intimacy in working with people on a large project, as well as having them in your house every day for months and months. But it was an intimacy that was both familiar and unfamiliar. At moments, it felt identical to what I had experienced innumerable times with Walta — "Come and look at what I just did to the kitchen wall." At other times, it was strange because these were not the kinds of men I usually had in my life. Not only did I barely know them, we had really just met.

I want to say that at times this intimacy felt almost like a romance, but that is completely the wrong word. There was nothing "romantic" about it, in the usual sense: nothing erotic, or deeply loving, or even evocative of that self-delusional projection that so often accompanies "romance." Yet it was — and is, as the house is not quite finished — far more compelling than a simple working relationship, and far more emotionally complex than a simple casual friendship. It is "queer," if only because it doesn’t fit into any categories I've ever experienced. This is partly because Walta is not here with me, and there is no other "romantic partner" in my life now. Part of it is because putting together a house is a complicated, time-consuming process that leaves no one — worker or owner — untouched. And part of it is because I have learned to love my new home, and the pride that Dave and the other workers took in their work showed me that they, in their own way, loved it too.

Michael Bronski is the author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (St. Martin’s). He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com